Educate to Innovate: Promoting Science and Math
Education

President Obama is scheduled to announce a campaign to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The campaign - "Educate to Innovate" will primarily focus on informal education opportunities such as after-school activities, mentoring opportunities with scientists and researchers, plus quality science and math promotion television. So far, Elmo and Big Bird have signed up and the MacArthur Foundation is sweetening the pot to encourage video game designers to create educational gaming software. In addition to Sesame Street and many professional science societies signing on, big media outlets and stepping in also, donating money, equipment, and television time.



Is it me or does this sound like President Obama tried to scoop the upcoming edition of Diversity in Science Carnival -


Broad Impacts II: Programs to promote STEM Diversity among K-12 students and general audiences?

Well, maybe not a scoop, but that sure is great timing. You all know how much I love theme-related carnivals. I'll take Obama's move as his official endorsement of the awesomeness of the science outreach and overall interest in participating in the upcoming DiS Carnival. When the official announcement comes out, I'll assume that White House is submitting that post to the upcoming carnival. I know they have their hands full so I'll submit it for them.

Read the entire news story published in the Science section of the New York Times. White House Plans Campaign to Promote Science and Math Education, November 22, 2009.

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ROBOTS IN UNIFORM

Fighting Robots

Robots: They’re Indispensable Now.

Buying AA batteries for the toy robots in your gift bags?

Enjoy the fun. But don’t imagine that the serious version is a plaything.

At least, not on the battlefield.

Milbots are flying, rolling, and walking for us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Humans still do most of the fighting and, sorry to say, take most of the hits.

But that may change.

The hellish beings in this video from 2008, give some idea of how advanced robotics has become. Watch how they handle themselves on ice.

video details and more

Freaky enough?

These robots have got the “I’m alive” thing down but, at least, they aren’t killing anybody. To see the lethal stuff, you have to look at the things we’re buying from companies like IRobot and Foster Miller.

Foster Miller’s selection of military robots includes a shrunk-down “Man-Portable Talon” which makes for easy (if you happen to a very fit soldier) transport over Afghan mountains.

Foster Miller's MAARS System

On my last visit to the company, I stepped quickly out of the path of one of its rolling weapons, remembering that these aren’t consumer products. Maybe (since they kill people) they aren’t as polite as elevator doors.

For some perspective, I called a friendly embedded systems developer in New Hampshire. (Embedded systems are the computers that’re buried inside things –  including robots. They do the thinking and control the movements.)

A little bashful about using her name so we’ll call her Betsy.

Could one of these fighting machines get away from its handlers and just take off after someone?

She snorted.

These robots would be helpless without a human ‘driving’ them.

You DAMN well don’t want to be in front of one when it’s pissed but they don’t have a pigeon’s worth of real brains. A bigger danger is that there’s a screw-up and the robot does something dangerous.

Don’t forget, these machines are working in battlefield conditions.

What about the chances of this hardware falling into the wrong hands?

That depends on which ‘wrong hands’ you’re referring to. The guys we’re currently ‘not getting along with’ like asymmetric warfare.

Simple weapons. Make it up as you go along

I don’t think they have the infrastructure to manage this kind of weapon. But, in time, I have no doubt that they will find ways to acquire some robotic systems, maybe from states like Iran or North Korea.

That’s one of the reasons we can’t allow our technology to stagnate.

No ScienceAintSoBadRating on this one.

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Hacked emails, tree-ring proxies and blogospheric
confusion

One of the commenters to my last post, an attempt to explain why the hacked climatology emails do not constitute a scientific scandal, came up with a darn fine idea:

If you think that global warming rests on a few temperature data sets and models, you are very wrong. If you don't understand this then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject, and you most likely will be treated just like any other ineducable troll.

Grab a climate textbook and do some reading...it will help if you have some physics background too. Yeah, science takes effort...

