The Science Thief: February 2005

Pentagon Developing Robot Soldiers

MSNBC - Creatures frozen for 32,000 years still alive

Synthetic enamel offers painless fillings

New Scientist Breaking News: "Dentists, put away your drills. Synthetic tooth enamel can seal tiny cavities without the pain, and with less damage to the patient's teeth.
Cavities form when acid produced by mouth bacteria starts eating away at the tooth's protective enamel layer. Early on, these lesions are too small for fillers such as resins to stick properly, so dentists have to drill bigger holes that destroy some healthy parts of the tooth.
Now Kazue Yamagishi's team at the FAP Dental Institute in Tokyo has found that a fine paste of hydroxyapatite crystals, the material of which natural enamel is made, can repair small cavities in just 15 minutes. The paste fills cavities with long crystals that bond with the tooth's own structure. But using it needs care. The strongly acidic mix required to promote crystal growth would be painful if it touched the gums."

Astronomers find star-less galaxy

BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | South East Wales: "Astronomers say they have discovered an object that appears to be an invisible galaxy made almost entirely of dark matter.
The team, led by Cardiff University, claimed it is the first to be detected.
A dark galaxy is an area in the Universe containing a large amount of mass that rotates like a galaxy, but contains no stars.
It was found 50 million light years away using radio telescopes in Cheshire and Puerto Rico.
The unknown material that is thought to hold these dark galaxies together is known as 'dark matter', but scientists still know very little about what that is.
The five-year research has involved studying the distribution of hydrogen atoms throughout the Universe, estimated by looking at the rotation of galaxies and the speed at which their components moved"

Women in Physics Match Men in Success

The New York Times > Science: "Only about one-eighth of the physics professors at Harvard are women, a statistic that might seem to support the recent assertion by its president, Dr. Lawrence H. Summers, that fewer women than men are willing to make the necessary sacrifices. He also suggested that a difference in 'intrinsic aptitude' between the sexes might help explain the disparity.
A report released Friday by the American Institute of Physics offers a contradictory conclusion: after they earn a bachelor's degree in physics, American women are just as successful as men at wending their way up the academic ladder.
Physics continues to be the most male-dominated field among the sciences. Men hold 90 percent of physics faculty positions, and earned 82 percent of the doctoral degrees in 2003.
'I'm not saying it was easy for women,' said Dr. Rachel Ivie, a sociologist and an author of the report. But she said her statistics showed no indication of discrimination in the hiring of female physicists - supporting one of Dr. Summers's points - or women dropping out of the field at a higher rate than men, countering what Dr. Summers had offered as the most important reason there are fewer women in science and engineering.

Dr. Ivie also said that in suggesting that men and women might have different intrinsic aptitude in science, Dr. Summers did not take into account the continuing progress of women in fields like physics. While women earned only 18 percent of the Ph.D.'s in the United States in 2003, that is far higher than 1970, when the percentage was 2.4.
"If it's differences in innate ability, I don't know what innate abilities would have changed so quickly," Dr. Ivie said."

CSI (Childish Scientific Illusions)

This show really ticks me off, I'm glad I finally found an article that agrees with me- albeit from across the ocean.

"There's more money spent in this country on holistic medicine than there is on forensic science research."

