Science News

It appears the first animals may have had more influence on the oxy levels in the ocean than once thought. By removing organic particles from the ocean, sponges and other filter feeders removed a drain on the oxygen in the ocean allowing oxygen levels to rise and allow for more complex animals to evolve. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140309150540.htm

Emphasis mine. This news means switch to a vegan diet. Information I've been studying indicates there is more bad news about eating meat than this study indicates. If you really try to switch, don't rush it. If it takes a year or ten years to switch complete, it is better than not switching.

I have log been a bit of a fan boy of the idea that the virus may have a more profound role in the operation of living system and evolution. Many ideas have swirled around the virus and proposed roles in life, the RNA world, and various other hypothesis. This article suggests that giant viruses could have been involved in the addition of nuclei to cells and perhaps a role in the change from the RNA world to our current DNA world. http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/39244/title/Viruses-Reconsidered/

Craig Venter has just announced a new company. Human Longevity Inc. that proposes to sequence 40,000 human genomes a year and scale to 100,000 a year to produce the worlds largest human genotype/phenotype database to address issues of aging related diseases. The scale of proposing this amount of data will be insane. Typical GWAS studies have a few thousand genotyped individuals. With this many whole genome sequences, the ability to do association analysis and fine mapping will be incredible. The real question is how the hell they will analyze so much data.

Has anyone heard the buzz around "Bionic brain?" creating totally realistic A.I. that could pass a Turing test? I personally believe the first country to have this technology will bring the next revolution (i.e. like the Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution etc) Think about it, any desk bound job could potentially be replaced by computer. Thoughts?

I hope Armando Solar-Lezama solves this problem, because it could make a big difference in program development times. However, I don't know if a single person can do it. I think the problem might be better done with a DARPA challenge. There are some problems that can be solved by applying standard scientific formulas, such as F=ma and E=mc2, However, most programming problems depend on the context of things like tax-laws, industry procedures, and corporate environment. Some are static, like F=ma, but some are fluid and change over time, depending on customer preferences, for example. Thus, code needs to be captured in an information base that can be searched quickly, …

Additive 3D printers for plastic, concrete, and common metals, subtractive printers (mills and other cutters) for many materials, and robot assemblers both stationary arms and mobile robots are available. The era in which these machines will be programmed to make themselves is coming soon. Cars and other vehicles can drive themselves, which means earth moving for mining, road building, and site preparation can be done without drivers. A few people will design sites and oversee the machinery, but work that has been done for centuries by labor forces will be displaced by machinery. One really good thing that will occur is people will not need to drive to work, use of o…

This technology needs to be tuned for use in various temperatures, but promises to be very useful.

Found a neat paper about how tawny crazy ants (Nylanderia fulva) are able to take on and displace the aggressive fire ants (Solenopsis invicta). Apparently crazy ants somehow use formic acid that they produce themselves to somehow detoxify the strong venom produced by fire ants. While the crazy ants are now starting to displace the fire ants in the US, the arms race between those two species probably originated in South America where there habitats are overlapping. Article

The article from Nature http://www.nature.com/news/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-1.14583 No comment, simply for info.

The earliest star in the Universe belongs to our galaxy. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2014/researchers-identify-one-of-the-earliest-stars-in-the-universe-0209.html SMSS J031300.36-670839.3. No comment, for info only.

Most of the universe was the right temperature for life to exist about 10 Billion years ago, regardless of whether a planet or moon is in the Goldilocks zone, as long as it is not too close to a star that it remains too hot.

Our quantum reality problem When the deepest theory we have seems to undermine science itself, some kind of collapse looks inevitable by Adrian Kent 6,400 words Read later or Kindle http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/78802-if-i-can-imagine-it-it-is-possible/#entry789486

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/now_we_can_see_if_cat_alive_or_dead_peeking_inside_schrodingers_box-128037 Now We Can See If That Cat Is Alive Or Dead: Peeking Inside Schrodinger's Box Direct measurements consists of two types of measurements performed one after the other, first a "weak" measurement followed by a "strong" measurement. In quantum mechanics the act of measuring a quantum state disturbs it irreversibly, a phenomenon referred to as collapse of the wave-function. The trick lies with the first measurement being so gentle that it only slightly disturbs the system and does not cause the wave-function to collapse. "It is sort of like peeking int…

http://www.livescience.com/42791-supernova-star-explosion-amateur-photos.html?cmpid=514627_20140124_17471054 New supernova in the sky The supernova was first observed Tuesday (Jan. 21) at 7:20 p.m. local time (19:20 UTC) by a group of students led by Steve Fossey at the University College London. "It was a surreal and exciting experience taking images of the unidentified object as Steve ran around the observatory verifying the result," UCL student Guy Pollack said in a statement. The only closer star explosion in the last three decades was Supernova 1987A, which was spotted in February 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy companion of the Milky…

http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/scientists-accidentally-capture-ball-lightning-proving-it-to-be-a-true-natural-phenomena-not-an-optical-illusion/story-fn5fsgyc-1226806565419 EDIT: I forgot to include my input on this topic. I think it is quite interesting how science can be seen as constantly improving as sometimes we begin to realize that there is a difference between fact and truth. Truths are always facts, but facts are not always truths.

Only 12 M LY away. Just reported this morning, so not a lot of in-depth stories out yet. Add links when they appear. I posted a link to the report and a picture on my blog http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/14585

Ideas on dark matter structure as webs looking good http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25809967

A triple system with millisecond pulsar has been found and studied which has the potential to provide new observation data that will strongly test the so far unblemished predictive power of General Relativity in the Cosmological Realm and may even cast into doubt some of the core assumptions. The Strong Equivalence Principle can be read about here in wikipedia or here in Living Reviews In Relativity My layman's reading is that conditions are such that the tiniest flaws in GR ( ie GR's equivalent of the precession of mercury) which we are certain will be manifest in the very very small (ie at the borders of quantum mechanics) will actually be observable here in th…

http://www.space.com/24207-dark-energy-galaxy-map-aas223.html The new results, presented by Schlegel and his colleagues here today (Jan. 8) at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, also provide one of the best-ever determinations of the curvature of space, researchers said. In short, the universe appears to be quite "flat," meaning that its shape can be described well by Euclidean geometry, in which straight lines are parallel and the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees. "One of the reasons we care is that a flat universe has implications for whether the universe is infinite," Schlegel said. "That means — while we can't say with certainty …

University students searched social media for signs of time travelers by looking for mentions of two subjects before they happened... http://www.space.com/24232-time-travelers-social-media-aass223.html?cmpid=556082

http://www.space.com/24288-strange-metal-asteroid-psyche-nasa-mission.html?cmpid=556375#sthash.RtEDlAkI.dpuf One of the strangest objects in the solar system may get its first close-up in the coming years. A team of scientists is mapping out a mission to the huge metallic asteroid Psyche, which is thought to be the exposed iron core of a battered and stripped protoplanet. The proposed mission would reveal insights about planet formation processes and the early days of the solar system, its designers say, and would also afford the first-ever good look at an odd class of celestial objects. "This is the first metal world humankind will have ever seen," team member L…

Microbes shed blobs of DNA into the worlds oceans, this could shed light on how DNA is swapped between microbes... http://www.livescience.com/42452-ocean-bacterial-buds.html?cmpid=556100

Interesting Article: Learning drugs reawaken grown-up brain's inner child See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-reawaken-grownup-brains-inner-child.html It would be great if the creativity and perspective of a child could be restored to older people. Seeing the world through the eyes of a child could be beneficial in helping one to realize their artistic aspirations. And I wonder if such "learning drugs" might also help one in other fields, like doing mathematics.