Is Warp Speed Possible? We Ask a String Theorist

The Enterprise: Courtesy Industrial Light & Magic/Paramount Pictures

From Popsci.com:

PopSci talks to futurist Michio Kaku about the (not necessarily) impossible physics of Star Trek.

Science geeks, Trekkers, and action-movie fans have now had a few days to digest the newest incarnation of the Star Trek franchise. PopSci set out to answer some of the movie's most puzzling questions (aside from what Winona Ryder was doing on Vulcan): Can we time-travel through black holes? Can we seed said black holes using something called "red matter"? How about teleportation -- will someone named Scotty (or Chekov) ever beam someone up?

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Neandertals Sophisticated And Fearless Hunters, New Analysis Shows

Model of the Neanderthal man. Exhibited in the Dinosaur Park Münchehagen, Germany. (Credit: iStockphoto/Klaus Nilkens)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 14, 2009) — Neandertals, the 'stupid' cousins of modern humans were capable of capturing the most impressive animals. This indicates that Neandertals were anything but dim. Dutch researcher Gerrit Dusseldorp analysed their daily forays for food to gain insights into the complex behaviour of the Neandertal. His analysis revealed that the hunting was very knowledge intensive.

Although it is now clear that Neandertals were hunters and not scavengers, their exact hunting methods are still something of a mystery. Dusseldorp investigated just how sophisticated the Neandertals' hunting methods really were. His analysis of two archaeological sites revealed that Neandertals in warm forested areas preferred to hunt solitary game but that in colder, less forested areas they preferred to hunt the more difficult to capture herding animals.

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Star Crust Is Ten Billion Times Stronger Than Steel

The outer crusts of so-called neutron stars (above, a neutron star in an artist's conception) are ten billion times stronger than steel—making it the strongest known material in the universe, scientists said in May 2009. Image by Casey Reed, courtesy of Penn State

From National Geographic News:

Move over, Superman.

The Man of Steel has nothing on the collapsed cores of massive snuffed-out stars, scientists say.

A new computer model suggests that the outer crusts of so-called neutron stars are the strongest known material in the universe.

To determine the breaking point of a neutron star's crust, the team modeled magnetic field stresses and crust deformation for a small region of the star's surface.

The results showed that the crust of a neutron star can withstand a breaking strain up to ten billion times the pressure it would take to snap steel.

"It sounds dramatic, but it's true," said study team member Charles Horowitz of Indiana University.

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19 Years Of Hubble

Courtesy STScI and NASA
The deployed Hubble telescope

From The CBC:

Happy birthday, Hubble

This galaxy was chosen as a subject for the Hubble Space Telescope because it won the most votes in a competition hosted by the Space Telescope Science Institute. The contest was held in celebration of 2009's designation as the International Year of Astronomy. This year also marks the Hubble telescope's 19th year in operation. This group of three galaxies is known as Arp 274, and is about 400 million light years away from Earth in the constellation Virgo. You can see the birthplace of new stars in the small knots of bright blue in the small galaxy on the left, and the arms of the galaxy on the right. (NASA)

The link to see the pictures from Hubble are here.

Gadgets Sap World's Electricity

From Live Science:

Sometime this year, the number of people using a personal computer will pass the one billion mark, according to the International Energy Agency. By sometime next year there will be more than 3.5 billion mobile phones subscribers and 2 billion TVs in use around the world, according to a new report from the agency.

And that's a problem.

You've heard of vampire energy? It's the name given to electricity that runs TVs, stereos and computers when they're in sleep mode, not even being used. You've seen the little red lights that indicate something's still humming inside.

Add that to the juice used by all manner of gadgets when they are being used or charged and, well ...

Without new policies, the energy consumed by electronic gadgets will double by 2022 and increase threefold by 2030 to 1,700 Terawatt hours (TWh), the IEA estimates.

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100 Geeks You Should Be Following On Twitter

From Geekdad/Wired News:

Twitter has of late been inundated by, shall we say, “normals.” What was once our little playground has become rather more populated. But that doesn’t make it any less effective a tool for communication. It just means we have to stick together, and keep the geek community thriving.

To this end, GeekDad has assembled the following: a list of 100 awesomely geeky-geeks. These are great, creative gamers and chiptune artists, astronomers and LEGO builders. Of course such a list cannot dream of being exhaustive, and we hope you’ll add your own suggestions in the comments.

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Fringe Season Finale Flirts With Theoretical Physics

From Popular Mechanics:

During the course of its first season, Fringe has played with the idea of that there are actually two realities, one slightly different from the other. In the season finale, "There's More Than One of Everything," the show delved into the science behind this idea, fleshing out the alternate reality with FBI Agent Olivia Dunham and company trying to stop über-villain David Robert Jones from getting to the elusive Massive Dynamic CEO William Bell, who, according to spokeswoman Nina Sharp, is hiding out in this other reality. PM spoke to physicist Michio Kaku, author of Physics of the Impossible, to perform our final fact check of Fringe, season one.

