The Cool Blue Blog

Anatomy of genius

Brain researchers have found a significant correlation between early brain growth and intelligence.

Several studies in children have shown that those with larger brains, measured with imaging studies or as head circumference, tend to score higher on tests of cognitive function. Similar associations have been found in adults.

But this is predictive only in children and head size at birth is not as important as head growth during infancy

By the age of one, mean head circumference increased from 34.9cm at birth to 46.6cm.

Head growth after infancy was slower. Mean head circumference increased to 50.9cm by four years and to 53.4cm by eight years.

Average full-scale IQ was 106.3 at four years and 105.6 at eight years. The investigators report that only prenatal growth and growth during infancy were associated with later IQ.

At four years, after adjusting for parental factors, there was an average increase in full-scale IQ of 2.41 points for each one standard deviation increase in head circumference at birth and 1.97 points for each 1-SD increase in head growth during infancy.

This was conditional on head size at birth.

Head circumference at birth was no longer associated with IQ at eight years.

However, head growth during infancy remained significantly predictive, with full-scale IQ increasing an average of 1.56 points for each 1-SD increase in head growth.

Studies on adults to determine what factors influence intelligence are also ongoing at the MIND (Mental Illness and Neurodiscovery) Institute in Albuquerque. But it turns out, that just by looking at brains, you can tell nothing special.

When looking for creativity inside a human brain, the first thing you notice is -- nothing unusual.

Most scientists say that current brain imaging technology doesn't tell you much more.

"If I showed you two brains side by side, one with an IQ of 150, one with an IQ of 75, I can't tell the difference," says Jay Giedd of the National Institute of Mental Health, one of the most experienced researchers in the field.

How ever, scientists developing techniques that qualitatively analyze brain images are making more progress.

"We can make quantitative assessments of how much gray matter they have in every single area, and we can use that to predict what their IQ might be," Haier says. "This is in the very early stage, and I think this is going to be very interesting."

Dr. Rex Jung of the MIND Institute and Dr. Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine, are using MRIs to measure various parts of the brain and what they find is pretty interesting.

So far, says Haier, he has found a strong correlation between intelligence and the size and shape of certain brain structures -- including parts of the superior parietal lobe (involved in sensory perception) and parts of the prefrontal cortex (associated with complex thinking, personality, planning, coordination).

Intelligence research is full of surprises. For example, the brains of smarter people, as measured by IQ, tend to be less active but more efficient, Haier says.

And, it seems, smart women are fundamentally different from smart men

...based on structural MRI scans that men and women think differently. For men in Haier's study, having more gray matter in certain areas corresponds to a higher IQ, while in women, it made no difference.

But with women, the amount of white matter in completely different areas is what corresponds to intelligence. (In both sexes, gray matter is made up of neurons that process information, while white matter is made of the neurons that connect different parts of the brain)....

"If a man and a woman both have a brain injury or a stroke at the same brain area, it could well be they have completely different effects," Haier says.

These conclusions, as you might guess, are controversial and have yet to be confirmed.

I'll keep you up to date

Political Dreams

Dr Kelly Bulkeley of the John F. Kennedy University in California has been studying how cultural differences manifest themselves in dreams. A cultural difference that has caught his attention over the past few years is political affiliation. Why political ideology?

Political ideology is an appealing cultural variable to study for several reasons. First, most people are easily able to describe where they stand in the contemporary political landscape. This makes it relatively simple to distinguish different cultural groups for the purposes of comparative analysis of dream content. Second, a number of people feel great emotional intensity about their chosen political causes. For such people their political affiliation is a major element in their psychological identity, their sense of who they are. This increases the likelihood that political ideology as a cultural variable will have a discernible presence in dream content, particularly in the dreams of people who profess a strong adherence to a particular political party or ideological point of view.

The third reason why political ideology is an interesting cultural factor to study in dream content is that it holds the promise of opening new ways of looking at the world of contemporary politics. In the aftermath of the 2000 U.S. Presidential campaign, in which the Republican George W. Bush defeated the Democrat Al Gore in a extremely controversial and bitterly contested election, it seems relevant to explore the question of why the members of the country’s two major political organizations are so profoundly divided against each other. The angry, mutually scornful arguments between leading Republicans and Democrats indicate that the differences between the two political groups go much deeper than public policy and ultimately touch on issues that are psychological and even existential in nature.