The Way We Live Now: Unintelligent Design

The New York Times Magazine: "Recently a school district in rural Pennsylvania officially recognized a supposed alternative to Darwinism. In a one-minute statement read by an administrator, ninth-grade biology students were told that evolution was not a fact and were encouraged to explore a different explanation of life called intelligent design. What is intelligent design? Its proponents maintain that living creatures are just too intricate to have arisen by evolution. Throughout the natural world, they say, there is evidence of deliberate design. Is it not reasonable, then, to infer the existence of an intelligent designer? To evade the charge that intelligent design is a religious theory -- creationism dressed up as science -- its advocates make no explicit claims about who or what this designer might be. But students will presumably get the desired point. As one Pennsylvania teacher observed: ''The first question they will ask is: 'Well, who's the designer? Do you mean God?'''
From a scientific perspective, one of the most frustrating things about intelligent design is that (unlike Darwinism) it is virtually impossible to test. Old-fashioned biblical creationism at least risked making some hard factual claims -- that the earth was created before the sun, for example. Intelligent design, by contrast, leaves the purposes of the designer wholly mysterious. Presumably any pattern of data in the natural world is consistent with his/her/its existence.
But if we can't infer anything about the design from the designer, maybe we can go the other way. What can we tell about the designer from the design? While there is much that is marvelous in nature, there is also much that is flawed, sloppy and downright bizarre. Some nonfunctional oddities, like the peacock's tail or the human male's nipples, might be attributed to a sense of whimsy on the part of the designer. Others just seem grossly inefficient. In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety."

MSNBC - Software sifts through gravity’s mysteries

MSNBC - Brightest galactic flash ever detected hits Earth

MSNBC - Brightest galactic flash ever detected hits Earth : "A huge explosion halfway across the galaxy packed so much power it briefly altered Earth's upper atmosphere in December, astronomers said Friday."

Will NASA Get Back on Track?

O'Keefe's last day is Friday.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Nuclear fusion 'put to the test'

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Nuclear fusion 'put to the test': "It is three years since Professor Rusi Taleyarkhan made the controversial claim that he had achieved one of the holy grails of science - nuclear fusion.
Since then, he has grown tired of the scepticism of his fellow scientists.
'My lab has been audited, my instruments have been audited, my books have been audited, the data speaks for itself.
'The data has to speak for itself - I mean how can I answer that I know absolutely 100% sure that it is what I think it is? I just have to look at the data and the data have been looked at very carefully.
'In the history of publication I probably will not be able to find one that has gone through this level of scrutiny - if you do, let me know,' he said."

Tilting at Windmills

The New York Times > Opinion: "FINALLY, American environmentalists have a chance to get it right about wind power.
News broke this week of plans for the first big wind energy installation in the Adirondack Park. Ten towering turbines would sprout on the site of an old garnet mine in this tiny town. They'd be visible from the ski slopes at nearby Gore Mountain, and they'd be visible too from the deep wild of the Siamese Ponds Wilderness, one of the loneliest and most beautiful parts of New York's 'forever wild' Adirondack Forest Preserve, the model for a century of American conservation. In fact, it would be hard to imagine a place better suited to illustrate the controversy that wind power is causing in this country.
I know the area well; I've lived most of my adult life in this part of the world, and I've skied and backpacked through the old mine and the woods around it, searched for (and found) lost hunters, encountered its bears and coyotes and fisher, sat on its anonymous peaks and knolls and watched the hawks circle beneath. In fact, this very wilderness - these yellow birches, the bear that left that berry-filled pile of scat, those particular loons laughing on that particular lake - led me to fall in love with the world outdoors.
Which is precisely why I hope those wind turbines rise on the skyline, and as soon as possible.
The planet faces many environmental challenges, but none of them come close to global warming. In the past month new studies have shown that the trigger point for severe climate change may be closer than previously thought, and the possible consequences even more severe. Just to slow the pace of this rapid warming will require every possible response, from more efficient cars to fewer sprawling suburbs to more trains to - well, the list is pretty well endless."

The New York Times > Technology > A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield

The New York Times > Technology > A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield
Looks like "Terminator 4" will be coming out sooner than we expected.

