Faster And Lighter Bomb-Disposal Robot Set For
Trials

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 22 March 2011 10:34:00 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From The Engineer: Engineers are finalising a prototype bomb-disposal robot that they claim will be lighter and more cost-effective than current models. At around 72cm in length and 35cm wide, the robot should weigh in at less than 50kg and achieve speeds of up to eight miles per hour

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Scientists Separate Plasma From Blood With
Working Biochip

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 22 March 2011 10:21:20 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Engadget: Disposable biotech sensors won't let you diagnose your own diseases quite yet, but we've taken the first step -- a research team spanning three universities has successfully prototyped a lab-on-a-chip. Called the Self-powered Integrated Microfluidic Blood Analysis System (

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Imagine a perfectly spherical sacred cow…

post from Pharyngula on 22 March 2011 10:12:52 AM. © Pharyngula

The BBC is reporting the imminent extinction of religion. This is an end result to be hoped for, which just makes me all the more critical, and I have to say up front that this is the work of mathematicians, engineers, and physicists modeling sociology. It's interesting stuff that looks at the very biggest picture without addressing the details, and it could very well be entirely true, but I'm always going to be a little bit suspicious of academics crossing boundaries that much. Sociologists are not stupid people; I'd like to see more of them pick up on this mode of analysis, and then I'll trust it more.

You can read the paper for yourself, it's available on arxiv, and it's not a piece of crackpot pseudoscience; it analyzes gross historical trends away from religious belief in diverse regions around the world, and fits a reasonable curve to the pattern using an extremely simple model of group dynamics. The simplicity of the model is the troubling part — I'm a biologist, I don't believe in simple any more — but the fact that the model works well for at least the selected regions is a little reassuring. Here's the short summary of what they did:

Here we use a minimal model of competition for members between social groups to explain historical census data on the growth of religious non-affiliation in 85 regions around the world. According to the model, a single parameter quantifying the perceived utility of adhering to a religion determines whether the unaffiliated group will grow in a society. The model predicts that for societies in which the perceived utility of not adhering is greater than the utility of adhering, religion will be driven toward extinction.

The data look wonderfully clean, too.

(About that rescaled time axis: the data from different regions show different rates of the deconversion process, with timescales from decades to centuries; they all fit their model with different parameters for the perceived utility of religion. The rescaling shows that the model provides a good fit to all of the data, but you can't use this to predict the date of the worldwide Atheist Rapture — it'll happen at different times in different regions.)

The authors also express reasonable reservations. I was wondering about these questions, myself.

Our assumption that the perceived utility of a social group remains constant may be approximately true for long stretches of time, but there may also be abrupt changes in perceived utility, a possibility that is not included in the model. We speculate that for most of human history, the perceived utility of religion was high and of non-affiliation low. Religiously non-affiliated people persisted but in small numbers. With the birth of modern secular societies, the perceived utility of adherence to religion versus non-affiliation has changed significantly in numerous countries, such as those with census data shown in Fig. 1, and the United States, wherenon-affiliation is growing rapidly.

That is a real concern. Their mathematical models are built around a parameter called perceived utility, u_x, which they extract from the overall data — it's not something that can be measured directly in individuals or populations, but is derived from historical trends and then used to calculate future trends, which is a little bit circular. I'd be more confident in their prediction if perceived utility had some independent measure that could be used in the curve fitting.

And of course, as they note, it's not at all certain that that perceived utility will remain constant — it can't have, for one thing, or the process of deconversion would have started a long time ago, we'd be further along the curve, and we'd all be atheists now. And unfortunately, the work doesn't address the interesting question of what caused the historical shift in the perceived utility of religion, and without that, we can't know what kind of factors might cause it to shift back.

I'll still hope the math is a good predictor of the fate of faith.

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Using Space Bacteria For Earthling Cures

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 22 March 2011 09:53:56 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Tech News Watch: What can you do when you've got a case of the Martian barnacles? Venusian whooping sneeze? Van Allen below-the-belt snickerbumps? The Callisto flockheart? Get NASA on the horn before your foot swells to the size of a Neptunian varp poodle (they're very large)! Astro

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Using sound and heat to find and treat tumors

post from Canadian BioTechnologist2.0 on 22 March 2011 09:46:34 AM. © Canadian BioTechnologist2.0

A team of scientists from Princess Margaret Hospital have created an organic nanoparticle that is completely non-toxic, biodegradable and nimble in the way it uses light and heat to treat cancer and deliver drugs. (A nanoparticle is a minute molecule with novel properties). The findings, published online today in Nature Materials (DOI: 10.1038/NMAT2986) are significant [...]

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Programming glitch leaves Cambridge, MA off
scientific map

post from American Biotechnologist on 22 March 2011 09:41:54 AM. © American Biotechnologist

A new method for evaluating top scientific cities based on publication rate has recently been[...]

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Piggyback Virus Could Curb HIV Pandemic

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 22 March 2011 09:34:16 AM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Wired Top Stories: Rather than destroying HIV, a proposed treatment would embrace its infectious abilities, sending the virus into competition with a harmless, stripped-down version of itself. Dubbed therapeutic interfering particles, or TIPs, these engineered viral scraps would

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Radiation Worrying You Take a Vitamin

From Discovery News - Top Stories: To mitigate the effects of radiation on astronauts, doctors advise a simple measure: Take a vitamin pill. Along with the anti-radiation drug potassium iodide, scientists recommend a vitamin pill to plug any nutritional deficiencies in the Recommended

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'Bilingual' neurons may reveal the secrets of
brain disease

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 22 March 2011 09:24:01 AM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

A team of researchers from the University of Montreal and McGill University have discovered a type of "cellular bilingualism" ? a phenomenon that allows a single neuron to use two different methods of communication to exchange information.

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Scientists find a key to maintaining our DNA

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 22 March 2011 09:21:57 AM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

DNA contains all of the genetic instructions that make us who we are, and maintaining the integrity of our DNA over the course of a lifetime is a critical, yet complex part of the aging process. In an important, albeit early step forward, scientists have discovered how DNA maintenance is regulated, opening the door to interventions that may enhance the body's natural preservation of genetic information.

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