• we shot that: sierra hull's new videos

    Updated: 2011-07-31 20:00:27

  • Are Cancers New Species? Probably Not—and It Probably Doesn't Matter | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-29 23:30:00
    Yesterday, an intriguing story circulated popped up on the web. In a new paper, a UC Berkeley biologist suggested that cancer—ravenously reproducing, endowed with radically different DNA from normal human cell—is actually a new species of parasite. Because such massive genetic rearrangement is reminiscent of how new species sometimes form, it could be said that cancers were doing just that. Some site picked up the story and ran it at face value: new species are a catchy idea, and cancer is always an interesting topic. But to anyone who's studied evolutionary biology or recognized the name of the lead researcher, it was a bizarre reminder of both how easy it is take scientific papers at face value and how quickly we forget. To understand the researcher's claim for yourself, it helps to remember that "species" is just a word made up by humans to help us better understand the world...

  • Impatient Futurist: Forget 3D Screens—We Need 3D Audio, Like in Real Life | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-29 19:30:00
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  • Bringing Power to the People—by Plugging Into the Sahara | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-29 08:40:00
    What if 35,000 square miles of barren desert could meet the entire planet's energy needs? That is the provocative premise that launched Europe's DESERTEC, a plan to erect vast fields of solar thermal collectors in North Africa, the Middle East, and southern Europe. The collectors would heat water to produce steam to drive electricity-generating turbines. The scientists and engineers behind the project hope that DESERTEC will be able to supply 15 to 20 percent of Europe's electricity by the middle of the century...

  • News From Simons Center

    Updated: 2011-07-29 00:51:00
    The Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook has a new web-site, and this week their annual summer workshop got underway, talks available in very high quality video here. Luca Mazzucato, a postdoc there, has started putting together … Continue reading →

  • 20 Things You Didn't Know About...: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About... Stress | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-27 17:05:00
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  • The Brain: A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-26 18:30:00
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  • Today’s physics news: We may not have found God particle after all, admits Hadron chief and was the universe born spinning?

    Updated: 2011-07-26 10:39:10
    Today’s physics news: We may not have found God particle after all, admits Hadron chief and was the universe born spinning? We may not have found God particle after all, admits Hadron chief Fevered speculation about the discovery of the so-called “God particle” by physicists at Europe’s underground atom-smasher experiment is premature, according to the [...]

  • String Theorists Throw SUSY Under the Bus

    Updated: 2011-07-25 16:03:55
    Over the past few days the results of the 2011 LHC run have been revealed at the EPS-HEP 2011 conference in Grenoble, where a press conference today marked the beginning of the next part of the conference, featuring summary talks. … Continue reading →

  • Living in Interesting Times

    Updated: 2011-07-25 06:20:01
    Skip to content Asymptotia Designing Women Living in Interesting Times Published by Clifford on July 24, 2011 in research science and work 0 Comments As far as particle physics and big questions about how the universe works , we are living in very interesting times , I’m happy to say . We’ve all been waiting for the Large Hadron Collider LHC for over two decades , and now it turns out I’ve been hearing from a number of people in various conversations here at the center that the machine is running really well impressively so . That alone is great , but an interesting thing is that we are almost certainly going to know something significant before the end of the current scientific run next year , maybe even by the end of 2011 Recall see posts like this one that the primary goal is to

  • Neon Nerves for Safer Surgery | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-24 15:50:00
    Even tiny nerves obscured by trauma or disease would be hard for a surgeon to miss if they glowed neon green. That is the idea behind a new technique invented by surgeon Quyen T. Nguyen and her colleagues at the University of California, San Diego. Her team discovered a molecule that sticks to nerve cells, tagged it with a fluorescent compound, and injected it into mice. Within two hours the rodents’ peripheral nerves stood out as if traced with luminescent paint and stayed that way for six hours... Image courtesy Quyen T. Nguyen M.D. Ph.D/University of California San Diego

  • Are Toxins in Seafood Causing ALS, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's? | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-22 17:10:00
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  • Results from EPS-HEP 2011

    Updated: 2011-07-21 22:58:05
    Results from the EPS-HEP 2011 conference that began today are starting to appear. These include the first results making use of most of the 2011 LHC run data. This is a factor of 30 or so more data than that … Continue reading →

  • NASA Astrophysics: It Really Is This Bad | Cosmic Variance

    Updated: 2011-07-20 18:38:43
    Shorter House of Representatives: NASA shouldn’t do astrophysics anymore. Via the Tracker, an article by Eric Hand in Nature News that puts the fiasco in helpful graphical form. Misleading graphic alert! The vertical scale starts at $0.5 billion, not at $0. But taking that into account merely changes the situation from “complete annihilation” to “devastating [...]

