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My new book, "Ruins of the Fall: Tree of Might" is out!!!

Posted by Russell A. Mebane on November 24, 2015 at 11:19am

I would like to thank everyone here at Black Science Fiction Society for all the help they've offered and given me.  A couple ideas for this book came from science articles I found on this site.  It's been a great two-year journey!  This book is the first part of a trilogy, and it should be highly controversial.  It's out on Kindle only, and is available for lending. 

Thanks again, everybody!

God bless...

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Short Story Vending Machine Solves All Fiction-On-The-Go Problems

Posted by William Hayashi on November 24, 2015 at 11:57am

It's a familiar scene: You're waiting for a train, or for a chronically late friend. Bored, you reach for your phone to pull up Twitter -- but you left your phone at home, or the battery's dead. You stare about, panicked, desperate for something stimulating to occupy the next few seemingly endless minutes. Billboards to read? A couple making out to ogle? Anything!

Click here for the full story

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Suicide Squad Trailer

Posted by Carles CJ Juzang on November 19, 2015 at 8:00am

We will see if DC has what it takes with characters outside of the Bat and Soops. Suicide Squad looks dark and procative but I am not sure the addition of Will Smith, Viola Davis Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje or Jared Leto's version of the Joker will make this a success. YOUR Thoughts and Feedback BSFS?

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Sole Power...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 20, 2015 at 7:54am
Image GIF source: MIT Technology Review


Topics: Economy, Jobs, Materials Science, Metamaterials, STEM


Considering the obesity rate in the country and the FitBit craze, this could be a win-win for all of us.

Children have been harnessing energy from their steps ever since 1992, when L.A. Gear introduced sneakers that light up. For most adults, however, the ambient energy created by the simple act of walking is forever lost. Considering that the average person takes around 216 million steps in a lifetime, it’s a significant waste.

Inventor Laurence Kemball-Cook hopes to harness the lost energy at two points of contact: the shoe and the floor. In 2009, Kemball-Cook founded Pavegen, a company whose floor tiles can capture the power of footsteps. The technology uses compression to skim a tiny fraction of the energy created when a human steps on the tile. It’s been installed in more than 100 projects around the world, including a football stadium in Rio de Janeiro and a terminal in Heathrow Airport. The energy is stored in batteries inside the tiles, where it can then be used to power lighting, advertisements, and way-finding solutions, which guide people through an environment via directional arrows.

Now Kemball-Cook and his R&D team have turned their attention to the shoe itself, hoping to apply the same principles used in the tiles as a way to harness personal energy. “The idea is that the energy source would be readily available to the shoe wearer,” explains Kemball-Cook, who has been in discussions with major footwear manufacturers such as Nike and Reebok about ways the technology could be incorporated into consumer products. “You could walk from work and charge your phone en route instead of waiting to use a charger at home. Runners could charge their music players during a jog.”

MIT Technology Review: The Quest to Make Your Shoe a Power Source, Simon Parkin
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Musing Crichton...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 18, 2015 at 10:51am
Star Trek Wiki Memory Alpha: Nanite

Topics: Diversity in Science, Nanotechnology, Philosophy, Science Fiction, Star Trek, Women in Science

From Physics Database:

Dr. Amanda Barnard is an Office of the Chief Executive (OCE) Science leader, and head of the Virtual Nanoscience Laboratory at CSIRO. She received her PhD in 2003, followed by a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory (USA), and the prestigious senior research position as Violette & Samuel Glasstone Fellow at the University of Oxford (UK) with an Extraordinary Research Fellowship at The Queen’s College.