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

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The Bee Convoy (Reclaiming The Fruits of their
Labor)

tags: insects, comedy, humor, bentekr, animation, streaming video

This video shows honeybees at work, and suddenly discovering a pot of honey on a picnic table. What do they do? This video follows the secret life of these bees.

Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...

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New tool for sharing & organizing your labs
protocols, materials and data

Ever get that feeling that things in the lab are disorganized and that as soon as you leave the lab, all your hard work will leave with you? You’re not alone. The founders of BioData were also confounded by their lab experience and came up with a laboratory management tool for maintaining organization, collaboration and [...]

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%80%99s-protocols-materials-and-data/

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looking for a.i., one cortex at a time

Recently, researchers at IBM used a supercomputer to map the cortex of a cat’s brain in high enough detail to run a simulation of what happens inside a feline mind in response to stimuli. Human brains are next in line as the team works to create[...]

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iPhone App Sends DNA To The Stars

Sending the genetic code for fundamental protein that makes all photosynthetic life (and therefore almost all life on Earth) possible to alien stars? There's an app for that!  

MIT artist in residence Joe Davis has, as well as one of the coolest titles it's possible to have, an iPhone which was Aceriboically connected to three distant stars.  Take a couple of goes at pronouncing that if you must, it's worth it: Aceribo is an immense three-hundred meter radio telescope, and if you've ever seen GoldenEye you don't have to imagine how cool that looks - you've already seen it.  Joe MacGyver (an honorary surname we're awarding him for this effort) wired his phone to the main transmitters via an old TV connector to transmit the genetic code of the RuBisCo protein to GJ83.1, Teagarden's star, and Kappa Ceti.  Which kicks the hell out of your contacts, "Anne", "Paul" and "Work."

The problem is in the conversion: they translated our well-know G A Ts and Cs into two-digit binary codes based on molecular weight, so far so funky, but then the artist in Joe decided to turn those codes into extracts from the edict of Apollo engraved at the entrance of the temple at Delphi.  Which we're sure is fascinating art but suddenly turns an earnest effort at interstellar communication something only an alien D'han B'Rrow-en would understand (and even then only after a bottle of exo-absinthe and a serious blow to whatever it has instead of a head).  This, by the way, is where the iPhone came in, reading out the converted text file using the standard "Speak" application.

It's still in awesome event, and the basic fact that it's an obviously intentional message isn't ruined by the deliberately convoluted communications convention.  The only downer involved was the opposition of some Aceribo staff - they were forced against the idea simply because it threatened their already endangered funding.  We live in a world where the attitude towards contacting extraterrestrials ranges from mockery to outright hostility, and the politicians in charge of spending range from flunking high-school science to mounting all-out attacks on reason itself.  So even if it's an impenetrable riddle to all but John Davis himself, we'll take any transmission we can get.

Luke McKinney

The RuBisCo Stars Story

Part I 

Part II 

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Could Interstellar Dust Clouds or Neutron Stars
Harbor Life

In his famous lecture, "Life in the Universe," Stephen Hawking observed that what we normally think of as 'life' is based on chains of carbon atoms, with a few other atoms, such as nitrogen or phosphorous. We can imagine  that one might have life with some other chemical basis, such as silicon, "but carbon seems the most favorable case, because it has the richest chemistry."

Several eminent scientists think otherwise, that life in the universe could have a myriad of possible biochemical foundations ranging from life in ammonia to life in hydrocarbons and silicon. Silicates have a rich chemistry with a propensity for forming chains, rings, and sheets. One of the founders on modern genetics, Cairs-Smith, argued that layers of crystalline silicates functioned as a primitive form of life on early Earth, before they evolved into carbon-based life forms.


The Earth was formed largely out of the heavier elements, including carbon and oxygen. Somehow, Hawking observes, "some of these atoms came to be arranged in the form of molecules of DNA. One possibility is that the formation of something like DNA, which could reproduce itself, is extremely unlikely. However, in a universe with a very large, or infinite, number of stars, one would expect it to occur in a few stellar systems, but they would be very widely separated."

