Arthur C. Clarke Died today

Today is a very sad day indeed; Arthur C. Clarke died at the age of 90. Author of books like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood’s End and Rendezvous with Rama – Clarke was one of the most influential authors from my early childhood onwards.

Some of my favourite quotes:

• “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
• “If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run – and often in the short one – the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.”
• “Somewhere in me is a curiosity sensor. I want to know what’s over the next hill. You know, people can live longer without food than without information. Without information, you’d go crazy”

And in his famous 10 word story:

“God said, ‘Cancel Program GENESIS.’ The universe ceased to exist.”

His vision and optimism about the continuance of our species will be sorely missed.

The Universe Is 13.73 Billion Years Old

CaptainCarrot writes “Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer has summarized for his readers the new results released by NASA from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which has been surveying the 3K microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang. Some of the most interesting results: The age of the universe is now known to unprecedented accuracy: 13.73 billion years old, +/- 120 million. Spacetime is flat to within a 2% error margin. And ordinary matter and energy account for only 4.62% of the universe’s total. Plait’s comment on the age result: ‘Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.‘”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Dawkins Quotes

By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.

Richard Dawkins Quotes

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV

A team of researchers at the University of Alberta has discovered a gene that is able to block HIV, and in turn prevent the onset of AIDS.Stephen Barr, a molecular virologist in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, says his team has identified a gene called TRIM22 that can block HIV infection in a cell culture by preventing the assembly of the virus.”When we put this gene in cells, it prevents the assembly of the HIV virus,” said Barr, a postdoctoral fellow. “This means the virus cannot get out of the cells to infect other cells, thereby blocking the spread of the virus.”

Researchers discover gene that blocks HIV

Tags: science, medicine, HIV, research, cutting-edge

Microsoft WorldWide Telescope in Action

Witness the power of the fully operational Microsoft WorldWide Telescope, as Roy Gould and Curtis Wong walks the audience at TED through this stunning software effort. Some experts say that the WorldWide Telescope, which puts together terabytes of information from telescopes all over the world to make a seamless rendition of the entire known Universe, will change the way we—the normal humans—understand the cosmos. After seeing it in action, I agree:

[From Microsoft WorldWide Telescope; Gizmodo]

Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope

Several days ago we wrote about something extraordinary that Robert Scoble said was coming from Microsoft and it was going to be announced on February 27th. When he saw a live demo of it at a recent visit to Redmond, he said it was enough to make his eyes well up with tears. TechCrunch is now speculating that this extraordinary something from Microsoft is a WorldWide Telescope. The desktop software would be available for Windows users and would allow them, as Michael Arrington says, to “pan around the nighttime sky and zoom as far in to any one area as the data will allow.  Microsoft is said to be tapping the Hubble Telescope as well as ten or so earthbound telescopes around the world for data. When you find an area you like, you can switch to a number of different views such as infrared and non-visible light.”

This would be wonderful for people who are interested in astronomy but don’t necessarily have the time or the access to the real thing.  I will be very interested to see how this stacks up against Google Sky or other desktop software like Stellerium.

U of MI Produces Strongest Laser Ever

I wonder if you can attach these to sharks?

eldavojohn writes “Weighing in at a mere 20 billion trillion watts per square centimeter and containing a measly 300 terawatts of power, the University of Michigan has broken a record with a 1.3-micron speck wide laser. It’s about two orders of magnitude higher than any other laser in the world and can perform for 30 femtoseconds once every ten seconds — some of the researchers speculate it is the most powerful laser in the universe. ‘If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory … To achieve this beam, the research team added another amplifier to the HERCULES laser system, which previously operated at 50 terawatts. HERCULES is a titanium-sapphire laser that takes up several rooms at U-M’s Center for Ultrafast Optical Science. Light fed into it bounces like a pinball off a series of mirrors and other optical elements. It gets stretched, energized, squeezed and focused along the way.’” And … cue the evil chortling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[From U of MI Produces Strongest Laser Ever]

No Pristine Oceans Left, New Map Shows

A new study has mapped the effects of human behavior on the world’s oceans, finding that 40 percent of the area has been strongly affected and no regions remain untouched.

No Pristine Oceans Left, New Map Shows
Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:00:00 GMT

I guess this goes towards the comments on my last posting.  It isn’t easy to build a big fence around a marine environment and protect the bits on the inside.  Marine environments are complex inter-dependant ecosystems; anyone who’s owned a marine tank will testify to how hard it is to keep everything running happily.

World’s Largest Marine Reserve Declared

Halfway between Hawaii and Fiji, the California-sized ocean wilderness includes pristine reefs and eight coral atolls teeming with fish and birds.