He has done a number of studies since 2000, the most recent of which has some interesting findings that are not inconsistent with past discoveries. A recent article in the Ottawa Citizen which is a precurser to a published work in Dreams, a journal of the American Psychological Association, begins

If you've recently dreamed about sex with a stranger, flying or the dead coming back to life, chances are you're a liberal.

Sex, it seems, is one of the differences Dr Bulkeley found.

Liberals were far more likely to have sexual dreams about strangers and a variety of partners, while liberal women showed a greater tendency toward same-sex fantasies than their conservative counterparts (24 vs. four per cent).

"Especially for liberal women, there was a far greater variety in sexual partners and incidents of homosexuality," Bulkeley said. "Liberals tended to show a greater willingness to experiment with different things."

Conservatives, by comparison, were far more likely to report having sexual dreams about their spouse or current partner.

But there are other differences as well. The dreams of Liberals tend to be more fantastical while conservatives were more reality based

...liberals are more restless sleepers and have a higher number of bizarre, surreal dreams - including fantasy settings and a wide variety of sexual encounters. Conservatives' dreams were, on average, far more mundane and focused on realistic people, situations and settings.

"Conservatives seem to have more of a focus on the here and now and the material world, whereas liberals, in contrast, seem to have a much wider sphere of imaginative activity," he said.

"They don't just dream about what is, but what could be or what they wish could be."

Back in 2002, Dr Bulkeley found two interpretations to explain this

One way to read these findings would be this: The dreams of the people on the political right reveal them to be insecure, anxious, conflict-ridden, and emotionally repressed.  When they are not terrified of imaginary threats they cling to the comforts of the status quo. They seek a kind of power through their political views that they lack within their deeper selves. By contrast, the dreams of people on the political left show them to be creative, progressive, and imaginative. They are confident in their abilities and willing to think beyond the boundaries of the present to envision new possibilities for the future.

Such an interpretation would be consistent with the findings of this study. However, an alternative reading with just as much plausibility would be this: The dreams of people on the political right reveal them to be highly attuned to the actual dangers and threats of the waking world. These people are realistic, grounded, honest about the frailties of human nature in the face of danger, and appreciative of the good things in present-day life. By contrast, the dreams of people on the political left show them to be irrational, naïve, utopian, and deluded by their own fantasies. These people are out of touch with the real world, and they wish for powers they do not have in actuality.

Although they may seem mutually exclusive, both of these interpretations have merit. Indeed, I would suggest the best way of understanding this study’s main findings is to appreciate how the dreams reveal both the greatest personality strengths and the greatest personality weaknesses of people on each end of the political spectrum.

And, it seems, liberals are more restless. Liberals had a higher precentage of nightmares than did conservatives. One such instance included in the Ottowa Citizen article involved a Liberal meeting George Bush.

"I was at a presidential rally where George W. Bush was speaking. There was so much red, white and blue. Bush speaks: 'There are those who say that we are giving up our civil liberties. But I say, we should be proud to sacrifice our freedoms for America!' The crowd went wild, clapping, cheering and waving flags. I awoke in a cold sweat."

Dr Bulkeley says

"With the change from the Clinton to the Bush administrations, there are waking world reasons for liberals to be more concerned and stressed, and conservatives to be less concerned," Mr. Bulkeley said.

"Dreams are like political cartoons of the mind -- mental op-ed columns. Sometimes dreams reflect internal commentaries on the state of things."

Indeed back in 2005, Dr Bulkeley wrote that just prior to the Presidential election, Liberals were literally frightened.

As the US Presidential election enters its final tense weeks, liberals are becoming increasingly agitated in their dreams, with a rising number of nightmares featuring aggressive attacks by President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and hordes of zombie Republicans.

