Science News

The "Shikhaev-Anokhin method", a mathematical discovery made by academician of the Moscow Aviation Institute, Kirill Shikhaev, was nominated for the Prince of Asturias Awards. Prince of Asturias Awards are annual prizes including a range of categories, of which "Technical and scientific research" is one of the most prestigious in the world. The authors of «Shikhaev-Anokhin teaching method for solving algebraic and undefined equations by numerical simulation on the basis of single equation solver» were nominated for the prize by the President of the Russian Academy of Engineering, corresponding member of Russian Academy of Sciences, Boris Gusev. The mathematical w…

I thought this article was interesting and thought provoking. Has anyone else heard about this finding that humans from 1 million years ago may have used fire? http://slashdot.org/submission/2006745/did-our-ancient-ancestors-cook-1-million-years-ago

A new word, ATOXOPY, has been coined by a Nigerian Scientist, Ejikeme Nwosu. For meaning and more check out his theory titled Special theory of Toxicity: Toxic properties of electron discovered.

I haven't seen it posted elsewhere - forgive me if it is... A significant number of scientists have begun to boycott the major scientific publisher Elsevier. http://thecostofknowledge.com/ The reasons for the boycott: They charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals. In the light of these high prices, the only realistic option for many libraries is to agree to buy very large "bundles", which will include many journals that those libraries do not actually want. Elsevier thus makes huge profits by exploiting the fact that some of their journals are essential. They support measures…

Hi there, We are currently developing a new project called the Global Science Connection. We would like to know what you think about the goals we have set for ourselves and our new company. Therefore we are searching for people who are willing to fill in our short online survey. It will only take you a few minutes but will provide us with a lot of information about what lives within the science community. Our survey is located at http://survey.globalscicon.com Thanks in Advanced. The Global Science Connection Team. http://www.GlobalSciCon.com

Great views of Venus and Jupiter a thumb or so apart in the western sky (290 ish 35 elevation) basis London. easily spotted with naked eye. Other side of sky is mars. At one point Uranus and Mercury should have been visible - damn light pollution!!! Get out and have a look Fourmi Lab is great for working out where to look http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Yoursky Will post - very bad - pictures when at my pc on monday

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/1757-underground-river-discovered-beneath-amazon.html This report seems to be about the most responsible, since many others love to jump to 'hundreds of times wider,' when it seems even the 'discoverer' didn't want to rush to conclusions until a projected 2014 date. But it was all over the news and cool so I thought I'd bring it in.

Ultra-efficient LED puts out more power than is pumped in Even though the amount of thermal energy leeched from its environment is miniscule, I feel that this is a triumph of engineering and a step towards converting some of the waste heat using semiconductor architecture.

Today is Feb 28, national science day of India. In tne memory of the great scientist sir C V Raman. This year's message is 'restore energy and atomic saftey.

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-finds-planet-thats-just-life-180545298.html NASA has found a new planet outside Earth's solar system that is eerily similar to Earth in important aspects. Scientists say the temperature on the surface of the planet is about a comfy 72 degrees (22 Celsius). Its star could almost be a twin of Earth's sun. It probably has water and land. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Holy chit!

Read more here http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1134256--medical-isotopes-possible-without-a-nuclear-reactor?bn=1 What are isotopes and why are isotopes needed?

Scientists from Austria and Spain have shown that females may be at higher risk of acquiring infections when they are ovulating due to higher circulating levels of estradiol.It all seems to be a mild trade-off of an significant trait evolved for the protection of spermatozoa. LINK : http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120103135333.htm

Transistor Made Using a Single Atom May Help Beat Moore's Law this is an article I found today about quantum computing research that could potentially break Moore's Law.

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-02/boy-who-played-fusion "...Kenneth [Taylor's father] feels the weight coming down on him again. What he doesn’t understand just yet is that he will come to look back on these days as the uncomplicated ones, when his scary-smart son was into simple things, like rocket science..." Worth a read, I think, pretty crazy, too many areas worth citing. -That is, if it isn't already covered somewhere around here and a fair bit of semi-interesting conversation follows in comments.

The Beeb has this article on the MIT initiative MIT launches free online 'fully automated' course

"Translating Energy Research Ideas in to Industry"—Cal State L.A.'s Lloyd N. Ferguson Distinguished Lecture Series for 2012—will be presented on Friday, Feb. 17, 1 p.m., at Cal State L.A.'s Golden Eagle Ballroom. Theodore Goodson III, the Richard Barry Bernstein Professor of Chemistry at the University of Michigan, will deliver the lecture. Goodson's research centers on the investigation of nonlinear optical and energy transfer in organic multi-chromophore systems for particular optical and electronic applications. He has investigated new quantum optical effects in organic systems, which have applications in discrete communication systems and sensing. Establish…

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16163931 http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/ I would be curious as to how they deal with storing the frames. If we assume 1kb/frame, which is probably way less than the actual size, we get 30 PB of data per second, which according to WA is about 1/30 of the estimated data content of the internet.

According to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service there has been a raise in the number of students applying for physics courses at university this year in the UK. This is despite an overall decrease across the board. Physics is up by 8.3% as compared to last year. See the IOP news report here. It seems that the number of students applying for a university place in England has gone down 9.9% as compared to last year. Wales and Scotland, who have different levels of student funding have different statistics. The drop in Scotland is about 1.5%, Wales 1.9% and Northern Ireland 4%. See the BBC news report here.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tame-theory-did-bonobos&WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20120125

Terrible, this ocean acidification is huge! Life underwater will be in serious danger if it keeps growing and growing! “When Earth started to warm 17,000 years ago, terminating the last glacial period, atmospheric CO2 levels rose from 190 parts per million (ppm) to 280 ppm over 6,000 years. Marine ecosystems had ample time to adjust. Now, for a similar rise in CO2 concentration to the present level of 392 ppm, the adjustment time is reduced to only 100 – 200 years.” From United Academics

Breakthrough?

Professor Steven Rawlings of Oxford University was found dead at the home of Dr Devinder Sivia. Both men had co-authored books together. Read more details (Daily Mirror)here. The BBC news report can be found here.

Hi all, Some UCLA research group using LED, pinhole, and webcam to make microscope (from more videos in the same account). It feels easy to make, but it looks like it's the (some youtube how to video) + holographic microscope (wikipedia).I think the only difference to the home-made one is just the pinhole and CMOS resolution, UCLA one can see blood cells. If that is the only difference, feels like anyone can re-create it easily tho. Just that holographic shadows... even though it says "simple algorithm," it might be hard to do it still...

First of all, there's no real danger to people. The problems I describe below are minor. And the main problem is excess rainwater, which cannot drain away because we're below sea level. We've had a pretty wet december, and last week we've had strong winds and lots of rain on top of it. It's been wind force 8-9 for 3 days in a row now. Nothing really out of the ordinary, and the types of problems below are also something that will occur almost once every year in some form or another. But still, it's in the news all over the country, and I thought this would be entertaining to read. So, the situation is the following: we've had lots of rain. All that rainwater coll…

Found this via slashdot: http://peswiki.com/index.php/News:Real-Time_Updates_on_the_October_6%2C_2011_E-Cat_Test http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/10/06/1430210/does-italian-demo-show-cold-fusion-or-snake-oil I've seen hydrogen-nickel fusion rolling around the crazier corners of the internet for a while, but this event and the commentary around it are merely ringing most of my crank alarms loudly. The others are only jangling. Anyone have anything more to say on the matter?