Wearable Warnings: snap crackle pop, back off! - Engadget - www.engadget.com

Wearable Warnings: snap crackle pop, back off! - Engadget - www.engadget.com: "Moral philosophers have historically abhored the easy-way-out concept of desiring to be a being of lesser cognizance than that of humans, with their knowledge of mortality and free-will. But in all reality, there is at least one proper bonus to being without such bothersome social indoctrinations and responsibilities: gestures and bodily reactions to unpleasant situations (the puffer fish inflates, the rattlesnake shakes its tail, etc.). Enter Wearable Warnings, Kind of like a punk looking version of the No Contact Jacket, or the complete apotheosis of the HugJacket: when the fur-striped coat is charged, its hair begins to stand on end; when an aggressor comes into its electrostatic field, they’ll feel their hair start to stand on end too, kind of like a Van de Graaff generator; closer still, and the fur will begin to crackle with electricity; touch the fur, and you get 100,000 volts. Please be sure to switch it off in the subway though, okay?
"

MSNBC - Rovers spot strange shapes on Mars

'Potato vaccine' for hepatitis B

BBC NEWS Health: "An edible vaccine against the deadly liver disease hepatitis B may have been developed by scientists in the US.
Chunks of genetically modified potato may be enough to give immunity without the need for an injection, they hope.
Researchers in Buffalo, New York, found signs of immunity in 60% of the 42 people who tested the potato vaccine.
An oral vaccine would be an affordable way to tackle a disease which kills 1m people a year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported."

Scientists Announce Smallest Extra-Solar Planet Yet Discovered And Find Outer Limits Of The Pulsar Planetary System

Science News Article | Reuters.com

Science News Article | Reuters.com: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An outcast star is zooming out of the Milky Way, the first ever seen escaping the galaxy, astronomers reported on Tuesday.
The star is heading for the emptiness of intergalactic space after being ejected from the heart of the Milky Way following a close encounter with a black hole, said Warren Brown, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The outcast is going so fast -- over 1.5 million mph -- that astronomers believe it was lobbed out of the galaxy by the tremendous force of a black hole thought to sit at the Milky Way's center. That speed is about twice the velocity needed to escape the galaxy's grip, Brown said by telephone.
'We have never before seen a star moving fast enough to completely escape the confines of our galaxy,' he said. 'We're tempted to call it the outcast star because it was forcefully tossed from its home.'"

Human Cloning Gets the Go Ahead

My Way News

Keep in mind, this does not actually result in a human being.

I Come from Planet Tiffany....

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some planets in our galaxy could harbor an unexpected treasure: a thick layer of diamonds hiding under the surface, astronomers reported on Monday.
No diamond planet exists in our solar system, but some planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way might have enough carbon to produce a diamond layer, Princeton University astronomer Marc Kuchner said in a telephone news conference.
That kind of planet would have to develop differently from Earth, Mars and Venus, so-called silicate planets made up mostly of silicon-oxygen compounds.
Carbon planets might form more like some meteorites than like Earth, which is believed to have condensed from a disk of gas orbiting the sun.
In gas with extra carbon or too little oxygen, carbon compounds like carbides and graphite could form instead of silicates, Kuchner said at a conference on extrasolar planets in Aspen, Colorado.
Any condensed graphite would change into diamond under the high pressures inside carbon planets, potentially forming diamond layers inside the planets many miles thick."

Link Between The Whale And Its Closest Relative, The Hippo, Found

Learn more about why this is a great discovery

Rodhocetus
Originally uploaded by ReidAnderes.

Interesting Too

I'm just adding some more evidence against "Intelligent Design Theory"

Recapitulation Theory (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) - States that stages in the evolution of the species are reproduced during the developmental stages of the individual (Chambers 1990). For example, a human embryo would start out as a "fish" embryo then work it's way through its evolutionary ancestry till reaching a full human stage. Promoted by Ernst Haeckel in the late19th century. This idea has been debunked for decades and is no longer in use.

Embryo homology (comparative embryology, developmental homology) - closely related organisms go through similar stages in their embryonic development (Campbell 1993). Embryonic structures can be adapted to different ultimate uses, for example, pharyngeal arches ("gill slits"). Or structures may be removed, for example, the tail of a human embryo.

embryo3, originally uploaded by ReidAnderes.