Tag: Science

Ohio wants to limit science teaching

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

BiM65CpIYAAdb-PThe US state of Ohio is considering restricting the teaching of science, in a move which might bring in a  Christian fundamentalist education system.

The bill, currently under consideration by the Ohio Assembly, is intended to revoke a previous approval of the Common Core educational standards, includes sections devoted to science and social studies.

The Common Core standards are based in core existing disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics; incorporate grade-level mathematics and be referenced to the mathematics standards; focus on academic and scientific knowledge rather than scientific processes; and prohibit political or religious interpretation of scientific facts.

This sounds reasonable but actually, the new law means that teachers will be forbidden to teach the scientific process. They might learn scientific facts, but will not be taught how scientists reached those facts.

The law prohibiting “political or religious interpretation of scientific facts” actually prevents educators from pointing out any evidence that says that the earth is more than 10,000 years old.

Republican Andy Thompson told The Columbus Dispatch that the bill would open the door to instruction on intelligent design. For those who came in late, Intelligent Design is a quasi-scientific way of saying that the world was created 10,000 years ago by a specific god in seven days.

Thompson however is not consistent in his statement of intent. He told the Cincinnati Enquirer that the bill does nothing to put creationism into the classroom what it prevents is politicised science.

That naturally includes the issue of climate change in which he quotes some fake science to say it is untrue and therefore “political.”

Where this will leave IBM which has a big plant in Ohio is anyone’s guess.  It will only be able to find workers who believe you can create data centre class servers by praying to God for them.

 

Cloud teaches teaches robots

Posted on August 26, 2014 by - News

robby the robotResearchers at Cornell, Stanford and Brown universities and the University of California have come up with a method of teaching robots using the cloud.

Dubbed Robo Brain , the system is a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources. The data is translated and stored in a robot-friendly format that robots can draw on when they need it.
Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University said that since  laptops and mobile phones don’t have access to all the information we want, the robot can query Robo Brain in the cloud.

Robo Brain will process images to pick out the objects in them, and by connecting images and video with text, it will learn to recognize objects and how they are used, along with human language and behaviour.

It speeds up the development time that a robot needs to work out what to do. If a robot sees a teacup, it can learn from Robo Brain not only that it is a teacup and not a coffee mug. It also can learn that liquids can be poured into or out of it, that it can be grasped by the handle, and that it must be carried upright when it is full.

The system employs what computer scientists call “structured deep learning,” where information is stored in many levels of abstraction. An easy chair is a member of the class of chairs, and going up another level, chairs are furniture. Robo Brain knows that chairs are something you can sit on, but that a human can also sit on a stool, a bench or the lawn.

The robot stores the information in a mathematical model, which can be represented graphically as a set of points connected by lines. The nodes could represent objects, actions or parts of an image, and each one is assigned a probability – how much you can vary it and still be correct.

This means that the robot’s brain makes its own chain and looks for one in the knowledge base that matches within those limits.

 

Boffins may make a quantum breakthrough

Posted on August 19, 2014 by - News

fatter catA team of boffins at the University of Chicago has announced it has developed a way to observe, control, and manipulate the behaviour of a single electron with the help of lasers.

In terms of quantum physics, this is a way of telling if Schrodinger’s cat is really dead or alive, or just has escaped the box and is asleep on a soft bed somewhere.

An electron is an elementary subatomic particle that is a fundamental constituent of matter, having a negative charge. It is found in all atoms and acts as the primary carrier of electricity in solids.

To manipulate a single electron at the quantum level the researchers used a laser light in ultra-fast pulses which in turn managed the quantum state of an electron inside a nanosecond defect, which is naturally found in diamonds.

The method used was also able to observe and track the properties of the single electron, as well as how the electron changes over a set period of time.

David Awschalom, who led the project, said that his research was a precursor for creating and developing semiconductor “quantum bits” and other microscopic technology and molecular powered computing which would increase computer speeds dramatically.

It would also mean that scientists will finally be able to find that pesky cat.

Senators fire rocket at SpaceX

Posted on August 13, 2014 by - News

spacex-grasshopperIt seems that SpaceX has rattled the chains of the defence establishment and is doing its job a little too well.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is putting payloads into orbit for less money than the big government contractors charge and it appears that has angered those in the defence community who have been making a fair bit of dosh flogging more expensive projects and gear to NASA.