...From a 22-year old college student, a liberal woman at a predominantly conservative school in a Midwest swing state:  “I've got to catch a flight, so I enter the airport and walk down a long, downhill hallway.  I enter into a cave/tunnel that is very dark.  I see  bloody people everywhere (lots of bright red zombie-like people) and lots of  people in blue who are clean and pure-looking.  I don't want to be rude, so I don't comment or ask why this is.  I come out of the tunnel into light, and am in some kind of theme-park.  Tons more people in bloody red or blue are all around.  A blue person grabs me and says she is trying to protect me from the red.  I see that she has the Kerry/Edwards logo on, and this is what all the blue people support.  All the reds are Bush supporters.  They all look like zombies, and I see them attacking people.   I hop onto the Kerry Campaign trail-literally.  It is a long line of connected wooden boats.  I climb from the back car towards the front.  I find Edwards on one boat, and Kerry is in the front boat.   I feel safe, but there is a huge disruption of some kind and I find myself alone again with all of the zombie Bush supporters pulling me in every direction and trying to feed me some kind of processed meats from their barbecue (sausage/hot dog looking things).  I don't trust this meat and find that it is human flesh from the Kerry supporters. I try to get away and am suddenly falling down a huge waterfall or waterslide with zombies grabbing me.  I wash into the dark tunnel again, and that’s when I woke up.” (As pointed out by the dreamer, the red and blue colors match the “red state, blue state” division of the electoral map.)

Interesting to me, in the latest study Dr Bulkeley was surprised to find that Conservatives were more likely than Liberals to be Lucid dreamers

Mr. Bulkeley said that the most surprising result in his study is that conservatives showed a higher tendency for lucid dreaming -- being aware they were asleep. Conservatives largely reported using their "dream awareness" to wake themselves up from uncomfortable situations and nightmares, he said.

I have written about this fascinating subject here.

The conclusion?

Overall, conservative males appear to sleep the most soundly and remember the fewest dreams, while liberal women are the most restless sleepers and fantastical dreamers.

"While some of my colleagues think my research reinforces the stereotype of repressed, uptight conservatives, it also shows that many liberals may he hanging on the edge of mental well-being," Mr. Bulkeley said. "There may be a lot of hidden distress and unpleasantness in the liberal mind."

Huh.

Ontogeny, phylogeny recapitulated

The loss of a 3 year old child 3 million years ago is giving new insight into the early development of evolutionary change that resulted in humans.

Although scientists have found bones and bone fragments of children from this and other species of human predecessors, and a few skeletons, the discovery represents one of the most complete individuals ever recovered and by far the oldest. Bones of young children are so small and soft that few survive.

Remains of children are especially valued by anthropologists because they give critical insight into development.

"We've never had anything so complete before," said Donald C. Johanson of Arizona State University, who discovered Lucy. "This is going to allow us to have extraordinary insight into the growth and development of this species."

...The discovery of a child also allows scientists to begin to study how the species developed. The child's brain size suggests that the species' brain matured relatively slowly.

"If the brain was developing slower, as in humans or similar to what you see in humans, here might have also been the beginnings of behavioral shifts towards being more human," Zeresenay said.

In this case, the find is especially exciting because this particular species is thought to be the mid point in the evolutionary change between ape and human.

The youngster's fossilized remains, the first to fully exhibit the mixed ape-human characteristics in a child, were found in the remote, harsh Dikika area of northeastern Ethiopia in 2000 when an expedition member spotted the face of the skull poking out from a steep dusty hillside....

Where the child's throat once was, Zeresenay found a hyoid bone, which is located in the voice box and supports muscles of the tongue and throat. It is the first time that bone has been discovered in such an old fossil of a human predecessor. It appears more primitive than a human hyoid and more like those in apes, suggesting that the 1 1/2 -foot toddler sounded more like a chimp than a human.

"If you imagine how this child would have sounded if it was crying out for its mother, its cry would appeal more to chimp ears than to human ears," said Fred Spoor of University College London, who is helping to study the remains. "Even though it's a very early human ancestor, she would sound more apelike than humanlike."

The child's lower limbs confirm earlier findings that the species walked upright like humans. But the shoulder blades resemble a young gorilla's. Along with the long arms, curved fingers and inner-ear cavity, the bones provide new evidence supporting those who believe the creatures may have still climbed trees as well.

"I see this species as foraging bipeds -- walking on two feet but climbing trees when necessary, such as to forage for food," Zeresenay said, adding that more research will be needed to be certain of that controversial conclusion.