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Angels & Demons - Separating Science From Fiction

Photo: In the film, Tom Hanks plays the Harvard academic Robert Langdon, who finds evidence that an ancient clandestine brotherhood have stolen antimatter from a secret laboratory at CERN, which they plan to use as a weapon to destroy the Vatican.

From The Independent:

CERN scientist Tara Shears examines the scientific reality of new film Angels and Demons.

Anti-matter and CERN are getting fantastic exposure with the release of the film Angels and Demons today - a film adaptation of Dan Brown’s novel of the same name.

As a CERN scientist myself, when I heard that part of the plot was based in the world’s biggest particle physics laboratory I was intrigued to see how our work would be portrayed. I was pleasantly surprised on the whole; it was wonderful to see particle physics get the Hollywood treatment! However, when you delve deeper into the science behind the plot, there is a line to draw between reality and fiction.

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Milk And Cereal As Good As Expensive Sports Drinks In Boosting Performance, Claim Scientists

The milk helps reduce lactic acid levels in the blood,
the compound that causes stiffness after exercise Photo: GETTY

From The Telegraph:

Milk and cereal help to speed up recovery after exercise as much as expensive sports drinks, new findings from the University of Texas suggest.

Researchers found that athletes were just as replenished after exercise with a bowl of wheat flakes and skimmed milk as they were with many modern sports drinks which claim to rehydrate and re-energise the muscles.

They found that the traditional breakfast was just as good at replenishing blood sugar and insulin levels and that protein production was even better than with the so-called energy drinks.

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Lift-Off! Telescopes Herschel And Planck Launched To Seek Out The Origins Of The Universe

From The Daily Mail:

Two European telescopes have launched into space today which could solve the mystery surrounding the origins of the universe.

The Herschel and Planck observatories were sent into orbit together from French Guinea at 2.12pm (BST) and scientists hope they will reveal crucial stages of star birth and galaxy formation.

This will help them answer some of the most important questions in modern science, such as how did the universe begin, how did it evolve to what we see now, and how will it continue to evolve in the future?

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The Truth About Angels, Demons and Antimatter

Physicist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) and symbologist Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) look upon an antimatter trap in the 2009 movie "Angels and Demons." Credit: Sony Pictures

From Live Science:

An antimatter explosion threatens to level the Vatican in the movie adaptation of the thriller "Angels and Demons," but real-world physicists are unfazed by this plot.

The story features "Da Vinci Code" hero Robert Langdon racing to recover an antimatter capsule stolen from the CERN particle physics facility in Switzerland. Researchers first figured out how to create and trap antimatter particles at CERN, which gave author Dan Brown the inspiration for his story.

One physicist doesn't find CERN's unexpected publicity from the story upsetting. On the contrary, he's rather pleased.

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EBay Has Unexpected, Chilling Effect On Looting Of Antiquities, Archaelogist Finds

The daughter of a Peruvian artisan who specializes in the production of fake antiquities holds up an example. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 9, 2009) — Having worked for 25 years at fragile archaeological sites in Peru, UCLA archaeologist Charles "Chip" Stanish held his breath when the online auction house eBay launched more than a decade ago.

"My greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking, which previously had been a wealthy person's vice, and lead to widespread looting," said the UCLA professor of anthropology, who directs the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Indeed, eBay has drastically altered the transporting and selling of illegal artifacts, Stanish writes in an article in the May/June issue of Archaeology, but not in the way he and other archaeologists had feared.

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Life’s First Spark Recreated In The Laboratory

A fundamental but elusive step in the early evolution of life
on Earth has been replicated in a laboratory.

From Wired Science:

Researchers synthesized the basic ingredients of RNA, a molecule from which the simplest self-replicating structures are made. Until now, they couldn’t explain how these ingredients might have formed.

“It’s like molecular choreography, where the molecules choreograph their own behavior,” said organic chemist John Sutherland of the University of Manchester, co-author of a study in Nature Wednesday.

RNA is now found in living cells, where it carries information between genes and protein-manufacturing cellular components. Scientists think RNA existed early in Earth’s history, providing a necessary intermediate platform between pre-biotic chemicals and DNA, its double-stranded, more-stable descendant.

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The Man Who Discovered Greenhouse Gases

Image: John Tyndall’s discovery that gases could trap heat provided the first hints of the mechanism behind climate change (Image: 1873, The Graphic)

From New Scientist:

As an antidote to this year's Darwin-mania, we celebrate a piece of science from 1859 that wasn't remotely controversial at the time, but which underpins the hottest political potato of our era: climate change. In May 1859, six months before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Irish physicist John Tyndall proved that some gases have a remarkable capacity to hang onto heat, so demonstrating the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. Charles Darwin had journeyed round the world and ruminated for 20 years before presenting his inflammatory ideas on evolution. Tyndall spent just a few weeks experimenting in a windowless basement lab in London.

