Source: Search Results – Springer

An awesome list of science books

There are at least 12 kinds of rainbows, a new study reveals, and some skip a color or two.

Since the 1950s, rainbow classification has been based on the size of the raindrops that create them. The bigger the drops, the more vivid the colors.

Another attempt organized them by the height of the sun above the horizon. At about 70 degrees, a rainbow is dominated by blues and greens. Closer to the horizon, there are mostly reds and yellows.

“At sunset or sunrise, the color of the sun and the intensity of the incoming light change dramatically,” Ricard said. When the sun is low in the horizon, rays of light must pass through more of the Earth’s atmosphere. “The red manages to go through,” he explained. “Other wavelengths are completely gone.”

Catch the Rainbows

To capture this rainbow diversity, Ricard and his colleagues gathered hundreds of pictures of rainbows, sorting them into 12 categories based on the visibility of the six colors, the strength of the dark band, and whether any supernumerary bands can be seen. One type lacks a band of green, for instance, another is missing blue and violet, and a third type has only red and blue.

The system is so simple that most anyone could look at a picture of a rainbow, put it in a class, and understand what’s going on, he said. A misty red rainbow, for instance, could only be created near sunrise or sunset with tiny raindrops.

Source: Some Rainbows Don’t Have Every Color of the Rainbow

The plan is to implant up to 11 small tiles, each loaded with 43 electrodes, into areas of the brain that deal with vision. When these areas are stimulated, people report seeing flashes of light. Lowery believes that each electrode could create a dot of light that is similar to seeing one pixel. In total, the tiles will provide around 500 pixels – enough to create a simple image. Although this resolution is far cruder than the 1 to 2 million pixel image a normal eye can produce, it should restore the basic

Source: Bionic eye will send images direct to the brain to restore sight | New Scientist

The Chinese scientist behind the world’s biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction.

Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020.

But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun’s ambitions.

In the factory pipeline are also thoroughbred racehorses, as well as pet and police dogs, specialised in searching and sniffing.

The firm does not currently engage in human cloning activities, Xu said, adding that it has to be “self-restrained” because of possible adverse reaction.

But social values can change, he pointed out, citing changing views of homosexuality and suggesting that in time humans could have more choices about their own reproduction.

Source: China ‘clone factory’ scientist eyes human replication

Turns out that companies have been writing information that makes US citizens not believe in climate change science.

“The comprehensive data include all individual and organizational actors in the climate change countermovement (164 organizations), as well as all written and verbal texts produced by this network between 1993–2013 (40,785 texts, more than 39 million words). Two main findings emerge. First, that organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue. Second, and more importantly, that corporate funding influences the actual thematic content of these polarization efforts, and the discursive prevalence of that thematic content over time. ”
Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change

As described in a paper posted online and submitted to Physical Review Letters (PRL), researchers from NIST and several other institutions created pairs of identical light particles, or photons, and sent them to two different locations to be measured. Researchers showed the measured results not only were correlated, but also—by eliminating all other known options—that these correlations cannot be caused by the locally controlled, “realistic” universe Einstein thought we lived in. This implies a different explanation such as entanglement.

Source: NIST team proves ‘spooky action at a distance’ is really real

The most surprising finding? “Our e-skin picked up sound better than the mic on a smartphone.”

Ko says that exactly how the pressure, texture, temperature, and acoustic signals will be transmitted into the brain is his next challenge.

Source: New artificial fingerprints feel texture, hear sound

The researchers observed the atoms under a microscope by illuminating them with a separate imaging laser. A light microscope can’t see individual atoms, but the imaging laser causes them to fluoresce, and the microscope captured the flashes of light. When the imaging laser was off, or turned on only dimly, the atoms tunneled freely. But as the imaging beam was made brighter and measurements made more frequently, the tunneling reduced dramatically.“This gives us an unprecedented tool to control a quantum system, perhaps even atom by atom,[…]Using this tuning, we’ve also been able to demonstrate an effect called ‘emergent classicality’ in this quantum system.” Quantum effects fade, and atoms begin to behave as expected under classical physics.