The lower body that walks upright with an upper body that is suited for climbing trees along with the slow-brain development all indicate that we are looking at what appears to be a transitional species when viewed from our perspective.

But how does this happen specifically? One old idea has been revived and is gaining support as H. Allen Orr explains in his book review of Sean Carroll's “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” in the New Yorker

Evo devo, punk-band-inspired slang for “evolutionary developmental biology,” holds the promise of a radical new way to look at life’s evolution. Its central thesis is simple. Organisms show two kinds of change through time: during the lifetime of a single animal (you don’t look much like the egg you started as) and during the evolutionary history of a biological lineage (you don’t look much like your three-and-a-half-billion-year-old ancestor). Evo devo’s key claim is that the first kind of change can provide important insights into the second.

The notion that there’s a connection between evolution and development—the growth of an organism from a single cell, through an embryo, to an adult—is both natural and old. It was especially popular in the nineteenth century; Ernst Haeckel’s law of recapitulation—the proposition that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—captured the spirit of the age.

      

The theory holds that all the basic elements that make all creatures of a certain type exists within their DNA. And associated with each gene is a "switch" which either turns the gene on or off for that creature.

Not all our DNA is given over to genes, though; there are also long stretches of so-called noncoding DNA, which sit between genes. So as we move along a string of DNA, we might first come to a gene, and then to a stretch of noncoding DNA, and then to another gene, and so on. Despite the relative fame of genes and the relative obscurity of noncoding DNA, more than ninety-five per cent of our DNA is noncoding....

Evo devo’s first big finding is that all animals are built from essentially the same genes. In the past few decades, biologists collected thousands of genetic mutations that disrupt the normal course of an embryo’s development. (Most of this work involved the humble fruit fly.) By characterizing how particular mutations derail the growth of embryos, biologists were able to figure out which genes control key steps in animal development. In one of the biggest breakthroughs, biologists worked out how fruit-fly embryos decide which of their ends should be the head, which the tail, and what should go between. Part of the answer involves what are called Hox genes. Different Hox genes get expressed in different parts of a fly’s body, and each Hox gene tells that body part what appendage it should grow. A Hox gene expressed in the head, for example, might tell the head to grow antennae, while a Hox gene expressed in the body might tell the body to grow legs. If you tinker experimentally with Hox genes, you get the stuff of B movies: mutant flies, for example, that have legs, not antennae, growing out of their heads.

But the truly surprising thing about Hox genes turns out to be evolutionary. All animals have Hox genes, and nearly all animals use their Hox genes to determine which appendage should go where along the axis that runs from head to tail. Given that the major animal groups, among them arthropods (now including insects), mollusks (snails), annelids (worms), and chordates (human beings), were in place at the start of the Cambrian period, Hox genes must be at least half a billion years old.

What’s more, plenty of important genes turn out to be this old.

             

Hox genes along with other genes have been dubbed "took-kit" genes because together these genes are necessary to lay out the basic design of an animal. But many of these "tool-kit" genes are generic

The same gene, for example, that triggers eye development in fruit flies also triggers eye development in mice. Indeed, genetically engineered flies will happily build eyes if supplied only with the mouse gene. (They build fly eyes, not mouse eyes.)

Proponents of Evo Devo say that because of all this, evolution's primary mechanism is the switch configurations; which is how you can see something like an animal with the upper body of a gorilla that also walks upright.

Evo devo’s emphasis on switch-throwing represents a profound departure from evolutionary biology’s long obsession with genes. Animal evolution works not so much by changing genes, Carroll maintains, but by changing when and where a conserved set of genes is expressed. In the lingo, evolution is regulatory (involving patterns of gene expression), not structural (involving the precise proteins coded by genes). You can think of this distinction in terms of those light switches. Imagine two houses that were built from the same blueprint and that were initially identical. But now, years later, we notice that they look different at night. In one, the first floor is bright and the second floor dim; in the other, the opposite is true. This difference could have arisen in two ways. Maybe the houses now feature different lights; the owners of the first house might, for instance, have replaced bulbs on the first floor with brighter ones; the other owners might have done the same thing on the second floor. But maybe—and this is the evo-devo picture—the owners of the first house have switched on most first-floor lights and switched off most second-floor lights; the owners of the second house might have done the reverse. Evo devo tells us that animal species look different not because their structural bits and pieces have changed but because they switch on and off the same old bits and pieces in different combinations. Roughly speaking, then, penguins and people differ for the same reason your pancreas and eye differ: they’re expressing different genes.