In the US when a corporate feels threatened it uses one of its tame lobby senators to go on the attack and so far their weapon of choice has been Senator Richard Shelby. He threw needless layers of bureaucracy at SpaceX .

Now it appears that more senators have been drawn in on the side of the other defence contractors.

Three House members—Mike Coffman, Mo Brooks, and Cory Gardner have sent a memo to NASA demanding that the agency investigate what they call “an epidemic of anomalies” with SpaceX missions.

The three are insisting that as a contractor, the company should be accountable to the American taxpayer. On this they are on a sticky wicket. According to Space News, NASA did not actually pay for the development of the Falcon 9; Elon Musk did so there is no public funds being used to develop the rockets in the first place.

The three senators are also moaning that SpaceX has experienced launch delays and other problems that has prevented payloads getting into space. However that is normal and it is unlikely that NASA could have done any better.

The congressmen’s complaint that SpaceX is behind schedule is also deeply ironic when the Sentator’s chum’s own project NASA’s Space Launch System—a next generation rocket that is supposed to replace the Shuttle—is also delayed.

Space expert Phil Plait  thinks that what the big defence contractors are worried about is that the space launch system is so behind that  SpaceX is catching up with its Dragon V2 and the Falcon Heavy which will launch next year.  The Space Launch System will not test launch until 2017.

Plait said that it is a transparent attempt from members of our Congress to hinder a privately owned company that threatens their own interests.

Boeing, which is the major SLS contractor has a big plant in Alabama, Brooks’ and Shelby’s home state. The United Launch Alliance has its HQ in Colorado, home to Gardner and Coffman – coincidence perhaps?

 

Nanomagnets improve supercomputers

Posted on August 8, 2014 by - News

magnet-manNanomagnet computer chips appear to make supercomputers run more efficiently, according to  researchers at the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

Irina Eichwald and her team of boffins have been using microchips made from tiny magnets rather than conventional power-hungry transistors may enable intensive number-crunching tasks.

On traditional silicon the bits of information, 0s and 1s, are represented by voltages across a transistor, each of which needs its own wire. Magnets can do the same job by switching their pole orientation: pointing north-south represents 1, say, and south-north is 0.

Eichwald found that flipping poles takes less energy than running current through a wire, so they need less power to run.

Nanomagnets have already been seen on microchips  but have been placed only on a single layer because they need extra space to work properly.

Now Eichwald has worked out a way to rival the density of transistor-based designs and grown a chip which is 100 nanomagnets deep.

Her team made a logic gate from stacked arrays of nanomagnets. Instead of wires, a handful of magnets above the chip induced magnetic fields. The magnets then flip their orientation one after the other, like dominoes, to the magnet performing the actual operation. In a test, the magnetic chip used 1/35th of the power a transistor used.

“A huge number of computing processes can now be done simultaneously with very low power consumption as you don’t need the connecting wires transistors need. You only need to generate a magnetic field across the chip,” says Eichwald.

New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329812.800-magnets-join-race-to-replace-transistors-in-computers.html#.U-RmOPmSyUY  says that the technology is one of a few which is in the race to replace silicon.

Boffins power gadgets with radio waves

Posted on August 5, 2014 by - News

mad-scientistBoffins from the University of Washington have emerged from their smoke filled labs with a new communication system that uses radio frequency (RF) signals as a power source.

It means that you can also use existing Wi-Fi infrastructure to provide Internet connectivity to these devices.

Dubbed Wi-Fi backscatter, this technology is the first that can connect battery-free devices to Wi-Fi networks.

It solves a problem that inventors were having with the unternet of thongs.  The devices have to be small, and that means losing or shinking the battery. It also means that people will be spending more time charging their shiny toys than they do using them.

Shyam Gollakota, a UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering, said that using this system it is possible to enable Wi-Fi connectivity for devices while consuming orders of magnitude less power than what Wi-Fi typically requires.

The researchers will publish their results at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Data Communication‘s annual conference this month in Chicago. The team also plans to start a company based on the technology.

There had been some work done before which showed how low-powered devices such as temperature sensors or wearable technology could run without batteries or cords by harnessing energy from existing radio, TV and wireless signals in the air. This work takes that a step further by connecting each individual device to the Internet, which previously was not possible.

