From Greg Laden's Blog: Evolution of the Moon
Reginald L. Goodwin's Posts (3117)
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There is a widely held view in the astronomical community that unmanned robotic space vehicles are, and will always be, more efficient explorers of planetary surfaces than astronauts (e.g. Coates, 2001; Clements 2009; Rees 2011). Partly this is due to a common assumption that robotic exploration is cheaper than human exploration (although, as we shall see, this isn't necessarily true if like is compared with like), and partly from the expectation that continued developments in technology will relentlessly increase the capability, and reduce the size and cost, of robotic missions to the point that human exploration will not be able to compete. I will argue below that the experience of human exploration during the Apollo missions, more recent field analogue studies, and trends in robotic space exploration actually all point to exactly the opposite conclusion.
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| "To boldly go where no man has gone before." TOS, images wiki |
Physics arXiv:
Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency: why human space exploration will tell us more about the Solar System than will robotic exploration alone,
Ian A. Crawford, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Birkbeck College London
...at least, it's a far less salacious result of "The Google."
Dr. Lawrence Krauss is a Theoretical Physicist and Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins Initiative, Co-Director of the Cosmology Initiative, School of Earth and Space Exploration, BEYOND Center, Department of Physics at Arizona State University, and author of popular physics books like The Physics of Star Trek. This is a noble, balanced attempt at a dialogue of understanding.
Some of the incredible things in this presentation that I saw:
- 50% of US adults know the earth orbits the sun! (Really? Just 50%!)
- Slide: Bad Theology!..a disservice to all people of faith to imply that it is better for our children to remain ignorant of the world than to risk the possibility that knowledge may undermine their faith! (0:22:03)
For political points, there's been a marketing campaign to "teach the controversy"; "teach both sides" as if a great debate still exists.
I am part of a community of faith. For my own family and the Diaspora in general, it was the most efficient means to organize in the aftermath of Emancipation. In some churches (not the one I currently participate), there's a certain orthodoxy that must be accepted, and any deviation is almost attacked...literally. I recall an email exchange between myself and a minister - regarding that I'd read, understood and agreed with "Origin of the Species" and that I did not disagree that the universe was 13.7 billion years old - that wound up in her sermon! I obviously no longer participate in that group.
A 2004 article on National Geographic notes: "In a 1997 survey in the science journal Nature, 40 percent of U.S. scientists said they believe in God—not just a creator, but a God to whom one can pray in expectation of an answer. That is the same percentage of scientists who were believers when the survey was taken 80 years earlier."
Being a scientist, technologist, engineer or mathematician (S.T.E.M. nerd), means you're versed and skilled in The Scientific Method. In a laboratory and workplace that reflects the diversity of humanity, that is the one unifying truth that must be adhered to to get work accomplished.
I am still waiting for a political debate where the questions are moderated by a S.T.E.M. panel. A true "no-spin zone." The answers and outcome would be, in Spock's words, "fascinating."
Any knowledge that undermines a personal faith, is in the end, no faith at all...
The Gated Community Mentality, NYT Opinion article by Richard Benjamin, author of “Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America”and a senior fellow at Demos, a nonpartisan research center
So, how far have we advanced since the '60s?
Comment: There will be more than enough work to do, if we're not short-sighted in how we prepare for it. There are more than enough problems to keep us busy, if we're not afraid solutions will disturb our personal dogmas. We cannot change the past, the only one sure thing we can determine is the future: ours, our country's and the world's.
The world may be in the midst of an economic downturn, yet that has not stopped scientists from planning a whole host of next-generation “big-science” facilities as well as governments pledging billions of euros to build them over the next 10–15 years.
From the ITER fusion experiment currently under construction in Cadarache, France, to the European Spallation Source in Lund, Sweden, the coming decade look to be a boon for researchers seeking new subatomic particles that exist for only a fraction of a second or studying events that occur on the femtosecond timescale.
Physics World: The Challenges of 'big science'; Big-Science Supplement
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| Credit: Physics World |
...and, it's NOT an "April Fool's" joke!
Researchers in Belgium have drawn up plans for an electronic "nanorefrigerator" device that is driven by high-energy photons, and so could potentially be directly powered by the Sun. The device consists of two electrodes, one of which is cooled by replacing hot electrons with cool ones via photon absorption. While this is definitely not the first system that applies the "cooling by heating" concept, it is the first that can be applied for a nanosized device, with no moving parts or electrical input, allowing a lower temperature to be achieved at the nanoscale.