In this talk Dr Amanda Barnard will take us through the latest advances in nanotechnology and answer the fantastic question: ‘Are nanoparticles alive?’ In the world of science fiction, nanotechnology is often shown as swarms of micro-machines that act without the need for human supervision. Much like their biological counterparts, these imagined devices even sometimes possess their own intelligence. The imagination of science fiction writers has taken this high tech fantasy beyond the reality. But scientists have imagination too, and increasingly they are taking nanomaterials to remarkable places with properties that sound stranger than fiction.
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Power To Pluto...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 16, 2015 at 10:31am
Image Source: Wired


Topics: Electrical Engineering, Humor, Planetary Science, Space Exploration


This was a rather tongue-in-cheek article, I say that because all solutions point to the company web site and the products it produces or allegedly can produce. It does raise the issue of interplanetary and interstellar travel: charging your cell phone for selfies is kinda low on the scale of concerns once you fly beyond the "Goldilocks Zone" we currently inhabit. Like "The Martian," you're probably going to have to subsist on a lot of veggies even if you didn't like them as a kid since a burger and fries would be well...several billion miles away!

Imagine this. You have just parked your private space ship on Pluto, intrigued by all the recent NASA photos of the not-a-planet small wannabe-could-be-planet, and you realize your cell phone is on its last legs. Power-wise, that is. Not because you skipped the last two upgrades.

What to do? For sure, here on Pluto, a zillion miles away from the sun, rigging up some sort of solar screen recharger thing is out of the question. Not that you can't do that and not because it wouldn't work (eventually) but because you need power fast. There are Pluto selfies to take and tweets to be tweeted.

Mouser Electronics: Portable Power: Especially Useful on Pluto, Arden Henderson

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Wearable Biosensors...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 17, 2015 at 7:31pm
A conformally contacted device on an artificial eye for glucose sensing in tears. Courtesy: YS Rim


Topics: Materials Science, Optical Physics, Semiconductor Technology, Nanotechnology, Thin Films

Okay, I have to admit: the bionic eye freaked me out. I'm trying to get used to it...


Researchers at the California NanoSystems Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles, have developed ultrathin, flexible, metal oxide semiconducting thin films for use in wearable or implantable biosensors. The devices, which are made using a straightforward printing technique, could be used as sensors in non-invasive health monitoring applications like smart contact lenses that monitor a person’s glucose levels, for example.

Nanotechweb: Metal oxide thin films make wearable biosensors

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I will be featured in "Curse of the Tomb Seekers"!

Posted by Brandon Scott Pilcher on November 15, 2015 at 7:01am

On December 1st this year, Zimbell Publishing will release their new anthology Curse of the Tomb Seekers, which has an ancient Egyptian theme.

Disturbing the resting places of the Pharaoh’s was thought to bring down plagues and curses upon those that dared.  The Book of the Dead and other artifacts are coveted by historians and archeologists alike.  Untold treasures tempt the seekers to defy the ancient Gods.  Never in any other region of the world has there been such desire to disturb the Dead as in the once mighty Egypt.

And I am most pleased to inform you guys that yours truly is among their contributors! My story will be titled "The Gold Tusks of Ekhaptu", and it will be about a traveler to the ruins who discovers a shocking secret about the people who built it.

You can pre-order the anthology now on Zimbell's official page (see the link about) or Amazon.com.

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Knowing Knowledge...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 13, 2015 at 8:59pm
Image Source: Scientific American, Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy, Shaun Lawrence Otto, October 16, 2012, see "trinity of three greatest men" link below.


Topics: Commentary, Science, SETI, STEM, Research


Science: 1 a : an area of knowledge that is an object of study b : something (as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like a science  c : any of the natural sciences (as biology, physics, or chemistry) Middle English science "the state of knowing, knowledge," from early French science (same meaning), from Latin scientia (same meaning)

Recently, there's been buzz on the Internet about a so-called mega structure (i.e. a Dyson Sphere) seen 1,500 light years away around its star. Related somewhat, astrophysicist Sara Seager thinks she can detect life on exoplanets by examining the spectrum of sodium (see BBC link below).

The quintessential question is - for any science discipline, from astronomy, biology, climate science and physics: how do scientists "know"?

They know first by sheer practice and enthusiasm. Everyone in STEM can recount the very instance that made such an impression on them that they decided to pursue a path to search the unknown - that labeled them "nerd"; weird and steeled their resolves against the tide of conformity. They studied all subjects with equal vigor, but particularly the science subjects. It formed a culture and a value system. Nerd went from epithet to web sites, social media forums; blerds, blogs and t-shirts.