Other prominent scientists have warned that we humans may be blinded by our familiarity with carbon and Earth-like conditions. In other words, what we?re looking for may not even lie in our version of a ?sweet spot?. After all, even here on Earth, one species ?sweet spot? is another species worst nightmare. In any case, it is not beyond the realm of feasibility that our first encounter with extraterrestrial life will not be a solely carbon-based fete.

Alternative biochemists speculate that there are several atoms and solvents that could potentially spawn life. Because carbon has worked for the conditions on Earth, we speculate that the same must be true throughout the universe. In reality, there are many elements that could potentially do the trick. Even counter-intuitive elements such as arsenic may be capable of supporting life under the right conditions. Even on Earth some marine algae incorporate arsenic into complex organic molecules such as arsenosugars and arsenobetaines.

Several other small life forms use arsenic to generate energy and facilitate growth. Chlorine and sulfur are also possible elemental replacements for carbon. Sulfur is capably of forming long-chain molecules like carbon. Some terrestrial bacteria have already been discovered to survive on sulfur rather than oxygen, by reducing sulfur to hydrogen sulfide.

Nitrogen and phosphorus could also potentially form biochemical molecules. Phosphorus is similar to carbon in that it can form long chain molecules on its own, which would conceivably allow for formation of complex macromolecules. When combined with nitrogen, it can create quite a wide range of molecules, including rings.

So what about water? Isn?t at least water essential to life?

Not necessarily. Ammonia, for example, as we mentioned above has many of the same properties as water. An ammonia or ammonia-water mixture stays liquid at much colder temperatures than plain water. Such biochemistries may exist outside the conventional water-based "habitability zone". One example of such a location would be right here in our own solar system on Saturn's largest moon Titan.

Hydrogen fluoride methanol, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and formamide have all been suggested as suitable solvents that could theoretically support alternative biochemistry. All of these ?water replacements? have pros and cons when considered in our terrestrial environment. What needs to be considered is that with a radically different environment, comes radically different reactions. Water and carbon might be the very last things capable of supporting life in some extreme planetary conditions.

While some of these scenarios may seem the stuff of science finction, it's important to keep in mind that the foundations of life on Erah, the association of a protein with a nucleic acid when view abstractly, does little to convey the endgame wonders such as blue whales and Mozart's operas.

A billion years from now our descendants may have discovered other systems of physical life such as plasma within stars which would be based on the reciprocal influence of patterns of magnetic force and the ordered motion of charged particles. In fact, such life may well exists within our Sun.

Another form would be based on radiation emitted by isolated atoms and molecules in a dense interstellar cloud similar to the one physicist Fred Hoyle described in his scifi thriller, The Black Cloud. Such clouds can have a long lifetime lasting millions of years before they collapse.
Our personal favorite at The Daily Galaxy is the possibility of life in Neutron stars which wou;df be based on the properties of polymeric atoms which which could form chains that could store and transmit information in a way that bears an uncanny similarity to the functions of nucleic acids -the molecules that carry genetic information or form structures within cells.

Posted by Casey Kazan with Rebecca Sato.

Highly Recommended:

Stephen Hawking: Why Isn't the Milky Way "Crawling With Self-Designing Mechanical or Biological Life?"

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"Deep Thought" - Beyond the Large Hadron Collider

Some scientists are already looking beyond the Large Hadron Collider and onto the next generation of ultimega-atom-smasher.  That's because scientists actually plan things and can concentrate for longer than four seconds, unlike the mass media which reports on them.  One potential particle pulverising system is a muon collider: the latest concept in the cutting edge that parts particles.

It might seems spoiled to be calling for another multimillion dollar megacollider when the latest one hasn't even started, but the LHC is no Deep Thought: they aren't going to turn it on and have the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (eventually) tumble out.  Whatever the results of the proton-pounding experiments underneath the Franco-Swiss border there are whole swathes of the high-energy particle spectrum still out of reach - and which we want to look at next will be determined by the LHC.

