You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Science’ tag.
Hey, quick, how does a internal combustion work in layman’s terms. You have 1 minute to get in all the pertinent information. Go!
Obviously, decisions are going to be made about what content to keep and how to say as much as possible with the time allotted. Climate change is like describing an internal combustion engine in 1 minute, only that that the science behind climate change is much more complex. Our media is guilty of not doing their homework on Climate Change. Potholer54 gets us more up to date on what the science actually says, as opposed to media mistranslations and inaccuracies.
Another refreshing video from Qualia Soup. Science, it works b*tches. :)
We are not alone in our galaxy. We have a visitor. By the name of HIP 13044 b? Leave it to science to find a really poetic name.
“Astronomers say they’ve found the first known planet to orbit a star that began its life outside our own Milky Way galaxy. In the last 15 years, almost 500 planets have been detected orbiting stars in our galaxy. But until now, no planet has been discovered that came from another galaxy.The discovery of a giant planet around the star HIP 13044 changes all that, a team of astronomers claims.”
“Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies,” he said in a statement. “But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach.”
The planet — named HIP 13044 b — lies about 2,000 light years from Earth in the southern constellation of Fornax. Its mass is at least 1.25 times that of Jupiter’s and takes only 16.2 days to complete an orbit.
It was discovered by looking for the tiny wobbles produced when an orbiting object creates a pull on a star’s gravity. Astronomers used a high-resolution spectrograph attached to the 2.2-metre MPG/ESO telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Way to go astronomers. I’m looking forward to more news on our first exoplanet discovery.
How cats defy gravity and get tasty milk noms!
The LHC continues to push the envelope in physics and cosmology.
What happens when you put Lead in the LHC and go Boom!
“A miniature Big Bang was created at the Large Hadron Collider this week as the world’s most powerful atom-smasher successfully entered a new phase of exploration.”
Creating the conditions that existed some 14 billion years ago is another new plateau for science and our understanding of our universe.
“These experiments[ attempting to find the Higgs Boson a.k.a the God Particle] were shut down last week, to allow the collider to run with lead ions — atoms from which an electron has been removed — to study different aspects of physics.
The lead ion collisions will allow the collider to create a superheated mixture of subatomic particles called quark-gluon plasma, which pervaded the Universe immediately after the Big Bang.”
“This process took place in a safe, controlled environment, generating incredibly hot and dense sub-atomic fireballs with temperatures of over ten trillion degrees. At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as quark-gluon plasma.”
Mmmm, yummy warm quark-gluon soup. We shall have to wait while the results are analyzed, stay tuned for further LHC updates.
Doctor Myers is one of the great atheist luminaries of recent times. I pilfered his speech from his blog Pharyngula because the speech describes much of what rational secular people are up against in our societies today and the battles that have been fought and are being fought today. I also believe it is a heartening speech that demarcates what has been done and still what needs to be done with no reservations and no regrets for rocking the boat as far as offending religious “sensibilities” are concerned. It may look TL:DR, but it is worth your time to peruse all of what PZ has to say, you’ll just have to trust me on this one. :)
I’m going to begin with where I entered this conflict — and make no mistake, it’s a real battle — with my experience in science education, and specifically with the teaching of evolution. Biology has been a lifelong passion for me, and when I first began teaching way back in the 1980s, it was a shock to discover students who had nothing but contempt for the great unifying principle of my discipline, who were happily wallowing in self-inflicted ignorance and who outright denied plain and simple facts about science. And when I discovered that there were ministers who came onto our campus and lied to our students, presented half-truths and weird fantasies to substitute for evidence, i was outraged. We Gnu Atheists have a reputation for being militant, but make no mistake: we didn’t start this war. If you want to place blame, put it on the backs of religious zealots who have been poisoning the minds of the young for a long, long time.
This is another theme in this conflict: Gnu Atheists are so dang angry. Damned right we are. The real question is why everyone else isn’t. If you aren’t angry about what’s being done to undermine education in this country, you haven’t been following along.
But we also respond rationally. My early incredulity about the nonsense being promoted by creationists was followed by a lot of fact-finding. You can do it too — look up the history of creationism, and you find that we’ve been fighting this same battle for at least half a century, and dealing with the same inane arguments over and over again. Where once Duane Gish was the creationist dinosaur roaming the earth, he was replaced by Kent Hovind, and he is now superseded by Ken Ham and Ray Comfort and Eric Hovind. Nothing has changed but the names. We have had a succession of court cases: Epperson v Arkansas in 68, McLean v Arkansas in 82, Edwards v. Aguillard in 87, Kitzmiller v Dover in 2005 — are they coming to an end? Did any of these trials diminish the influence of creationists? One flareup will be squelched, and next year there will be another. Similarly, we see a succession of politicians come and go, and nothing changes. Ronald Reagan becomes Santorum becomes Bush becomes another dreary chain of Republican know-nothings at every election cycle. It’s 2010, and guess what: Christine O’Donnell is running for the senate, and I’ve still got a local fundamentalist pastor coming on to my campus every week to instruct my students in the video fables of Brother Kent Hovind.
We have been treading water for 50 years. In one sense, that’s a very good thing: better to stay afloat in one place than to sink, and I am deeply appreciative of organizations like the NCSE that have kept us bobbing at the surface all this time, and please don’t ever stop. But isn’t it also about time we learned a new stroke and actually made some progress towards the shore? Shouldn’t we move beyond just reacting to every assault by Idiot America on science education, and honestly look at the root causes of this chronic malignancy and do something about it?
The sea our country is drowning in is a raging religiosity, wave after wave of ignorant arguments and ideological absurdities pushed by tired dogma and fervent and frustrated fanatics. We keep hearing that the answer is to find the still waters of a more moderate faith, but I’m sorry, I don’t feel like drowning there either.
There is an answer, and it’s on display right here in this room. The solution, the only longterm solution, is the sanity of secularism. The lesser struggles to keep silly stickers off our textbooks or to keep pseudoscientific BS like intelligent design out of our classrooms are important, but they are endless chores — at some point we just have to stop pandering to the ideological noise that spawns these unending tasks and cut right to the source: religion.
That’s where the Gnu Atheists get their confrontational reputation. We’re fed up with fighting off the symptoms. We need to address the disease. And if you’re one of those people trying to defend superstition and quivering in fear at the idea of taking on a majority that believes in foolishness, urging us to continue slapping bandages on the blight of faith, well then, you’re part of the problem and we’ll probably do something utterly dreadful, like be rude to you or write some cutting sarcastic essay to mock your position. That is our métier, after all.
Theoretical Physics is always just so darn useful according to the CBC:
“A geometric “atlas” of the internet has been created in an effort to preserve it in the coming decades.
U.S., Spanish and Cypriot researchers say they have discovered what they call a negatively curved space hidden beneath the surface of the internet known as a “latent, hyperbolic” geometry.
This discovery has enabled them to create a new way of mapping the internet, a process they believe will help it to operate in the future.
“We compare routing in the internet today to using a hypothetical road atlas, which is really just a long encoded list of road intersections and connections that would require drivers to pore through each line to plot a course to their destination …,” Dmitri Krioukov, principal investigator of the project, said in a release.
I’m a little fuzzy on ‘negative parabolic space’ but the abstract from the journal is actually quite helpful.
“The Internet infrastructure is severely stressed. Rapidly growing overheads associated with the primary function of the Internet—routing information packets between any two computers in the world—cause concerns among Internet experts that the existing Internet routing architecture may not sustain even another decade. In this paper, we present a method to map the Internet to a hyperbolic space.”
So, if the intertoobz fail, we’ll at least know why.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…