They know by observation, forming hypothesis, doing experiments; rigorously defending and refuting positions...it sounds a lot like democracy, or at least how Thomas Jefferson envisioned it on the foundation of his "trinity of three greatest men." If knowing knowledge is thesis, then it's antithesis is prideful, unknowing ignorance.

Scientists and engineers will know knowledge, test it, debate it; refute it. They will confirm an ancient civilization that existed in our past...or, not. They have consensus on climate change, not conspiracy. I'm sure they would rather be wrong. They have a vested interest beyond an elaborate Ponzi scheme: their families. Some legacies have far more value than money.

Pseudoscience differs from erroneous science. Science thrives on errors, cutting away one by one. False conclusions are drawn all the time, but they are drawn tentatively. Hypotheses are framed so they are capable of being disproved. A succession of alternative hypotheses is confronted by experiment and observation. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. Proprietary feelings are of course offended when a scientific hypothesis is disproved, but such disproofs are recognized as central to the scientific enterprise.

Pseudoscience is just the opposite. Hypotheses are often framed precisely so they are invulnerable to any experiment that offers a prospect of disproof, so even in principle they cannot be invalidated. Practitioners are defensive and wary. Skeptical scrutiny is opposed. When the pseudoscientific hypothesis fails to catch fire with scientists, conspiracies to suppress it are deduced.

“I would rather have questions I can’t answer, than answers I can’t question.” Richard Feynman

BBC Future: If alien life exists on exoplanets, how would we know?
Mouser Electronics: The Truth Is Still Out There. And We’re Still Looking, Barry Manz

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Hacking Photosynthesis...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 12, 2015 at 7:05am
Image Source: Teacher's Guide to Photosynthesis


Topics: Alternative Energy, Biology, Green Energy, Photosynthesis


See previous post this year Mimicking Nature. I derived the title of the post from a supporting link to the article below suggesting that scientist had "hacked photosynthesis" and I thought it catchy. The fact that Argonne National Laboratory, Australian researchers (see link in the article) and now Florida State University have achieved this is exciting. What will be interesting are the moneyed interests that will ally against this advancement and sadly, throw lobbyists and dollars towards our elected officials to delay or squash it totally. Our economy is tied to commerce, but in essence this would be like [paraphrased] "living in the canopy, and burning down the forest." *

* Source: "Predator Nation," Charles H. Ferguson, chapter 1: "Where We Are Now."
Image Source: Biology Notes for IGCSE

It’s one of the holy grails of scientific research: discovering a way of replicating the natural process of photosynthesis, such that light could be easily converted into energy for other purposes, just like a plant does. And now researchers in the US have discovered an artificial material that lets them mimic this system to create a clean, sustainable source of power.

Researchers at Florida State University have discovered a method of using manganese oxide – also known as birnessite – to capture sunlight and then use that solar energy to create an oxidation reaction, breaking down water (H2O) into hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O2). Oxidation occurs during photosynthesis, and by replicating this part of the natural process, we might be able to produce energy in new ways via a simple, practical mechanism.

Science Alert:
New artificial material mimics photosynthesis to create clean, self-sustaining energy source
Peter Dockrill

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Tomato, to-MA-to...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 10, 2015 at 8:05pm
©iStock.com


Topics: High Energy Physics, Particle Physics, Theoretical Physics


What’s the difference between matter and antimatter? Sometimes nothing, a new study finds.

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) discovered that antimatter protons, called antiprotons, act just like their ordinary-matter cousins when they are close enough to interact via the so-called strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together into atomic nuclei.

Antimatter is essentially the opposite of matter, in which the subatomic particles (protons and electrons) of antimatter have charges opposite to those of ordinary matter. In an ordinary block of stuff, for instance, the protons are positively charged, and the electrons carry negative charges. In antimatter, the antiprotons are negatively charged, while the antielectrons (called positrons) are positively charged. When antimatter and matter touch, they annihilate each other and produce energy in the form of gamma radiation.

