Official "Science News" Thread

[xilman]

Originally Posted by retina

It would seem to be dependant upon one's method of measuring efficiency.

Indeed.

Engineers define efficiency as the ratio (useful stuff out)/(useful stuff in) by and large. The qualification "useful" is very much an engineering term!

[ewmayer]

New technology speeding progress on bird flu vaccine
(Reuters) - Even as U.S. officials this week awaited the arrival of a sample of the new bird flu virus from China - typically the first step in making a flu vaccine - government-backed researchers had already begun testing a "seed" strain of the virus made from the genetic code posted on the Internet

[rogue]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

New technology speeding progress on bird flu vaccine
(Reuters) - Even as U.S. officials this week awaited the arrival of a sample of the new bird flu virus from China - typically the first step in making a flu vaccine - government-backed researchers had already begun testing a "seed" strain of the virus made from the genetic code posted on the Internet

This is how I read it at first. China is so generous. They give viruses to the US.

[jasong]

Holy crap, we've got birds and pigs giving us flu viruses, monkeys giving us AIDS, and cats making pregnant women sick when they clean up the cat poo.

Is there no safe harbor for us poor humans?

[only_human]

Originally Posted by jasong

Holy crap, we've got birds and pigs giving us flu viruses, monkeys giving us AIDS, and cats making pregnant women sick when they clean up the cat poo.

Is there no safe harbor for us poor humans?

As far as I can tell, all of those hazards can be avoided by being chosen for a one way trip to Mars.

[only_human]

In the perennial saga about Alice, Bob, and Charley, today's episode is:
Alice and Bob communicate without transferring a single photon

What does it all mean? Whom can we depend upon in a quantum world?

Another of the team, Hatim Salih of KACST, says that the group's approach could be used to carry out secure communications thanks to the absence of a physical signal. But given the method's significant complexity, it might not appeal to commercial developers. Salih also points out that the team's paper makes no claim as to how the information travels. "If physical particles did not carry information between sender and receiver then what did?" he adds.
Nicolas Gisin of the University of Geneva says that the work is "quite original, quite clever" and describes the non-physical communication as "very puzzling". He says that a key challenge will be in quantifying precisely how many photons or fractions of photons are actually transferred from Bob to Alice.

Is there no hope for Charley?

[retina]

Originally Posted by only_human

In the perennial saga about Alice, Bob, and Charley, today's episode is:
Alice and Bob communicate without transferring a single photon

What does it all mean? Whom can we depend upon in a quantum world?
Is there no hope for Charley?

I liken this to Bob simply manipulating a mirror and reflecting Alice's photons back to Alice. The only difference being that it is done at the quantum level to allow detection of Charley and avoid MITM attacks.

I think the "communicate without transferring a single photon" part is simply to get into the headlines and attract attention. IMO photons are transferred; They are transferred from Alice back to Alice and directed by Bob with his mirrors.

[cheesehead]

"NASA Probe Observes Meteors Colliding With Saturn's Rings"
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ca...i20130425.html

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn's rings.

These observations make Saturn's rings the only location besides Earth, the moon and Jupiter where scientists and amateur astronomers have been able to observe impacts as they occur. Studying the impact rate of meteoroids from outside the Saturnian system helps scientists understand how different planet systems in our solar system formed.

. . .

[rogue]

New algorithm helps evaluate, rank scientific literature

You Can Hear When Trees Are Thirsty

Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries the most powerful yet

Dark matter experiment CDMS sees three tentative clues

[only_human]

ars aechnica article:

Nature makes an effort to enhance reproducibility in science

Methods of papers in Nature journals will now include the actual methods.

Overall, it's hard to see this as anything other than a good idea. Even if it is partly meant to solve a problem that the journals' limits on paper length helped create, the new policy goes well beyond that. It tries to ensure that the data presented in these journals is reliable. There's obviously more publications could do—a strict policy and check for image manipulation, like the one used by Rockefeller University Press, seems like an obvious choice—but this appears to be a solid step in the right direction.

[cheesehead]

Solving the Mystery of Supercharged Lightning

The serendipitous flybys of two satellites near a tropical thunderstorm have given researchers an unprecedented look at terrestrial gamma-ray flashes—a mysterious, high-energy phenomenon that scientists first observed in 1991. First thought to be generated at high altitudes, researchers have recently pinned down the origin of the fleeting lightning-linked bursts—one of the most energetic surges of natural electromagnetic radiation on Earth—to altitudes below 20 kilometers, in the layer of the atmosphere where most weather happens. Now, analyses of data gathered in 2006 by two satellites—one carrying a down-gazing camera and the other a gamma ray detector—as well as a ground-based lightning detector in North Carolina, reveal that these flashes start out, as does most lightning, as a small channel of charged particles within the storm cloud (golden zigzag line, left; lightning-generated radio waves are depicted as concentric rings). ...