Cooling with heat is not a new idea – the simplest description of the concept would be "sweating" or more scientifically evaporative cooling. While physicists have been using coherent laser light to cool gasses since the 1980s, a theoretical method for cooling a quantum system with noncoherent light, by using an "optomechanical device", was proposed only last year.
Physics World: 'Nanorefrigerator' is cooled using sunlight
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| Discover Magazine |
1 The median score for college-bound seniors on the math section of the SAT in 2011 is about 510 out of 800. So right there is proof that there are lots of unsolved math problems.
2 The great 19th-century mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss called his field “the queen of sciences.”
3 If math is a queen, she’s the White Queen from Alice in Wonderland, who bragged that she believed “as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” (No surprise that Lewis Carroll also wrote about plane algebraic geometry.)
4 For example, the Navier-Stokes equations are used all the time to approximate turbulent fluid flows around aircraft and in the bloodstream, but the math behind them still isn’t understood.
5 And the oddest bits of math often turn out to be useful. Quaternions, which can describe the rotation of 3-D objects, were discovered in 1843. They were considered beautiful but useless until 1985, when computer scientists applied them to rendering digital animation.
My favorite Calculus problem:
More at the link below:
Discover Magazine: 20 Things You Didn't Know About...Math
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| PhDComicsdotcom |
EURODOC: Recognising doctoral candidates as professional employees rather than students is one way of doing this. At the moment, only Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands give those working towards a PhD in Europe this status. For PhD candidates in these countries, their employee status benefits both them and their employer. The employee gets job benefits such as social security rights, access to personnel health care and internal internet systems (one candidate on a short term contractor we spoke to was not able to access the intranet because she was not a proper employee) while the employer gets a more productive and involved employee, who has a stake in the successful performance of the research institution. Treating PhDs as equals from the get-go means that further down the line, these highly motivated employees should be more likely to continue in research.
I'm sure postdocs with school bills would agree!
New Scientist Big Wide World: Make PhDs employees not students
SCIENCE MAG: The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Office of Naval Research are investing millions of dollars into so-called micro air vehicles and nano air vehicles, as well as basic research into how birds and insects fly. While the theory of airflow over a flapping wing remains surprisingly rudimentary, humans are now making significant progress in understanding how to fly, control, and land flapping-wing aircraft.
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| A MULTIFACETED PROBLEM: Realistically simulating the growth of snowflakes has proved a huge challenge. Above, two examples of faceted snowflake structures. Image: Barrett/Garcke/Nürnberg |
Scientists as far back as Johannes Kepler have pondered the mystery of snowflakes: Their formation requires subtle physics that to this day is not well understood. Even a small change in temperature or humidity can radically alter the shape and size of a snowflake, making it notoriously difficult to model these ice crystals on a computer. But after a flurry of attempts by several scientists, a team of mathematicians has for the first time succeeded in simulating a panoply of snowflake shapes using basic conservation laws, such as preserving the number of water molecules in the air.
Kind of late for this article, but it was a very mild winter in the northeast. To next winter:
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| 1000 Awesome Things |
Scientific American: Snowflake Growth Successfully Modeled from Physical Laws
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| Trimming uncertainty. Results of climate simulations that best match observations since 1960 (those depicted in darker shades of blue) suggest that global average temperature in 2050 will be between 1.4°C and 3°C warmer than the global average measured between 1961 and 1990. Credit: D. J. Rowlands et al., Nature Geoscience, Advanced Online Publication (25 March) |
By 2050, global average temperature could be between 1.4°C and 3°C warmer than it was just a couple of decades ago, according to a new study that seeks to address the largest sources of uncertainty in current climate models. That's substantially higher than estimates produced by other climate analyses, suggesting that Earth's climate could warm much more quickly than previously thought.
Many factors affect global and regional climate, including planet-warming "greenhouse" gases, solar activity, light-scattering atmospheric pollutants, and heat transfer among the land, sea, and air, to name just a few. There are so many influences to consider that it makes determining the effect of any one factor—despite years and sometimes decades of measurements—difficult.
The Internet as we know it: started as a project by the so-called, forewarned "military-industrial-complex" (DARPA). Think of a wagon wheel: most military communications for command, control, communications and countermeasures (C3CM*) had the headquarters element in the center, and/or two hours rear of the "forward edge of the battle area" (FEBA). Hence, we and the Soviets had a "hub-spoke" wagon wheel configuration to our [then] C3CM, thus finding out where ours or the Soviet's HQ was was a matter of espionage; nuking it out of existence presented...problems.