Scientific American:
Antimatter Protons Stick Together Just Like Normal Particles
Jesse Emspak and LiveScience

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Beauty...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 9, 2015 at 7:29pm
Image Source: NIST

Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Lasers, Materials Science, Metamaterials, Quantum Mechanics

Physicists at JILA have made their "quantum crystal" of ultracold molecules more valuable than ever by packing about five times more molecules into it. The denser crystal will help scientists unlock the secrets of magnets and other, more exotic materials.

The crystal is actually a gas of particles trapped in 3-D formation by laser beams. The trap, called an optical lattice, has wells—local regions of low energy—like an egg carton made of light. The researchers maneuvered a single molecule into each well, successfully filling about 25 percent of the crystal. The structure has an advantage over a real crystal, as it is made of scientifically interesting molecules that normally would not crystallize.

Described in the Nov. 6, 2015, issue of Science,* the JILA crystal is useful for studying correlations among the molecules' "spins," or rotations, a quantum behavior related to magnetism. The denser crystal will enable scientists to study and model complex effects such as how spin correlations or entanglement—a quantum link between the properties of separated particles—spread through a large system. Scientists might use these effects, for example, to make novel materials for electronics or other applications.

NIST:
It’s a Beauty: JILA’s Quantum Crystal is Now More Valuable, Laura Ost

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Squeezed Light and Qumodes...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 4, 2015 at 7:00am
Image Source: Technology Review


Topics: Computer Science, Modern Physics, Quantum Computer, Quantum Mechanics


TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The world’s fastest computer is the Tianhe-2 supercomputer at National Super Computer Center in Guangzhou, China. It consists of 16,000 computer nodes, each with two Intel Ivy Bridge Xeon processors and three Xeon Phi coprocessor. Together these make it capable of 33.86 quadrillion floating point calculations per second, more than any other computing machine on the planet.

Clearly, the resources available to carry out a calculation are the crucial factor in its performance, and the number of calculations per second is a good guide to a computer’s power.

But quantifying the power of a quantum computer is much harder. These computing devices can perform calculations that are beyond the ken of ordinary processing machines. And yet the resources they require to do this trick are poorly understood.

Abstract


Although quantum computers are capable of solving problems like factoring exponentially faster than the best-known classical algorithms, determining the resources responsible for their computational power remains unclear. An important class of problems where quantum computers possess an advantage is phase estimation, which includes applications like factoring. We introduce a new computational model based on a single squeezed state resource that can perform phase estimation, which we call the power of one qumode. This model is inspired by an interesting computational model known as deterministic quantum computing with one quantum bit (DQC1). Using the power of one qumode, we identify that the amount of squeezing is sufficient to quantify the resource requirements of different computational problems based on phase estimation. In particular, it establishes a quantitative relationship between the resources required for factoring and DQC1. For example, we find the squeezing required to factor has an exponential scaling whereas no squeezing (i.e., a coherent state) is already sufficient to solve the hardest problem in DQC1.

Physics arXiv: The power of one qumode
Nana Liu, Jayne Thompson, Christian Weedbrook, Seth Lloyd, Vlatko Vedral, Mile Gu, Kavan Modi

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Sacred Cows...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 6, 2015 at 7:32am
From "The Demon Haunted World"; more at Good Reads


Topics: #Commentary, Carl Sagan, Philosophy, Research


This is a very good article about the duality humans express, such as: we really LIKE our tech; we just hate what the science behind the tech points to...or, points away from.

Galileo was branded a heretic by the church for daring to say the Earth revolved around the sun, versus the now understood accepted observation. There's still a Flat Earth Society, and people who long for "the good old days," that coincide with their youth and for many, an understood; un-breached and unquestioned social status and strata. It explains - at least to me - why we can be vulnerable to pseudoscience and the flimflam artist: s/he tells us what we wish to hear about a world we wish to bend to our wills.

There would have to be some wholesale, necessary-for-survival shift as a species from intuition to a rational, logic-based viewpoint. As sophisticated as we like to think of ourselves, we're really primitives by nature; tribal at heart, bending the world to our own view of right and wrong to bow at the altars of our sacred cows...