Source: ‘Zeno effect’ verified: Atoms won’t move while you watch | Cornell Chronicle

The famous Heisenberg uncertainty principle says that position and velocity of a particle are related and cannot be simultaneously measured precisely.

Yet again a major study looks at reproducing results (in this case only in psychological studies) and finds that the strength of the results is much lower than published.

Expect this to happen for economics, political science, etc as well.

Reproducibility is a defining feature of science, but the extent to which it characterizes current research is unknown. We conducted replications of 100 experimental and correlational studies published in three psychology journals using high-powered designs and original materials when available. Replication effects were half the magnitude of original effects, representing a substantial decline. Ninety-seven percent of original studies had statistically significant results. Thirty-six percent of replications had statistically significant results; 47% of original effect sizes were in the 95% confidence interval of the replication effect size; 39% of effects were subjectively rated to have replicated the original result; and if no bias in original results is assumed, combining original and replication results left 68% with statistically significant effects. Correlational tests suggest that replication success was better predicted by the strength of original evidence than by characteristics of the original and replication teams.

Source: Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science

Scientists Have Made a Möbius Strip Out of Light for the First Time.

Scientists have discovered an antibiotic capable of fighting infections that kill hundreds of thousands of people each year, a breakthrough that could lead to the field’s first major new drug in more than a quarter-century.The experimental drug, which was isolated from a sample of New England dirt, is called teixobactin. It hasn’t yet been tested in people, though it cured all mice infected with antibiotic-resistant staphylococci bacteria that usually kills 90 percent of the animals, according to a study published today in the journal Nature. Bacteria appear to have a particularly difficult time developing resistance to the drug, potentially overcoming a major problem with existing antibiotics.

via Antibiotic Pulled From Dirt Ends 25-Year Drug Drought – Bloomberg.

Scientists at the University of B.C. searching for ways to slow the deterioration of blood vessels may have stumbled on to the key to youthful skin.

While exploring the effects of the protein-degrading enzyme Granzyme B on blood vessels during heart attacks, professor David Granville couldn’t help noticing that mice engineered to lack the enzyme had beautiful skin at the end of the experiment, while normal mice showed signs of age.

“This is one of those moments that we live for in science,” said Granville, a researcher for Providence Health Care.

“We were interested in the effects of aging on blood vessels; we had no idea (the absence of this enzyme) would have any effect on their skin.”

The discovery pushed Granville’s research in an unexpected new direction.

The researchers built a mechanized rodent tanning salon and exposed mice engineered to lack the enzyme and normal mice to UV light three times a week for 20 weeks, enough to cause redness, but not to burn.

At the end of the experiment, the engineered mice still had smooth, unblemished skin, while the normal mice were deeply wrinkled.

“About 80 to 90 per cent of visible skin aging is caused by sunlight,” said Granville. “We found that by knocking out this gene we could markedly protect against the loss of collagen and it prevented wrinkling in these mice.”

via 'One of those moments that we live for in science': UBC researchers may have stumbled upon the secret to youthful skin.

Users of Watson Analytics feed in their own raw data, say, in the form of a spreadsheet, which the service then crunches with its own statistical analysis to highlight associations between different variables. It saves execs from needing to know how to write their own scripts or understand statistics in order to derive meaning from their data.

via IBM's Watson Analytics enters public beta | ZDNet.

▶ How to Cool a Drink in 2 Minutes – YouTube.