Away with hub-spoke! DARPA's solution was a "spider's web" where destroying one base had nothing to do with your overall communications. There would be an alternate route to get word to your battle field elements; you'd never be "radio silent" i.e. without communication. It started quite humble: big, bulky (and, ugly) Zenith computers on puke-green screens with the equivalent communication of what teens now do with their thumbs almost at a whim - texting. This, along with FORTRAN on key punched, computer index cards that you had to have in the right order, or you'd just be starting over (ugh - you can tell this used to be the source of engineering nightmares), I'm glad it is a part of our distant history.
The first commercial user sold to the public was Netscape as a browser, soon followed by AOL (yes, people still use it), followed by others...
Judging from the commentary at the foot of the article, the science is once again "poo-poohed" by loud opinions to the contrary. That will be picked up and broadcast as the "doubt" as in evolution in the classroom "teaching the controversy."
Senior Master Sergeant Roland S. Wilkins was one of my AFJROTC instructors at North Forsyth High School in Winston-Salem, NC. He was fond of a quote that at the time many of us couldn't quite understand. It's clearer now in the age of the Internet, blogs, tweets and sound bites cum "news":
"We're going to become 'so free,' we're not going to be able to do anything."
* Now: Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Intelligence - C4I.
AAAS Science Mag: Earth Warming Faster Than Expected
I’ve posted on this elsewhere: “Old Tapes”; “BWB”; “Self-Portrait.” I’ve changed my Facebook profile photo to Trayvon, and spoken with my sons. Let me explain:
In “Old Tapes,” I revisited an incident in which I was forcibly frisked by a store detective. He didn’t care if I had a microscope, a telescope, a tool kit, a chemistry set at home, physics and science books nor did he ask if I had a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. No, I was a suspect for shoplifting for merely combing my hair: guilty until proven innocent. “BWB” was an admittedly emotional response directly to the absurdity of a teenager losing his life over his dress, an iced tea and skittles; “Self-Portrait” was written earlier, but reflected the same concerns.
In Nanos Gigantium Humeris Insidentes, I did describe my background a bit, but not so the photo. I became Brigade Commander of Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools '79 - 80 on the negative answer to what I thought was a rhetorical question to the Commander for the ’76-77 school year: “what would it take for someone to rise to your rank?” His answer was specifically addressed (to my ethnicity and potential): “Your kind will NEVER get to this rank!” (Never) say never: the complete irony was he went in an enlisted, I an Air Force officer. We saw each other on active duty at Bergstrom Air Force Base in Austin, Texas. He had a Constitutional obligation to salute me.
Women and men of a certain age in my culture can trace back to when we lived in humble conditions on a segregated side of of our respective towns, I recall numerous times when the sight of drug dealers and runners; switch blades, kitchen hatchets (both directed at me) or guns threatened our lives. Despite these challenges, many of us went to college – HBCUs, Ivy League, Graduate Schools – and attained degrees for a better life. Our parents, and leaders of the Civil Rights movement (like my sister) inspired us to do this.
Tony Morrison said: "In this country American means white. Everyone else has to hyphenate." So, I am classed as African-American because Negro/Black wasn’t definitive enough for Malcolm X. As he went on his own pilgrimage of self-discovery to Mecca, he coined “Afro American,” founding the Organization of Afro American Unity (dissolved after his assassination). Reverend Jesse Jackson is credited as the source of “African-American,” since as a fellow engineering student from A and T pointed out: “there’s no such country as ‘Afro.’” And to be sure: Africa is a continent of 53 different nationalities, as diverse as this nation in cultures and ethnicity.
Yet, all this effort towards equity, to “pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps,” we as our parents must have “the talk” with our male sons, how to behave in public, how to talk to the police if stopped, how not to appear “a threat.” Yet, I still get quick looks when I get on an elevator, shifted purses, I must put others at ease; apologize when professionally embarrassed in email. Guilty until [I've] proven [myself] innocent...
I AM: the father of two statistics: The risk of dying from homicide among non-Hispanic black male teenagers (39.2 per 100,000 population) is more than twice that of Hispanic males (17.1 per 100,000 population) (Figure 4) and about 15 times that of non-Hispanic white males (2.6 per 100,000 population); at current levels of incarceration a black male in the United States today has greater than a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison during his lifetime, while a Hispanic male has a 1 in 6 chance and a white male has a 1 in 23 chance of serving time. That has nothing to do with their locale (suburbs); nothing to do with my education, their education or career choices. It is the aftermath of what historians tastefully describe as “the peculiar institution,” of the antebellum South, as with South Africa’s Apartheid, based on pigmentation, its wages and legacy. What happened to Trayvon is the unspoken nightmare; the uttered prayer each night, Psalms and Glossolalia. We do not have the luxury, or security to be blithely skeptic or agnostic. The slaughter of male children by Pharaoh and Herod are not biblical illustrations, but an evidential, everyday concern.