World’s Largest Marine Reserve Declared

Now how to prevent the crap and waste from outside the marine reserve from getting in … nice to be seeing more marine preservation efforts though.

What was James Cameron thinking?

Cameron’s documentary, aired recently on Discovery, is not only embarrassing from a scientific point of view; it reeks of Dan Brown and conspiracy theory. Cameron and an Israeli archaeologist claim to have found the lost tomb of Jesus outside Jerusalem containing ossuary’s (small stone caskets) holding the bones of Jesus and his parents.

On closer examination of the facts Cameron seems merely out for the ratings in the hope that the gullible public will cash in on this story before the real embarrassment begins or he is truly and completely deluded. Cameron defied all the laws of the scientific method when he cherry picked his experts with a vested interest in the claim and then failed to subject his findings to the peer review process before his announcement; a process where experts could examine the data and perhaps point out flaws in his over-enthusiastic claims. Then Cameron drops a media bomb-shell: ‘I’ve found Jesus, let the debate begin’ and waits eagerly for the tinkle of falling gold coin to begin.

So here are some points to ponder:

1. He found the tomb of people called Jesus, Mary and Joseph containing authentic looking ossuary’s disregarding similar claims recently about the tomb of Jesus’ brother where the ossuary’s were clearly fakes and the inscriptions made very recently with a little Calcium carbonate dissolved in some hot water.
2. In the area of the burial chamber the odds of finding the combinations of those 3 names together is around 600:1, all those names were incredibly popular.
3. According to this data Jesus wasn’t a messiah, he was an average Joe who lived with his folks and was buried with them in a very average middle class tomb.
4. Jesus clearly wasn’t immortal and his ascent to heaven never occurred as per the legend – old and dusty boxes of bones don’t fit well with the resurrection myth.
5. The findings never went for peer-review and now there is a lot of scientific dismissal of the claims and some anger by real scholars.

Real scholars are angry with Cameron, they feel that the data and the entire process was manhandled and real scientific method held up to ridicule. These are men and women who dedicate their lives to trying to understand real historical facts, many of them spending decades understanding the intricacies of civilizations that lived millennia ago. Cameron has ensured that future finds of historic significance in the area will be weighed against his less than ideal standards.

10 times around the sun without Carl

Carl Sagan, born on the 9th November 1934 in Brooklyn, New York undoubtedly ranks in my top ten people I would have love to have met. As an Astrophysicyst he shared his joy and wonder at life and the universe with millions of people through television, books and movies. I remember sitting wide-eyed and entranced as a child watching his Cosmos television series, taping and later re-watching the episodes until the physical limits of a VHS tape were pushed to a blurred and fuzzy demise.

I won’t attempt to list his writings, personal accomplishments or scientific endeavours, his wikipedia entry covers that more than adequately.

I was however very touched by the tributes that have poured in from all corners of the globe to mark a decade without this great man. He was a man who loved and was loved by many people the world over, not least his family. For me he encompasses much of what we as humans should strive for: a questioning, unbounded curiosity in the universe, a keen intellect, a disbelief in superstition or pseudo-science and patience for the slower things of this world. The tribute by his wife Ann Druyan (10 times around the sun without Carl) and son Nick Sagan (Memories of my dad) highlight many admirable traits of both husband and father; His eulogy, more than forgotten mossy etchings on a tomb stone, is still trumpeted by those who remember and will continue to remember him.

Carl Sagan passed away in 1996 after a long battle with cancer.

Hate Mail (and concerned criticism) archive at Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

 

http://www.venganza.org/category/hate-mail/

This is fantastic, hate mail is just so full of anger, resentment and for want of a better word; stupidity.  I have really enjoyed myself reading some of the hate mail received by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti monster.  The thing I love best about this is that is seems many of the mailers just haven’t figured out that this is satire, ‘designed’ [I couldn't resist] by Bobby Henderson to make a point in protest to the Kansas court ruling that ‘intelligent design’ be offered as a valid and scientific alternative to the theory of evolution:

Nautilus questions:

How can a thing made by man be god? its fucking spagetti! people EAT IT! why would you let people EAT your god? Everyone I know thinks you are retarded, so congrats there

indeed!

Michael Martin, so full of Christian cheer writes:

flimsy moral standards? Lets see here.  If I were to shoot your wife, would you have a problem with that?

It seems that Michael might be one of those ‘good ol boys’ where the distinction between guns, religion and sex with your sister is a little blurred.