For over three decades, researchers in the fields of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, and science education have been studying the dynamics of conceptual change. They have been characterizing what we intuitively know about different domains, how that knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, and how that knowledge changes with instruction, either formal instruction in the classroom or informal instruction at home or elsewhere (e.g., museums, libraries, parks). While different researchers have analyzed conceptual change in different ways, most would agree that conceptual change requires a basic restructuring of one’s intuitive knowledge. That restructuring could involve collapsing distinctions that are no longer meaningful on a scientific conception of the domain (e.g., collapsing the distinction between objects in motion and objects at rest), introducing new distinctions that are scientifically meaningful (e.g., making a distinction between weight and mass), or moving an entity from one mental category to another (e.g., shifting the entity air from the category empty space to the category matter). Accumulating new facts and new experiences is not sufficient to bring about conceptual change; one must instead reorganize the very nature of one’s understanding.

Because conceptual change requires knowledge restructuring, it has long been assumed that, once the restructuring was complete, one’s initial conceptions of the domain would no longer be accessible. Restructuring one’s knowledge was assumed to erase previously held intuitions in the same way that remodeling one’s house erases previously navigated floor plans. A growing body of research, however, suggests that conceptual change does not produce this result. Rather, conceptual change appears to produce dual modes of understanding: a new scientific understanding of the domain and an older, more intuitive understanding of the domain that coexists with, but is not replaced by, the scientific understanding. Put differently, adults with extensive science education appear to harbor intuitions that they had explicitly rejected many years prior—intuitions like “whales are fish,” “coats produce heat,” “the wind is alive,” “air has no weight,” “heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects,” and “the sun revolves around the earth.” In some cases, these intuitions had previously been documented only among preschool-aged children, but, with the application of new methodologies, they are now being documented among scientifically literate adults as well.

Skeptic.com:
SCIENCE V. INTUITION: Why is it Difficult for Scientific Knowledge to Take Root?
Andrew Shtulman

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The Q Continuum...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 5, 2015 at 7:19am
Image Source: Argonne National Laboratory


Topics: Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Physics Humor, Star Trek, Theoretical Physics, Quantum Cosmology

This is the title of the original post, I kid you not! There are apparently a few Trekkies at Argonne National Lab...\\//_


Researchers are sifting through an avalanche of data produced by one of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed, led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory.

The simulation, run on the Titan supercomputer at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modeled the evolution of the universe from just 50 million years after the Big Bang to the present day — from its earliest infancy to its current adulthood. Over the course of 13.8 billion years, the matter in the universe clumped together to form galaxies, stars, and planets; but we’re not sure precisely how.

These kinds of simulations help scientists understand dark energy, a form of energy that affects the expansion rate of the universe, including the distribution of galaxies, composed of ordinary matter, as well as dark matter, a mysterious kind of matter that no instrument has directly measured so far.

Argonne National Laboratory:
Researchers model birth of universe in one of largest cosmological simulations ever run
Louise Lerner

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Quantum Tunneling Between Nanowires...

Posted by Reginald L. Goodwin on November 3, 2015 at 8:03am
Figure 1, see link below

Topics: Condensed Matter Physics, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Technology, Solid State Physics, Quantum Mechanics

Abstract


We theoretically investigate the electronic transport properties of two closely spaced L-shaped semiconductor quantum wires, for different configurations of the output channel widths as well as the distance between the wires. Within the effective-mass approximation, we solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation using the split-operator technique that allows us to calculate the transmission probability, the total probability current, the conductance, and the wave function scattering between the energy subbands. We determine the maximum distance between the quantum wires below which a relevant non-zero transmission is still found. The transmission probability and the conductance show a strong dependence on the width of the output channel for small distances between the wires.

Journal of Applied Physics: Quantum tunneling between bent semiconductor nanowires
A. A. Sousa, Andrey Chaves, T. A. S. Pereira, G. A. Farias and F. M. Peeters

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