The muon collider concept combines exciting potential with challenging problems.  Muons are only a ninth of the mass of protons and so can be accelerated to higher energies with current hardware (in fact, because they're made of fewer subatomic bits they can reach higher effective energies even with less powerful equipment).  They're two hundred times heavier than electrons, but because they're less prone to radiate away energy via synchrotron radiation when being bent around curves by magnetic fields, they can be kept in rings at energy levels where electrons would require vast linear accelerators.

The challenges are just as cool: a muon's stable lifetime is only two point two microseconds, and when faced with the problem "they only hang around for a couple millionths of a second" the designers said "let's just accelerate them to close to the speed of light" - that way they hang around long enough (in our frame) due to relativistic time dilation.  If that sounds improbable, it's already happened to you a bunch of times while reading this sentence: muons created by cosmic ray impacts classically couldn't survive long enough to reach the surface, it's only time dilation extending their life from our reference frame that lets them stream into the surface of the Earth, bubble chambers, and your body right now.

There are still extraordinarily significant challenges to overcome: how do you streams muons into the accelerator from the reactions that cause them, who wants to pay for something this big, and will they be able to overcome other accelerator strategies to get that funding?  Only time, and awesome science, will tell.

Luke McKinney

Muon Accelerator http://www.nature.com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/news/2009/091118/full/462260a.html

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Image of the Day: "The Geometry Galaxy"

Centaurus A (NGC 5128) is the nearest giant, elliptical galaxy to the Milky Way, at a distance of about 11 million light-years.  This beautiful and spectacular appearance is due to an opaque dust lane that covers the central part of the galaxy. This dust is thought to be the remains of a cosmic merger between a giant elliptical galaxy and a smaller spiral galaxy full of dust that was swallowed up 200 to 700 years ago. The central region of the image reveals the parallelogram-shaped ghostly remains of the smaller galaxy, the contents of which appear to be churning inside Centaurus A's core, likely triggering new generations of stars.First glimpses of the "leftovers" of this event were obtained thanks to observations with the ESA Infrared Space Observatory , which revealed a 16 500 light-year-wide structure, very similar to that of a small barred galaxy. More recently, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope resolved this structure into the parallelogram, which can be explained as the remnant of a gas-rich spiral galaxy falling into an elliptical galaxy and becoming twisted and warped in the process. Galaxy merging is the most common mechanism to explain the formation of such giant elliptical galaxies.
The new SOFI images, obtained with the 3.58-metre New Technology Telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, allow astronomers to get an even sharper view of the structure of this galaxy, completely free of obscuring dust. The original images, obtained by observing in the near-infrared through three different filters (J, H, K) were combined using a new technique that removes the dark, screening effect of the dust, providing a clear view of the centre of this galaxy.
"There is a clear ring of stars and clusters hidden behind the dust lanes, and our images provide an unprecedentedly detailed view toward it," says Jouni Kainulainen, lead author of the paper reporting these results. "Further analysis of this structure will provide important clues on how the merging process occurred and what has been the role of star formation during it."
"These are the first steps in the development of a new technique that has the potential to trace giant clouds of gas in other galaxies at high resolution and in a cost-effective way," explains co-author João Alves. "Knowing how these giant clouds form and evolve is to understand how stars form in galaxies."
Previous observations done with ISAAC on the VLT (ESO 04/01) have revealed that a supermassive black hole lurks inside Centaurus A. Its mass is about 200 million times the mass of our Sun, or 50 times more massive than the one that lies at the centre of our Milky Way. In contrast to our own galaxy, the supermassive black hole in Centaurus A is continuously fed by material falling onto into it, making the giant galaxy a very active one. Centaurus A is in fact one of the brightest radio sources in the sky (hence the "A" in its name). Jets of high energy particles from the centre are also observed in radio and X-ray images.
Casey Kazan 
Source: ESO

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