In the evo-devo view, animals still adapt to their environments by Darwin’s natural selection, but adaptation involves a different kind of genetic change from what biologists used to assume. As a result, evolutionists may need to abandon what Carroll calls their “protein-centric perspective” and look instead to the poorly understood noncoding DNA that sits between genes. Evo devo’s advocates argue that switch-throwing also makes good evolutionary sense. If a gene itself were to change, its altered protein would show up in every tissue that expresses the gene, and the new protein probably wouldn’t work well in some tissue. If a switch were to change, though, the same old protein would show up in all the usual tissues except one. This kind of “modular” change is far less likely to wreak havoc on an organism and so is much more likely to be used by evolution. Indeed, evolution likes modular change for the same reason engineers do: while changing all the metal in an airplane to some new alloy would be asking for trouble, switching the metal in the bathroom door handle to the new alloy would probably go fine.

      

Perhaps the discovery of "baby Lucy" will help to prove or disprove the theories put forth by the Evo Devo group.

 

Haldron collider: Revealer of mysteries or cosmic reset button?

String theory is a way of reconciling General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. It is, at the moment, the most popular theory for doing so. You see, Special Relativity works great as a theory for for large objects. But once you get really small, you run into problems. To reconcile Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity you need a Quantum Field theory. Well there has been some success in this area. There is a Quantum Field Theory for the strong nuclear force, and one for the Weak Nuclear force. But developing quantum field equations for gravity that are consistent with Special Relativity has proved elusive. Having such a field theory would potentially lead to a Unified Field Theory that would be the Holy Grail of the Physical Sciences: a single equation that could describe physical phenomena.

String Theory holds out the promise of this. But there is a problem: at the moment, String Theory is religion, not science. In fact, it can't properly be called a scientific theory at all.

As I've discussed in the evolution "debate", a scientific theory must be falsifiable; that is it must be able to make some predictions that can be tested. This has yet to occur with regards to String Theory. At the moment, it is strictly a mathematical exercise. One of the problems is that the strings are so damn small we don't have any tools that can see them. Of course, the other way to test the theory is to predict the behavior of a system that is consistent with String Theory alone. But to do this, you would need massive amounts of energy.

This is where the Large Haldon Collider comes in.

This is, or will be, a particle accelerator located in Switzerland and being built by CERN. It's so big that it invades France. And with it, scientists hope to get particles accelerated very close to the speed of light and then crash them into each other unleashing huge amounts of energy.

With such a device, some of the predictions of String Theory may be able to be observed. Some of the goals related to String Theory that may be observed by the LHC are

• Is the popular Higgs mechanism for generating elementary particle masses in the Standard Model violated? If not, how many Higgs bosons are there, and what are their masses? ^[2]
• Will the more precise measurements of the masses of baryons continue to be mutually consistent within the Standard Model?
• Do particles have supersymmetric ("SUSY") partners?
• Why are there violations of the symmetry between matter and antimatter?
• Are there extra dimensions, as predicted by various models inspired by string theory, and can we "see" them?

Well that's cool, but some physicists fear that the LHC may destroy the Universe.

...while Physicists have the logistics of the LHC well in hand ideas about its outcome are strictly theoretical. According to one scenario tiny black holes could be produced which hopefully would decay into what is known as Hawking radiation (the tinier the black hole, the faster it evaporates). If these black holes fail to decay, however, the consequences could be disasterous. CERN software developer Ran Livneh has expressed some concerns about the project:

"This physical realm is unknown, and dangerous phenomena might arise…Any physicist will tell you that there is no way to prove that generated black holes will decay. The consequences of being mistaken are unfathomable. This subject deserves serious unbiased discussion."

It would probably be bad if a black hole was generated in the middle of France (right?) mostly because it would not be restricted to France. And while "destroy the Universe" might be a bit hyperbolic, some do worry it might destroy our corner of the universe and that's pretty much all that concerns us.

