Official "Science News" Thread

[only_human]

When this thread's discussion about arsenic microbes was winding down I posted about a Bigfoot genetics article: link. I came across a status update about that today:
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0213-h...gfoot-DNA.html

A new study purporting to uncover DNA evidence for Bigfoot has been published today in DeNovo Scientific Journal.

But it's likely that study will find little welcome in the scientific community, since it's been published in a scientific journal that Ketchum's team bought. In fact, Ketchum admits that the team acquired the rights to the journal before publication but says the paper was still "peer-reviewed," which in scientific parlance means reviewed by an independent committee of experts before publication.

"Rather than spend another five years just trying to find a journal to publish and hoping that decent, open minded reviewers would be chosen, we acquired the rights to this journal and renamed it so we would not lose the passing peer reviews that are expected by the public and the scientific community," Ketchum wrote on her website, which is currently off-line.

[rogue]

Artificial Retina Receives FDA Approval

Researchers say AI prescribes better treatment than doctors

Weird Quantum Theory Works in 'Big' Things

Picasso's Genius Revealed: He Used Common House Paint

[chappy]

rogue, you forgot: Canseco explains gravity via twitter


Yes, I know this doesn't belong in this thread, but I couldn't help myself.

[science_man_88]

http://news.yahoo.com/dark-matter-fi...144840916.html

saw this a few days ago now.

[only_human]

Contact lost with space station

[jasong]

Originally Posted by rogue

Researchers say AI prescribes better treatment than doctors

The grey metal box will see you now.

Apparently, a doctor's bedside manner is going to suck a lot more in the near future.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by jasong

The grey metal box will see you now.

Apparently, a doctor's bedside manner is going to suck a lot more in the near future.

The doctor who committed malpractice on me had a wonderful "bedside manner" and was quite charming to most of his co-workers, but made elementary blunders in reasoning which his narcissism blinded him from seeing.

[only_human]

The Whitehouse has responded to the petition to "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."

From the attached memorandum pdf

3. Objectives for Public Access to Scientific Publications
To the extent feasible and consistent with law; agency mission; resource constraints; U.S. national, homeland, and economic security; and the objectives listed below, the results of unclassified research that are published in peer-reviewed publications directly arising from Federal funding should be stored for long-term preservation and publicly accessible to search, retrieve, and analyze in ways that maximize the impact and accountability of the Federal research investment.

In developing their public access plans, agencies shall seek to put in place policies that enhance innovation and competitiveness by maximizing the potential to create new business opportunities and are otherwise consistent with the principles articulated in section 1.

Agency plans must also describe, to the extent feasible, procedures the agency will take to help prevent the unauthorized mass redistribution of scholarly publications.

Further, each agency plan shall:
a) Ensure that the public can read, download, and analyze in digital form final peer reviewed manuscripts or final published documents within a timeframe that is appropriate for each type of research conducted or sponsored by the agency.

For the most part I am very optimistic -- but note the part above that I marked in bold font. There is this forum thread on Aaron Swartz. I wouldn't be surprised if that event was a driving force in crafting that paragraph.

Excepting that, I am optimistic that the rest of this will do some good.

[ewmayer]

Ah, they can just call in a drone strike on any unauthorized leakers ... problem solved.

[cheesehead]

Why does an artificial satellite fail when the cause is not that a colliding meteoroid punctured or otherwise caused physical damage to it?

Perhaps an electromagnetic pulse (EMP)!

"Scientist closes in on a mystery that impedes space exploration"

http://phys.org/news/2013-02-scienti...ploration.html

(Phys.org)—New research by Stanford aeronautics and astronautics Assistant Professor Sigrid Close suggests she's on track to solve a mystery that has long bedeviled space exploration: Why do satellites fail?

In the popular imagination, satellites are imperiled by impacts from "space junk" – particles of man-made debris the size of a pea (or greater) that litter the Earth's upper atmosphere – or by large meteoroids like the one that recently exploded spectacularly over Chelyabinsk, Russia.

Although such impacts are a serious concern, most satellites that have died in space haven't been knocked out by them. Something else has killed them.

The likely culprit, it turns out, is material so tiny its nickname is "space dust."

These natural micro-meteoroids are not directly causing satellites harm. When they hit an object in space, however, they are traveling so fast that they turn into a quasi-neutral gas of ions and electrons known as plasma. That plasma, Close theorizes, has the potential to create a radio signal that can damage, and even completely shut down, the satellites they hit.

The signal is an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP – similar in concept but not in size to what is generated by nuclear detonations. (Tellingly, a massive EMP knocked out cell phones when the Chelyabinsk meteoroid hit.)

. . .

[cheesehead]

"Reconstructing the Chelyabinsk meteor’s path, with Google Earth, YouTube and high-school math"

http://ogleearth.com/2013/02/reconst...h-school-math/

Originally Posted by Stefan Geens

Like many others, I was absolutely astounded by the meteor strike over Chelyabinsk when I woke on Friday morning. One silver lining to our self-surveilling society is that an event of this magnitude is certain to get caught on the myriad of always-on dash- and webcams. I for one could not get enough of the videos.

Might it be possible to use this viral footage with Google Earth to have an initial go at mapping the meteorite’s trajectory? I was pondering this question some 2,500km away from Chelyabinsk when I chanced upon this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=bXifSi2K278

That place is easy to find — it’s Revolution Square at the absolute center of Chelyabinsk, looking almost directly south. It is also easy to measure — the distance between the two central light poles is 32 meters, as per a quick measurement in Google Earth, while the five lanes of traffic going right to left (west to east) measure 19 meters. From this it is easy to estimate the height of the light poles to be around 12 meters — an estimate corroborated by numerous panoramas in Google Earth showing people next to these lamp posts, giving us added data points.

Using all this information, I was able to do some image analysis in Photoshop on the lengths and angles of the shadows as the meteor streaked across the sky. Here’s an animated gif showing the result of that:

http://ogleearth.com/wp-content/uplo...ion-small1.gif

The ensuing grade-school mathematics (SOHCAHTOA!) resulted in three lines of sight at three instants a few seconds apart. (For the sake of the record, I roughly calculated them to be towards 122 degrees at an inclination of 33 degrees at 9:20:28.7, towards 187 degrees at an inclination of 40 degrees at 9:20:32.2, and towards 222 degrees at an inclination of 32 degrees at 9:20:33.4. These times are the video’s own timeline, though they appear to correlate closely with the timelines of other videos.)

This allowed me to draw an inclined plane in Google Earth that should include the meteor’s path, though it does not allow me to know the distance of the meteor from central Chelyabinsk, nor its speed.

. . .

UPDATE 2013-02-22: OK, so this is kind of special: An astrophysics paper has just been submitted to ArXiv.org that models the orbit of the Chelyabinsk meteor, referencing this blog post as a starting point: A preliminary reconstruction of the orbit of the Chelyabinsk Meteoroid by Jorge I. Zuluagaa and Ignacio Ferrin. Details are here, and here comes the resulting animation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5DgX...layer_embedded

- - -

The ArXiv.org paper that Stefan Geens mentioned credits Stefan:

abstract: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.5377
PDF: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.5377v1

. . .

In this letter we present one of the first rigorous attempts to reconstruct the orbit of the
Chelyabinsk Meteoroid. We use here the recording of a camera located in the Revolutionary Square in Chelyabinsk and one video recorded in the close city of Korkino. Both observations are used to triangulate the trajectory of the body in the atmosphere. The method used is here was first devised by Stefen Geen and published in one his blog, Ogle Earth ...

. . .