One individual on the old blog site has this to say:

Yo Bobby, You are an ignorant ignoramous!!  Why can’t you and all of your atheist cohorts just keep your big, fat traps closed when it comes to even a HINT of GOD!!!  What are you afraid of????  Darwin’s rantings (sorry, not even enough scientific evidence to even CALL it a theory) have NO basis–time has proven that.  Our schoolkids are being totally cheated out of the truth—and it is people like you that turn it into a farce when a viable alternative is presented!!!  When you deny kids the knowledge of an Intelligent Designer that created them for a specific purpose—-you deny them a true purpose in life and deny them the ability to cherish this wonderful life and world God created just for us humans……….Your website makes me ill—-but I will be praying for you!  Don’t worry—God does love you even though you are vehemently pushing him away right now and we will ALL be judged when we die.   Do you feel good about taking your atheism one step further or what????

He/She is obviously in need of some basic  grammar and science lessons. ‘Not enough scientific evidence’? A word to anonymous from me – ‘Show me your evidence and I’ll show you mine  - and one question mark usually suffices as a sentence terminator’.

I would love to try and quantify just how much more ignorant an ignorant ignoramus is compared with your basic garden-variety ignoramus but alas I find it hard.

and lastly fd cuts to the intellectual chase with his excellent piece of logical deduction:

This is fucking retarded, a flying piece of fucking spaghetti can not create the universe, considering spaghetti was made by man, and monsters from man’s imagination.  SO FUCK FSM

Yip, he’s got us all there.

Technology Review: Printing Muscle and Bone

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have successfully directed adult stem cells from mice to develop into bone and muscle cells with the aid of a custom-designed ink-jet printer. They say it’s a first step toward better understanding tissue regeneration, which may one day lead to therapies for repairing damaged tissues, as occurs in osteoarthritis. For years, tissue engineers have used souped-up printers, and in some cases off-the-shelf models, to print "bio-inks." These inks consist of anything from proteins to individual cells printed in microscopic patterns. By printing layer upon layer of cell patterns, scientists may one day be able to "print" whole tissues or organs for replacement therapies.

http://www.technologyreview.com/BioTech/17913/

The Parasitic Cordyceps Fungus

David Attenborough on the amazing Cordyceps fungus that infect insects in the jungle. Each fungus attacks only one species of insect, first by altering their behaviour and then, like in some bizarre sci-fi movie – bursting from their bodies to grow and eventually produce another generation of highly infective spores.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-REOyhRvvj0

Use GridRepublic to manage your BOINC projects

Update to this post

GridRepublic ( http://gridrepublic.org) is a web based BOINC project manager allowing for ease of subscription to the various BOINC offerings.  The BOINC software can synchronise with GridRepublic. in what appears to be the easiest method of subscribing.  My computer is now currently helping with climactic change modelling – nice

Choose BOINC

If you haven’t already done so, please head on over to BOINC

Boinc is a piece of software that generously donates your computer’s idle time – like when you are not at your desk – to scientific pursuits.  There are a number of noble projects to choose from – the control of the spread of malaria, or climactic change modelling, or searching for little green men with SETI.  Some of the projects are listed here

Wired Magazine: The Church of the Non-Believers?

Wired Magazine,
by Gary Wolf

MY FRIENDS, I MUST ASK YOU AN IMPORTANT QUESTION TODAY: Where do you stand on God?

It’s a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I’m afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three and a half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position. This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith. The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking. Three writers have sounded this call to arms.

They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.11/atheism.html

Richard Dawkins Has A Posse

Share the Courage of Your Convictions

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Life in BioSphere 2

Jane Poynter entered the world’s first hermetically sealed, manufactured ecological system in 1991 with seven other people.

Biosphere 2 — the 3.15-acre, almost-airtight outpost in the Arizona desert that was to be their home for two years — proved impressively stable, although low oxygen levels and disappointing crop yields made survival a daily challenge. Eventually, pure oxygen had to be added to the system, and the team had to supplement its diet with food from an emergency stockpile stored before closure.

Throughout their stay, short tempers, depression and even the specter of insanity kept life interesting for the “biospherians.” In her new book, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, Poynter gives an insider’s view of the famous experiment. She spoke with Wired News about cult rumors, Biosphere 2′s unique usefulness to climatologists and her time inside the bubble.

Interview here …

Sea Monkeys, The Comics Lied!

I remember being endlessly fascinated by the back covers of my comic books when I was younger, there were these miraculous creatures called Sea Monkeys.  They apparently miraculously appeared when you added some funny nutrient mixture to water.  The image showed little amphibian-primates in a Disney style family unit replete with mandatory castle and happily oogling humans.

Sadly the truth was very far from the marketing as is often the case in life.  A sea monkey is actually a brine shrimp (Artemia salina for the biologists among you). 

This is what a brine shrimp looks like – nothing like the add is it?