Some other concerns that have been raised include

• Creation of a stable black hole^[7]
• Creation of strange matter that is more stable than ordinary matter
• Creation of magnetic monopoles that could catalyze proton decay
• Triggering a transition into a different quantum mechanical vacuum (see False vacuum)

CERN did and investigation and concluded

"We find no basis for any conceivable threat."

Cool. I guess we'll find out who's right in November of 2007 when the LHC is projected to be switched on.

Dark Matter

For years scientists have struggled with the fact that based on current knowledge, there isn't enough matter in the universe to hold it together. Specifically, the rotation speed of many observed galaxies is too high for the amount of matter that they contain, and should, as a result, fly apart. But instead, they remain cohesive. As a result of this observation, two theories arose: one says that our understanding of gravity is flawed and the other speculates Dark Matter.

One group of scientists speculate that you can account for current state of the universe by speculating that gravity becomes stronger the futher away from a body of mass you get and also is stronger in weak fields. The model for this theory is called Modified Newtonian Dynamics. But this has been hard to reconcile with general relativity.

The other group speculates that the majority of matter in the universe does not interact with electromatgnetic radiation in the same way as ordinary matter does and therefore is undetectable by direct observation. This type of matter has been dubbed Dark Matter.

But if you can't detect the matter, how is it science? Science, as you may recall from my criticism of Intelligent Design, can only consist of theories that can be tested. So how does one go about finding Dark Matter?

Well Dark Matter may not be able to be seen but, according to the theory, it must have a gravitational effect or there would be no need to speculate its existence in the first place.

Recently astronomers cleverly observed the collision of two galaxies to observe the effects of Dark Matter and as a result claim to have the proof that the pervasive substance exists

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Magellan optical telescopes were used to observe the violent collision between two large galaxy clusters 3 billion light years away. The force of the collision separated the dark and luminous matter, allowing a clear identification. Although scientists are yet to determine what form this mysterious dark matter may take, the observations are strong evidence that most of the matter in the universe is dark (Astrophysical J. and Astrophysical J. Letters to be published).

It is clear that these new observations make it more difficult to justify continued work on modified gravitation theories.

“Regardless of how one modifies gravity, it should still generally point to where most of the mass is,” says Maxim Markevitch at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was involved in the research. “If the only matter in this cluster was visible matter, the mass map would approximately follow the interstellar gas map. Instead, we found most of the mass elsewhere, exactly where if it were dominated by collisionless dark matter.”

Behind these observations lies a remarkable bullet-shaped cloud of hot gas produced by the collision of two clusters. As they cross at 10 million miles per hour, the luminous matter in each interacts with the other and slows down. But the dark matter does not interact at all, passing right through without disruption. This causes the dark matter to sail ahead, separating each cluster into two components: dark matter in the lead and luminous matter lagging behind.

To detect this separation, researchers compared x-ray images of the luminous matter with measurements of the cluster's total mass through gravitational lensing. This involves the observation of the distortion of light from background galaxies by the cluster's gravity -- the greater the distortion, the more massive the cluster. The team discovered four separate clumps of matter: two large clumps of dark matter speeding away from the collision, and two smaller clumps of luminous matter trailing behind, proving two types of matter exist.

The results have captured the imagination of the cosmology community. “This is an exciting discovery -- dark matter is not merely a trick of the light,” says Robert Caldwell, who is a cosmologist at Dartmouth College, in New Hampshire. “This result helps confirm we're on the right track in trying to solve the mystery of dark matter.”

This observation is winning scientists over to the Dark (Matter) side

"I don't think there is any other way to work around it," said Marusa Bradac, one of the study's authors and a researcher at Stanford's Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. "This is the clear-cut example where we do see there is something else in the system."

The bullet cluster formed when two different groupings of galaxies passed through each other. As the two galaxy clusters collided, the visible gas—which constitutes regular matter—slowed down as a result of frictional forces. But dark matter, which gives off no light or heat, is not subject to these same forces and would not have slowed down during the collision. The researchers hypothesized that if the colliding galaxy clusters contained dark matter, the visible and invisible matter would have separated as the dark matter traveled more rapidly past the collision site.

When the scientists measured the mass after the collision, they found that much of the bullet cluster's mass lay beyond the observable gas, where they had predicted the dark matter would be.