The problem was that low-power Wi-Fi consumes three to four orders of magnitude more power than can be harvested in these wireless signals.

What the researchers developed was an ultra-low power tag prototype with an antenna and circuitry that can communicate with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops or smartphones while consuming negligible power.

The tags looking for Wi-Fi signals moving between the router and a laptop or smartphone. They encode data by either reflecting or not reflecting the Wi-Fi router’s signals, and slightly changing the wireless signal. Wi-Fi-enabled devices detect these changes and receive data from the tag.

The UW’s Wi-Fi backscatter tag has communicated with a Wi-Fi device at rates of 1 kilobit per second with about 2 meters between the devices. They want to extend the range to about 20 meters and have patents filed on it all.

London student possesses another’s body

Posted on July 31, 2014 by - News

ExorcistYifei Chai, a student at the Imperial College London, has worked out how to use virtual reality and 3D modelling hardware to “possess” another person.

Chai’s method does not involve vomit or turning heads, or even an invocation to the Prince of Darkness. One person wears a headmounted, twin-angle camera and attaches electrical stimulators to their body. Meanwhile, another person wears an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset streaming footage from their friend’s camera/view.

A Microsoft Kinect 3D sensor tracks the Rift wearer’s body. Chai’s system then shocks the appropriate muscles to force the possessed person to lift or lower their arms.

The person wearing the Rift looks down and sees another body, a body that moves when they move—giving the illusion of possessing another’s body.

It is all a bit rough at the moment. Watching the video there is a noticeable delay between action and reaction, which lessens the illusion’s effectiveness.

You can only control 34 arm and shoulder muscles and Chai’s thinks that he can improve it with high-definition versions of the Oculus Rift and Kinect to detect subtler movements.

One thing he thinks the idea might be used for is to encourage empathy by literally putting us in someone else’s shoes. A care worker, for example, might be less apt to become frustrated with a patient after experiencing their challenges first-hand.

 

Russian scientists save spaced out randy lizards

Posted on July 28, 2014 by - News

Tlizardhe Russian space agency Roscosmos has managed to gain control over a satellite crewed by randy lizards who are keen to test out sex in zero gravity.

Mission control said that it has manage to gain positive control over the agency’s orbiting Foton-M4 satellite. Launched a week ago, Foton-M4 carries a primarily biological payload made up of geckos, flies, plant seeds, and various micro-organisms which was supposed to test out how lower orders of life bonk when there is no gravity.

The satellite made headlines late last week when just a few days after launch, ground control lost communication with the satellite and could no longer send it commands.

Apparently the satellite’s five-gecko crew, four females and one male, were sent aloft by Russian scientists in order to study the effects of microgravity on sex and reproduction are safe. Scientists are spying on the geckos and then slice up the randy couples when the satellite returns to Earth at the conclusion of its two-month mission.

If they had not fixed Foton-M4 it would remain in its 357-mile orbit for about four months—two months longer than the provisions for its biological payload would last. The Geckos having bonked themselves to exhaustion would have run out of food and begun to eat each other, and not in a good way. The survivors would have been burnt to a crisp on re-entry.

Now that the spacecraft is functioning normally, the lizards can get to it safe in the knowledge that their death will not take place until they are safely in a Russian lab back on the planet.  Now all that can go wrong is a reptile dysfunction.

 

 

 

 

Booze boffins recreate 150 year old beer

Posted on March 19, 2013 by - Fun Stuff

beerA beer spanning back from 170 years ago will be reproduced using modern techniques.

Booze boffins at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have set their sights on reproducing a beer that was found preserved in five bottles at the bottom of a Baltic Sea shipwreck.

They have now cracked open these bottles, which were rescued in 2010 from a shipwreck that is believed to have sunk in the Åland archipelago southwest of Finland in the 1840s, and are analysing the contents in a bid to recreate the original recipe for modern industrial production methods.

The beer,  we doubt it was drinkable, was preserved as a result of the wreck’s darkness and low seabed temperatures. The salt water was kept at bay as a result of the pressure inside the corks.

Once the boffins have deciphered the formula and made a recipe, they will hand it over to the  Stallhagen brewery of Åland for reproduction and sales.

It is thought that drinkers will be able to get their hands on the brew from June 2014 with all profits given to charities focusing on the sea and environment.