  • Five Books on Relativity and Cosmology | Cosmic Variance

    Updated: 2011-07-20 16:07:50
    A website called The Browser has been doing a fun collection of interviews, where they ask experts in different fields to recommend five books, either starting points for non-experts or books that they were influenced by themselves. Read Randall Grahm on wine, Jim Shepard on short stories, Deborah Blum on science and society, or Qiu [...]

  • First International Spring School on Particle Physics and Philosophy

    Updated: 2011-07-19 19:34:19
    From an article in the CERN Courier I recently learned about a program that brought together physicists and philosophers of science earlier this year around the topic of philosophy and particle physics. This was the First International Spring School on … Continue reading →

  • Questions About the Multiverse

    Updated: 2011-07-19 18:50:01
    The August issue of Scientific American has the multiverse on the cover, with a skeptical feature article on the topic by George F. R. Ellis, Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, which argues that heavily promoted multiverse research isn’t really testable … Continue reading →

  • Big Picture: We're Looking for a Few Good Astronauts | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-19 18:45:00
    Brian Shiro always dreamed of becoming an astronaut, and he planned his life accordingly. He studied planetary science in graduate school, interned at NASA three times, learned to fly, and ran marathons. Then in January 2009, after beating out 3,500 other applicants to qualify for one of the final rounds of NASA’s astronaut selection process, he learned that he had missed the cut. Until recently NASA was the only game in town for aspiring astronauts like Shiro. But for the first time in the history of manned spaceflight, astronauts will soon be able to reach the final frontier in vehicles neither designed nor operated by a government space agency. Once NASA completes its last shuttle mission, scheduled for this month, its manned exploration arm will become little more than a deep-pocketed customer For seats on private space vehicles, each of which will require trained pilots and crew. That shift could open up outer space to a new class of astronaut, trained and employed more like airline pilots than Apollo explorers... Image: Astronauts4Hire member Laura Stiles experiments in microgravity. Courtesy of NASA/A4H.

  • When Astronomy Met Computer Science | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-19 18:35:00
    For Kirk Borne, the information revolution began 11 years ago while he was working at NASA’s National Space Science Data Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. At a conference, another astronomer asked him if the center could archive a terabyte of data that had been collected from the MACHO sky survey, a project designed to study mysterious cosmic bodies that emit very little light or other radiation. Nowadays, plenty of desktop computers can store a terabyte on a hard drive. But when Borne ran the request up the flagpole, his boss almost choked. “That’s impossible!” he told Borne. “Don’t you realize that the entire data set NASA has collected over the past 45 years is one terabyte?” “That’s when the lightbulb went off,” says Borne, who is now an associate professor of computational and data sciences at George Mason University. “That single experiment had produced as much data as the previous 15,000 experiments. I realized then that we needed to do something not only to make all that data available to scientists but also to enable scientific discovery from all that information.” The tools of astronomy have changed drastically over just the past generation, and our picture of the universe has changed with them. Gone are the days of photographic plates that recorded the sky snapshot by painstaking snapshot. Today more than a dozen observatories on Earth and in space let researchers eyeball vast swaths of the universe in multiple wavelengths, from radio waves to gamma rays. And with the advent of digital detectors, computers have replaced darkrooms. These new capabilities provide a much more meaningful way to understand our place in the cosmos, but they have also unleashed a baffling torrent of data. Amazing discoveries might be in sight, yet hidden within all the information. Since 2000, the $85 million Sloan Digital Sky Survey at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico has imaged more than one-third of the night sky, capturing information on more than 930,000 galaxies and 120,000 quasars. Computational analysis of Sloan’s prodigious data set has uncovered evidence of some of the earliest known astronomical objects, determined that most large galaxies harbor supermassive black holes, and even mapped out the three-dimensional structure of the local universe. “Before Sloan, individual researchers or small groups dominated astronomy,” says Robert Brunner, an astronomy professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “You’d go to a telescope, get your data, and analyze it. Then Sloan came along, and suddenly there was this huge data set designed for one thing, but people were using it for all kinds of other interesting things. So you have this sea change in astronomy that allows people who aren’t affiliated with a project to ask entirely new questions.” A new generation of sky surveys promises to catalog literally billions and billions of astronomical objects. Trouble is, there are not enough graduate students in the known universe to classify all of them. When the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) in Cerro Pachón, Chile, aims its 3.2-
billion-pixel digital camera (the world’s largest) at the night sky in 2019, it will capture an area 49 times as large as the moon in each 15-second exposure, 2,000 times a night. Those snapshots will be stitched together over a decade to eventually form a motion picture of half the visible sky. The LSST, producing 30 terabytes of data nightly, will become the centerpiece of what some experts have dubbed the age of peta­scale astronomy—that’s 1015 bits (what Borne jokingly calls “a tonabytes”)... Image: Contrasting views of the Lagoon nebula. Top: Infrared observations from the Paranal Observatory in Chile cut through dust and gas to reveal a crisp view of baby stars within. Bottom: A similar view in visible light appears opaque. Courtesy of ESO and VVV