"THE scene was one of the most wonderful I had ever witnessed. Along the entire slope of the Glacier des Bois, the ice was cleft and riven into the most striking and fantastic forms. It had not yet suffered much from the warming influence of the summer weather, but its towers and minarets sprang from the general mass with clean chiselled outlines." John Tyndall was entranced by the Alps, in particular the great glaciers that creaked and groaned as they crept down the mountains. He found the Mer de Glace especially captivating: the largest glacier in France was a deep river of ice that stretched down the north slope of Mont Blanc and spilled out into the Chamonix valley near the hamlet of Les Bois.

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‘90% Of The Last Million Years, The Normal State Of The Earth’s Climate Has Been An Ice Age’

From Watts Up With That?

Those who ignore the geologic perspective do so at great risk. In fall of 1985, geologists warned that a Columbian volcano, Nevado del Ruiz, was getting ready to erupt. But the volcano had been dormant for 150 years. So government officials and inhabitants of nearby towns did not take the warnings seriously. On the evening of November 13, Nevado del Ruiz erupted, triggering catastrophic mudslides. In the town of Armero, 23,000 people were buried alive in a matter of seconds.

For ninety percent of the last million years, the normal state of the Earth’s climate has been an ice age. Ice ages last about 100,000 years, and are punctuated by short periods of warm climate, or interglacials. The last ice age started about 114,000 years ago. It began instantaneously. For a hundred-thousand years, temperatures fell and sheets of ice a mile thick grew to envelop much of North America, Europe and Asia. The ice age ended nearly as abruptly as it began. Between about 12,000 and 10,000 years ago, the temperature in Greenland rose more than 50 °F.

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Obsession With Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years

Side and front views of the Venus of Hohle Fels. Credit: H. Jensen; Copyright University of Tubingen

From Live Science:

If human culture seems obsessed with sex lately, it's nothing new. Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known artistic representation of a woman — a carved ivory statue of a naked female, dating from 35,000 years ago.

The figurine, unearthed in September 2008 in Hohle Fels Cave in southwestern Germany, may be the oldest known example of figurative art, meaning art that is supposed to represent and resemble a real person, animal or object. The discovery could help scientists understand the origins of art and the advent of symbolic thinking, including complicated language.

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Changes In The Sun Are Not Causing Global Warming, New Study Shows

With the U.S. Congress beginning to consider regulations on greenhouse gases, a troubling hypothesis about how the sun may impact global warming is finally laid to rest. (Credit: iStockphoto)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2009) — With the U.S. Congress beginning to consider regulations on greenhouse gases, a troubling hypothesis about how the sun may impact global warming is finally laid to rest.

Carnegie Mellon University's Peter Adams along with Jeff Pierce from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, have developed a model to test a controversial hypothesis that says changes in the sun are causing global warming.

The hypothesis they tested was that increased solar activity reduces cloudiness by changing cosmic rays. So, when clouds decrease, more sunlight is let in, causing the earth to warm. Some climate change skeptics have tried to use this hypothesis to suggest that greenhouse gases may not be the global warming culprits that most scientists agree they are.

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Could Wolfram|Alpha Sway Google Regulators?

From Wired News/Epicenter:

News Analysis — Wolfram|Alpha, a company whose product you have never used, may turn out to be Google’s best friend.

For those who haven’t heard yet, Wolfram|Alpha is a much-hyped, badly-named computational search engine that gives real answers to queries such as “internet users in Europe.” It pulls off the techie magic by using structured data sets, rather than messy web pages, as its index. Its demo has impressed quite a few tech journalists, including the originally skeptical Danny Sullivan, one of the crown princes of search engine journalism. See the screenshot below from Read/Write/Web:

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Brain's Problem-solving Function At Work When We Daydream

These are fMRI brain scans from UBC Mind Wandering Study.
(Credit: Courtesy of Kalina Christoff)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2009) — A new University of British Columbia study finds that our brains are much more active when we daydream than previously thought.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that activity in numerous brain regions increases when our minds wander. It also finds that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving – previously thought to go dormant when we daydream – are in fact highly active during these episodes.

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Brain's Willpower Spot Found

From Live Science:

When healthy eaters choose broccoli over a Butterfinger, they use a small region in their brains that indulgers don't use.

That bundle of cells is a clue to the biology of willpower, a new study finds. Like a wagging finger in our heads, the region admonishes us to consider long-term benefits over instant rewards when we make decisions.

"This is the first time people have looked at the mechanism of self-control in people who are making real-life decisions," said Todd Hare, a Caltech neuroscientist who led the study.

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