We show that non-ionizing, low-power laser (LPL) treatment can instead be used as a minimally invasive tool to activate an endogenous latent growth factor complex, transforming growth factor–β1 (TGF-β1), that subsequently differentiates host stem cells to promote tissue regeneration. LPL treatment induced reactive oxygen species (ROS) in a dose-dependent manner, which, in turn, activated latent TGF-β1 (LTGF-β1) via a specific methionine residue (at position 253 on LAP). Laser-activated TGF-β1 was capable of differentiating human dental stem cells in vitro. Further, an in vivo pulp capping model in rat teeth demonstrated significant increase in dentin regeneration after LPL treatment. These in vivo effects were abrogated in TGF-β receptor II (TGF-βRII) conditional knockout (DSPPCreTGF-βRIIfl/fl) mice or when wild-type mice were given a TGF-βRI inhibitor. These findings indicate a pivotal role for TGF-β in mediating LPL-induced dental tissue regeneration. More broadly, this work outlines a mechanistic basis for harnessing resident stem cells with a light-activated endogenous cue for clinical regenerative applications

via Photoactivation of Endogenous Latent Transforming Growth Factor–β1 Directs Dental Stem Cell Differentiation for Regeneration.

OK, it only pulls 1cm objects and wouldn’t work in space, but still…

Physics – A Macroscopic Tractor Beam with Acoustic Waves.

Doctors in UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania are now waiting for a patient to show up with a gaping chest wound, who’s lost around 50% of his / her blood so they can replace the entire blood supply with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. This reduces the amount of oxygen required by the heart and other vital organs. They hope to fix the structural issues whilst the patient is in a cooled state, then return the blood and warm it up slowly.
This has been demonstrated in pigs in 2002.

Gunshot victims to be suspended between life and death – health – 26 March 2014 – New Scientist.

Cool science, might lead to designer babies – which IMHO are a good thing…

Serious mitochondrial disease: new techniques to prevent transmission – Consultations – GOV.UK.

After years of research and hours of gruelling surgery, scientists have successfully attached sensors from a prosthetic hand to human nerve tissue to allow the device to give its wearer a sense of touch.

via First man/machine nerve grafts restore amputee's sense of touch • The Register.

In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.

http://phys.org/news/2013-12-algae-crude-oil-million-year-natural.html

A team of physicists has provided some of the clearest evidence yet that our Universe could be just one big projection.

In 1997, theoretical physicist Juan Maldacena proposed1 that an audacious model of the Universe in which gravity arises from infinitesimally thin, vibrating strings could be reinterpreted in terms of well-established physics. The mathematically intricate world of strings, which exist in nine dimensions of space plus one of time, would be merely a hologram: the real action would play out in a simpler, flatter cosmos where there is no gravity.

via Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram : Nature News & Comment.

ie models that work in lower dimensional universes, can be proven to work in higher dimensional universes. This means that we are projected ‘up’ from lower dimensions.

Now the following article becomes properly relevant because of the above article: A Link Between Wormholes and Quantum Entanglement.

wo independent teams of scientists say that it should also be possible to create a wormhole connection between two ordinary quantum particles, such as quarks that make up protons and neutrons.

This article was detracted as being a fun mathematical excercise but impractical because it only worked in a lower dimensional universe. Now, however we know that our universe is a projection of that universe, and so the laws that hold there, definitely hold here and are practical.

Experiments showed that a traumatic event could affect the DNA in sperm and alter the brains and behaviour of subsequent generations. A Nature Neuroscience study shows mice trained to avoid a smell passed their aversion on to their “grandchildren”. The animals were trained to fear a smell similar to cherry blossom. The team at the Emory University School of Medicine, in the US, then looked at what was happening inside the sperm. They showed a section of DNA responsible for sensitivity to the cherry blossom scent was made more active in the mice’s sperm. Both the mice’s offspring, and their offspring, were “extremely sensitive” to cherry blossom and would avoid the scent, despite never having experiencing it in their lives. hanges in brain structure were also found. “The experiences of a parent, even before conceiving, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations,” the report concluded.

The findings provide evidence of “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” – that the environment can affect an individual’s genetics, which can in turn be passed on.

via BBC News – ‘Memories’ pass between generations.