Science News

The paper is in Nature. I suppose some of you have heard of this as a theoretical possibility; I had not, and am dumfounded.

Once they teach it to pick and pickle peppers, it can be named Peter Piper. Devices such as these are needed because farm labor is in some places not affordable or not available, and robots should eventually make more fruits and vegetables available at affordable prices. Eventually, a Peter Piper Personal can care for a home owner's garden.

A test drilling site for shale gas near Banks on the outskirts of Southport, Lancashire. Photograph: Ashley Cooper Corbis The UK’s priority should be to develop a low-carbon energy mix, while encouraging growth from those industries. In May this year, academics from Washington State University published research confirming a long-held suspicion: being loud and confident is a more effective way to win an argument than being right. The researchers assiduously mined their data from more than 1bn Tweets, but a quick look at the increasingly polarised debate about shale gas in the UK might have saved them some time. For a significant number of climate-sceptic Tories and rig…

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-quantum-physics/ They present a pretty interesting hypothesis.

This news reports only on two glaciers and one location each. Hopefully these locations were poor choices to take samples.

http://gizmodo.com/the-aluminum-airship-of-the-future-has-finally-flown-1301320903 Cool new airship, flies on hover fans and transport materials to places no other aircraft can go,

http://www.livescience.com/39577-insects-with-leg-gears-discovered.html Just goes to show many of man's inventions are inspired by the mechanisms of nature.

Thanks to AJB from whom I discovered the link, the list of the winning entries of the past years is very instructive. http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/ I liked especially the 2011 mathematics prize Although this is not for laugh. I missed the prize for all those who predicted the end of the world in 2000 and 2012.

Well, I finally found some good news regarding my theory of temporal uniformity. It looks like "Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada" has done all the hard work for me. Although I relate time as being a result of ordinary motion, the model proposed seems to be the concept I was trying to model. There are a few discrepancies, but Niayesh Afshordi is refining his model. Of course, this doesn't give credence to my theory, but it's finally nice to have someone professionally working on it However, it does sadden me a little bit knowing the mathematics has been structured beyond what I have don…

So Australia goes to the polls tomorrow to elect a new federal government. The opposition released their budget plans 48 hours before the election including this gem: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/abbott-vows-to-cut-futile-research/story-fni0cx12-1226710934260 A play straight out of the far right GOP playbook: http://news.sciencemag.org/2013/04/u.s.-lawmaker-proposes-new-criteria-choosing-nsf-grants As a natural born Australian working as a scientist overseas, this is horrifying. Firstly, the ARC has a rigorous peer review system which awards less than 25% of grants. So what our opposition leader is saying is that not only does he not trust the…

This bioengineered bacterium is actually pretty cool, and has many practical applications. The most beneficial, of course, is the ability to fight disease, but we could also see bio-weapons being made with such a technique.

Governments need to enact laws or regulations that will clean up soot emissions in the arctic.

This article emphasises more the succusses of MOND gravity rather than the failures of dark matter to pridict observed reality concerning stellar movements in dwarf gallaxies. The bigger news, however, may be the lack of predictive power concerning the dark matter hypothesis. I think such successes and failures may imply that the dark matter hypothesis is more a retrodictive system than a predictive one, while at least in these cases the MOND hypothesis made accurate predictions. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/cwru-mpd082813.php

If you are younger than 28, you have not known a normal global July temperature.

A possible new type of dark matter, sounds more than a bit like Mirror Matter to me. http://www.space.com/21508-dark-matter-atoms-disks.html?cmpid=514630 Mirror Matter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_matter I've communicated several times with a leading proponent of Mirror Matter, Robert Foot, about ways to collect Mirror Matter that has fallen to Earth, the ease of detection depends on parameters that have yet to established but it is possible that Mirror Matter space dust falls to earth and could be found under certain circumstances.

How can anything avoid being eaten for that long? They live in rock, which must help longevity, but they are surrounded by up to 10x viruses per bacteria. They must be immune to the viruses, or have a symbiotic relationship. Will we find similar life on asteroids?

Unusual weather caused flooding in Australia in 2010 and 2011, and the water was soaked up by the dry soil. As a result, the sea level dropped a bit, but since then it has continued to rise by 10 mm (0.4 inches) a year, which is an increase from rising 0.13 inches per year previously.

NASA's Chandra catches our galaxy's giant black hole rejecting food. http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/08/29/nasas.chandra.catches.our.galaxys.giant.black.hole.rejecting.food http://arxiv.org/abs/1307.5845 We may not understand galactic black holes nearly as well as we think we do. The link above indicates that a galactic black hole may reject up to 90% of the matter within its grasp and instead can reject and/or jettison it away from itself rather than pulling it in. This finding could better explain the reasons and behaviors of the huge sizes of galactic jets and large matter clouds moving away from the galctic center instead of towards it.

how would you make a use of it? http://www.livescience.com/38294-3d-printing-in-china.html

We may all be Martians http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-08/eaog-wma082613.php This is not the first such proposal concerning "Earth-life" first evolving on Mars. The possibility is very speculative, but interesting none the less. Because the first life on Earth was probably very delicate there may be no remnants or fossils left on Earth. But the first microbial DNA life that we know of was very complicated and it may have taken longer than just a few hundred million years for it to have evolved, as in the present Earth primordial soup hypothesis. If so the Mars-First hypothesis might provide maybe another few hundred million years for the first evo…

Researchers, Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, from the University of Washington have performed the first noinvasive human-to-human brain interface. Here is the video they produced demonstrating their experiment. However, it's hard to tell what is actually going on. Nevertheless, it is still pretty cool!

The Open Computing Project is a resource for computer room managers and administrators. It is a source of information for anyone who wishes to learn about computer room management, redundant servers, and related hardware.

I bet CIA saliva is flowing over this juicy tidbit, and I expect a movie will soon appear with a similar, future, hand held technology being used to interrogate terrorists, criminal suspects, or (stealth version) political rivals. Soon someone will report aliens are scanning our brains from orbit, they no longer need to abduct a person for examination.

I hope sales of the Elio account for more fuel saved than used by this jet-pack. Years ago, kids built cars for the Soap Box Derby, which were cars without an engine that ran a downhill race. The race encouraged entrants to engineer a fast car, learn to use tools and quality workmanship. In those days people liked a quiet walk down a friendly lane in the evening, watching the sun set and day become night. They also watched the weather and stars, and some kept a garden. My mother had a cow she liked to milk. She made butter and sold some of it to the neighbors. Mom mixed that milk with sugar, vanilla, and fruit, and I turned a crank on an ice cream maker---it was the b…