All I ask, all WE ask: is to be considered not as a threat, but for our potential.
Related links:
The story goes: Donald A. Glaser developed the idea for the bubble chamber - a means of tracking atomic particles (alpha, mu mesons) staring at a bottle of beer. Or, er several bottles of beer at the University of Michigan Student Union. If you're looking for the physicists... He mentions beer as well as Ginger Ale and soda (I guess he was "designated driver") in his Nobel Prize speech.
Now...it appears Beaujolais helps with superconductivity. Looks like they had several trials...
And, you thought physics was boring? Remember, soda for the DD's.
Physics arXiv: Red Wine, Tartaric Acid, and the Secret of Superconductivity
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| Good Technology |
la vengeance se mange très-bien froide, or "revenge is very good eaten cold." Khan Noonian Singh in Wrath of Khan quotes "revenge is a dish best served cold," is alas not from the Klingons, but the 1841 French novel Mathilde by Marie Joseph Eugène Sue (Wikipedia)
In the late 19th century, two competing electricity systems jostled for dominance in electric power distribution in the United States and much of the industrialized world. Alternating current (AC) and direct current (DC) were both used to power devices like motors and light bulbs, but they were not interchangeable.
A battle for the grid emerged from the Apple and Microsoft of the Gilded Age. Thomas Edison, who invented many devices that used DC power, developed the first power transmission systems using this standard. Meanwhile, AC was pushed by George Westinghouse and several European companies that used Nikola Tesla's inventions to step up current to higher voltages, making it easier to transmit power over long distances using thinner and cheaper wires.
The rivalry was fraught with acrimony and publicity stunts -- like Edison electrocuting an elephant to show AC was dangerous -- but AC eventually won out as the standard for transmission, reigning for more than a century.
When we visited the Architectural Engineering Department at North Carolina A and T, Dr. Singh (absolutely no relation to Ricardo Montaban's fictional character, but an interesting aside), spoke to my son of "off-grid" buildings, self-sufficient and generating their own power. I see this as a part of the effort towards energy independency.
However, It is my sincerely hope that no elephant is injured in this latest incarnation of DC power.
Scientific American: Edison's Revenge - Will DC Make a Comeback in the US?
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| Technovelgydotcom |
The ESPER machine in the Sci-Fi Blade Runner allowed bounty hunter Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) to see around corners in search of his prey (replicants). Dutiful as we Sci-Fi fans tend to be, we suspend belief subconsciously to both enjoy the movie and help the plot along.
Until.
Bats, whales and dolphins (and, some very adept humans) use a sonar form of this: echolocation, where most likely, the sonar images are not exact or precise, but each group has enough experience to know friend from foe.
Gizmag: MIT researchers create camera that can see around corners
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| NIST Photo |
In our bodies, an electrolyte "any substance containing free ions that make the substance electrically conductive." (Wikipedia) Our muscles and neurons respond to this when we replenish it with a solution that has a salt like sodium, potassium, calcuim, magnesium (ibid). It made the University of Florida famous (Gatorade), and most likely quite wealthy.
It turns out you can be too thin—especially if you’re a nanoscale battery. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Maryland, College Park, and Sandia National Laboratories built a series of nanowire batteries to demonstrate that the thickness of the electrolyte layer can dramatically affect the performance of the battery, effectively setting a lower limit to the size of the tiny power sources.* The results are important because battery size and performance are key to the development of autonomous MEMS—microelectromechanical machines—which have potentially revolutionary applications in a wide range of fields.
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| Starts With a Bang! |
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| Ars Technica - link below |
A new experiment involving a graphene-like material has shown that it's possible to perform some spectacular manipulations of the properties of these quasiparticles. The work is described in a Nature letter by Kenjiro Gomes, Warren Mar, Wonhee Ko, Francisco Guinea, and Hari C. Manoharan. The team arranged carbon monoxide molecules to form the same hexagonal pattern found in graphene, except that they could change the spacing slightly.
This produced an environment where the material's electrons behave remarkably like relativistic particles, with a "speed of light" that they can adjust. Additionally, the researchers could change the spacing between molecules in a way that the masses of the quasiparticles changed, or cause them to behave as though they are interacting with electric and magnetic fields—without actually applying those fields to the material. This setup will potentially help us explore new physics that may arise in these environments.
Wikipedia: Higgs mechanism
Ars Technica: Researchers mimic relativity and the Higgs field in graphene-like material