  • How Bad Luck & Bad Networking Cost Douglas Prasher a Nobel Prize | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-18 15:15:00
    In December 2008 Douglas Prasher took a week off from his job driving a courtesy van at the Penney Toyota car dealership in Huntsville, Alabama, to attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm. It was the first vacation he and his wife, Gina, had taken in years. On the day of the awards, he donned a rented copy of the penguin suit that all male Nobel attendees are required to wear, along with a pair of leather shoes that a Huntsville store had let him borrow. At the Nobel banquet, sitting beneath glittering chandeliers suspended from a seven-story ceiling, Prasher got his first sip of a dessert wine that he had dreamed of tasting for 30 years. When the waitress was done pouring it into his glass, he asked if she could leave the bottle at the table. She couldn’t, she told him, because the staff planned to finish it later. His buddies back at Penney Toyota were going to love that story, he thought. Prasher’s trip would have been impossible without the sponsorship of biologist Martin Chalfie and chemist and biologist Roger Tsien, who not only invited the Prashers but paid for their airfare and hotel. Chalfie and Tsien, along with Osama Shimomura, an organic chemist and marine biologist, had won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The three researchers were sharing the $1.4 million award for the development of green fluorescent protein (GFP), a molecule that makes certain jellyfish glow. Starting in the mid-1990s, scientists began using GFP as a tracer for studying biochemical processes. The results were spectacular: The luminous protein made it possible to glimpse the inner workings of cells, tissues, and organs in unprecedented detail. Had life turned out slightly differently, Prasher could have been attending the ceremony not as a guest but as a laureate. More than two decades earlier, it was Prasher who cloned the gene for GFP while working as a molecular biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. The cloning was the first step in using GFP as a tracer chemical in organisms other than jellyfish. Prasher proposed an experiment to see if the GFP gene could make bacteria glow, but he was not able to pull it off. In 1992, when he was about to leave Woods Hole for another science job, he gave the gene to his colleagues Chalfie and Tsien. They went on to perform the experiments that made GFP and its variants into a powerful research tool, the foundation of a multimillion-dollar industry. Prasher had the vision before anybody else did. But he failed to make it a reality. If GFP’s progression from an obscure protein into a biological laser pointer is a quintessential scientific success story, Prasher’s journey from Woods Hole to Penney Toyota is a tale of individual and institutional failure. His vanishing act provides a glimpse into what it takes to flourish in modern-day science, where mentorship, networking, and the ability to secure funding can be as important as talent and intelligence. And then there is the role of luck. In life as in science, small underlying variables can translate into wildly divergent outcomes. One misplaced base pair in a DNA sequence can define the gap between health and disease. The paths leading to career success or failure, too, can lie a hair’s breadth apart...

  • The Priest-Physicist Who Would Marry Science to Religion | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-14 16:50:00
    When he describes his line of work, John Polkinghorne jests, he encounters “more suspicion than a vegetarian butcher.” For the particle physicist turned Anglican priest, dissonance comes with the territory. Science parses the concrete: the structure of the atom and the workings of the brain. Religion confronts the intangible: questions about ethics and the purpose of life. Taken literally, the biblical story of Genesis contradicts modern cosmology and evolutionary biology in full. Yet 21 years ago, in a move that made many eyes roll, Polkinghorne began working to unite the two sides by seeking a mechanism that would explain how God might act in the physical world. Now that work has met its day of reckoning. At a series of meetings at Oxford University last July and September, timed to celebrate Polkinghorne’s 80th birthday, physicists and theologians presented their answers to the questions he has so relentlessly pursued. Do any physical theories allow room for God to influence human actions and events? And, more controversially, is there any concrete evidence of God’s hand at work in the physical world? Image of the Carina Nebula courtesy of NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