"Because normal and dark matter usually are closely intertwined in galaxies and clusters, it has always been difficult to distinguish unambiguously between the dark matter and the modified gravity paradigms," Maxim Markevitch, a Harvard University astronomer and another of the study's coauthors, wrote in an email. "This is the first time when dark matter and normal matter have been seen separated in space, and the reason is the energetic cluster collision."

Still skeptics remain

Mordehai Milgrom, the man who originally proposed Modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) as an alternative to dark matter, said that just because the researchers didn't see all the matter they measured doesn't mean dark matter had to be present.

"Everyone knows there is still a lot of normal matter out there that we have yet to detect," he said via email. "While this is also 'dark,' it is not what we call the 'dark matter,' which people say has to be there. So it is definitely not a proof of the dark matter paradigm."

The new study's authors say their paper is not an attempt to disprove MOND, but insist that their results point directly to dark matter.

Science is best when debate is vigorous.

Free Energy for morons

An Irish company claims to have created a device that outputs more energy than it takes in.

"We put in a small amount of mechanical energy and we get a   large amount out." [Steorn Chief Executive Sean McCarthy] said....

"What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy," McCarthy said.

"The energy isn't being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It's literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy," he told Ireland's RTE radio.

Cool!

But doesn't such a claim violate the established laws of physics? So it would seem. Specifically, the First Law of Thermodynamics

The increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.

The Steorn company feels that that since they are directly confronting the scientific community, they are not getting the recognition they deserve.

"But we have been unable to get significant scientific interest in it. We have had scientists come in, test it and, off the record, they are quite happy to admit that it works.

"But for us to be able to commercialise this and put this into peoples' lives we need credible, academic validation in the public domain and hence the challenge," McCarthy said.

Damn. Doncha just hate it when that happens? That damn monolithic "Scientific Community" standing in the way of free energy for everyone. Probably paid off by oil executives.

So Steorn has taken the tack that every huckster and con man takes: The took out a full page add in the Economist Magazine challenging "the worldwide scientific community to test a technology it has developed that it claims produces free energy."

Now why would they need to do that?

I mean if they know the device produces more energy than is input then they must have tested it. And if they've tested it, they have test data. And if they have test data, they could publish it.

They could also hire a scientist to work on the underlying principles involved, write a paper, and get it published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. That would guarantee it got the attention of the ecientific community. It would also guarantee that other scientists would work to try to validate, or not, the device.

But no. Instead they take out an ad in the Economist.

Defending Steorn in the comments to this blog post by the SciGuy Eric Berger, we find typical conspiratorial thinking

Please consider the possibility that the the modern scientific community bears the same relation to society that medeival Christianity bore to Europe in the middle ages: The single source of truth about the nature of the world and man's relation to it. This view implies that modern scientists are more like priests defending an orthodoxy than individuals of an inquiring mind and their primary function is to defend and protect the world view of an extremely conservative society.

The complaint and the frustration voiced by Steorn is nothing new. Many people in the new energy community who have had dealings with the modern scientific community share it. And, of course, your cynical skepticism is nothing new either. But of course in the face of a new truth the scientific community's faith in their theory or your skepticism count for nothing. The only real issue is assuring that is the new proposal really is a new truth. And this requires stringent measures to keep ALL interested parties from cheating either by omission or commission.

To which another commenter responded

the 'new energy community; bears a striking resemblance to the old 'ufo community' and the old 'ESP community' and the old 'hollow earth community'. They all bear a striking resemblence to the 'con artist community'.

Or the Intelligent Design community.

Remembering the PC

On August 12th, 1981, IBM Introduced the PC: The IBM 5150. That's 25 years ago today. It wasn't the first personal computer on the market but it changed everything.

Costing $1,565, the 5150 had just 16K of memory - scarcely more than a couple of modest e-mails worth...

It altered the way business was done forever and sparked a revolution in home computing.

"It's hard to imagine what people used to do with computers in those days because by modern standards they really couldn't do anything," said Tom Standage, the Economist magazine's business editor told the World Service's Analysis programme.

"But there were still things you could do with a computer that you couldn't do without it like spreadsheets and word processing."

Back in the day, the premier wordprocessing program was WordStar which has all but disappeared today. The spreadsheet was VisiCalc.