  • The Trillions of Microbes That Call Us Home—and Help Keep Us Healthy | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-13 18:35:00
    In the intensive care nursery at Duke University Medical Center, doctors and nurses attend to premature infants in rows of incubators surrounded by ventilators and monitors. As new parents holding packages of breast milk watch their tiny babies, neo­natologist Susan LaTuga makes her rounds, checking vital signs and evaluating how the infants tolerate feeding. She consults with nurses, dietitians, and pharmacists about the course of the day’s treatment for the babies, some of whom weigh as little as one pound and were born as much as 17 weeks early. At the end of her shift, LaTuga stops at a freezer and inspects stool samples from some of the infants that are at the center of a remarkable new study. Across the Duke campus, technicians are waiting to analyze them with a powerful gene sequencer capable of penetrating the hidden world of the billions of microorganisms growing inside each infant. LaTuga is one of several medical researchers at Duke working with microbial ecologists to study the development of the human microbiome—the enormous population of microbes, including bacteria, fungi, and viruses, that live in the human body, predominantly in the gut. There are 20 times as many of these microbes as there are cells in the body, up to 200 trillion in an adult, and each of us hosts at least 1,000 different species. Seen through the prism of the microbiome, a person is not so much an individual human body as a superorganism made up of diverse ecosystems, each teeming with microscopic creatures that are essential to our well-being. “Our hope is that if we can understand the normal microbial communities of healthy babies, then we can manipulate unhealthy ones,” LaTuga says. The Duke study is just one of many projects begun in the past five years that use genetic sequencing to explore how the ­diversity of the microbiome impacts our health. Two of the largest efforts are the Human Microbiome Project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (See “Your Microbial Menagerie,” page 4), and the European Union’s Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract. Although these groups have only just begun to publish their findings, it is already clear that the micro­biome is much more complex and very likely more critical to human health than anyone suspected. Understanding and controlling the diversity of our germs, as opposed to assaulting them with anti­biotics, could be the key to a range of future medical treatments... Image: Masterfile

  • This Week’s Leak

    Updated: 2011-07-12 14:41:51
    Everyone in the HEP community is breathlessly awaiting the release of results from the 2011 LHC run, expected to come at the EPS-HEP 2011 conference in Grenoble starting July 21. A public press conference has been announced for July 25. … Continue reading →

  • Rediscovering Consciousness in People Diagnosed as "Vegetative" | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-06 08:45:00
    The woman in the wheelchair wearing burgundy scrubs is lovely, with full eyebrows arching over her closed eyes. Joseph Giacino, director of rehabilitation neuro­psychology at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, squats beside her, looking into her face. “Hi, Kellie, it’s Dr. Giacino. How are you? Can you open your eyes?” No response. Two and a half months ago, during what was supposed to be a simple nasal operation for sinusitis, Kellie’s left carotid artery was accidentally sliced open, starving half her brain of blood and oxygen. Since that day, she has not spoken or clearly responded in any way. She opens her eyes, and sometimes she groans or gropes toward people nearby. Most of the time she seems to be asleep. Is Kellie still in there? Giacino, 52, an expert in disorders of consciousness, will establish her condition more precisely with this exam. First, though, he needs Kellie to be more alert. He rubs her arm and her leg firmly, applying deep-muscle pressure, and her dark eyes pop open. She begins to breathe heavily and to shake. Giacino soothes her. “I’m just waking you up,” he says gently. “You had some bleeding in your brain, and we’re trying to help you get better.” The expression on her face is intense and hard to read. It mixes fear with annoyance, as if she has just woken from a nightmare. “Every kid has a dad and a…” he prompts. She moans, or is she trying to say “mom”? It is difficult to tell whether she is oblivious or struggling to respond. When she makes eye contact and holds it, she seems just as aware as anyone else in the room. By her fierce expression, she looks as if she is about to tell Giacino to buzz off. Yet she does not speak. That is why this exam, calibrated to distinguish between reflexes and real cognition, is so important. When Giacino hands her a toy ball, she grabs it, smoothly and naturally. It is a good sign. Just a few years ago, a patient like Kellie would have been written off. Anyone who did not regain consciousness within a few weeks after a stroke or head injury was said to have no hope for meaningful improvement. But in the past decade, a series of increasingly spectacular experiments conducted by Giacino and Weill Cornell Medical Center neurologist Nicholas Schiff has proved that this bleak verdict is often wrong. The semiconscious brain is not a useless sack of neural goo, they have shown, and not all damaged brains are the same. Disorders of consciousness come in shades of gray, from severely impaired “vegetative states” to the perplexing “minimally conscious state” in which people slip into and out of awareness. By studying patients who emerge into consciousness after years in limbo, Schiff and Giacino have shown that the brain can sometimes fix itself even decades after damage. They have discovered apparently vegetative people whose minds can still imagine, still recognize, still respond. In turn, these profoundly disabled people have opened the door to one of the last great mysteries of science: the nature of consciousness...

  • 20 Things You Didn't Know About...: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About... Crystals | DISCOVER Magazine

    Updated: 2011-07-05 18:00:00
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