Of course, the big thing about the IBM PC was the open architecture, something that would eventually force IBM out of the market, but would assure the explosion of personal ownership of computers as hordes of third-party developers competed and drove prices down.

That open architecture sparked an explosion in PC sales and also paved the way for common standards - something business had craved.

Since then the PC has come to dominate the home and the office and led the move to the online era with cheap global communication, e-commerce and for consumers the ability to find the answer to almost any question on the web.

Twenty-five years. That's a single generation between what we had then and what we have today. I have children who aren't yet 25 years old.

Capitalism is stunning in its effect.

Destiny

A team led by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center has been selected by NASA to develop a concept for a space mission to characterize the mysterious “Dark Energy” that permeates the Universe and causes its expansion to accelerate.

Known as Destiny, the Dark Energy Space Telescope, the small spacecraft would detect and observe more than 3,000 supernovae over its two-year primary mission to measure the expansion history of the Universe, followed by a year-long survey of 1,000 square-degrees of the sky at near-infrared wavelengths to measure how the large-scale distribution of matter in the Universe has evolved since the Big Bang. Used together, the data from these two surveys will have 10 times the sensitivity of current ground-based projects to explore the properties of Dark Energy, and will provide data critical to understanding the origin of Dark Energy, which is poorly explained by existing physical theories.

“Destiny’s strength is that it is a simple, low-cost mission designed to attack the puzzling problem of Dark Energy directly with high statistical precision,” said Tod R. Lauer, the Principal Investigator for Destiny and an astronomer at NOAO. “We build upon grism technology used in the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys to help us provide spectra of the supernovae as well as images. Spectra are critical to diagnosing the properties of the supernova, but are very difficult to obtain with more traditional cameras. Destiny’s grism camera, however, will take simultaneous spectra of all objects in its field. This is a major advantage of our approach, which greatly increases the ability to detect and characterize these distant stellar explosions.”

The discovery of a mysterious force now known as Dark Energy was announced in 1998 by two independent teams of astronomers who were studying distant supernovae as a way to measure how the expansion rate of the Universe has changed over time. These teams (both of whom used NOAO telescopes in Chile to discover the supernovae) were surprised to discover that, rather than slowing down, as had been expected, the expansion rate of the Universe is actually speeding up as the Universe ages. To explain this surprising phenomenon, scientists have been forced to conclude that the Universe contains not only ordinary matter and dark (invisible) matter, but also an ingredient called Dark Energy that permeates all of space and propels this expansion. Understanding the origin and properties of Dark Energy is probably the most outstanding problem in cosmology today.

“Destiny is designed to exploit two complementary paths—supernovae and large scale distribution of matter—to measure Dark Energy in a manner that is less susceptible to unknowns than any single technique,” said Dominic J. Benford of NASA Goddard, the Deputy Principal Investigator for Destiny.

Read more here

Sunday Science Roundup

Live long and prosper

We hear talk all the time of environmental dangers to our health, unhealthy life styles, and general health-care issues. And yet, when you step outside the box of local context, and you do the research, you learn facts that may startle you.

New research from around the world has begun to reveal a picture of humans today that is so different from what it was in the past that scientists say they are startled. Over the past 100 years, says one researcher, Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago, humans in the industrialized world have undergone “a form of evolution that is unique not only to humankind, but unique among the 7,000 or so generations of humans who have ever inhabited the earth.”

The difference does not involve changes in genes, as far as is known, but changes in the human form. It shows up in several ways, from those that are well known and almost taken for granted, like greater heights and longer lives, to ones that are emerging only from comparisons of health records.

The biggest surprise emerging from the new studies is that many chronic ailments like heart disease, lung disease and arthritis are occurring an average of 10 to 25 years later than they used to. There is also less disability among older people today, according to a federal study that directly measures it. And that is not just because medical treatments like cataract surgery keep people functioning. Human bodies are simply not breaking down the way they did before.

Even the human mind seems improved. The average I.Q. has been increasing for decades, and at least one study found that a person’s chances of having dementia in old age appeared to have fallen in recent years.

This trend, it turns out, is only partly attributable to better medical care. And these benefits are not just for the wealthy nations.

Rim of the Earth

From Genesis I via Bigelow Aerospace