Science Online

"The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing", Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4's Material World programme. "And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we'll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea." Dr Rose's approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions. But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers. - Eric from Bookmarklet

Scientists hailed CERN's confirmation of the Higgs Boson in July of 2012, speculating that it could one day make light speed travel possible by "un-massing" objects or allow huge items to be launched into space by "switching off" the Higgs. CERN scientist Albert de Roeck likened it to the discovery of electricity, when he said humanity could never have imagined its future applications. - Eric from Bookmarklet

AFPs within these living organisms bind to seed ice crystals that form as the weather cools. By binding to the ice, AFPs prevent the ice from spreading and freezing the organism. Many organisms that live in cold weather have some level of AFPs including insects, fish, plants, bacteria, algae and fungi. ~ Antifreeze protein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Halil from Bookmarklet

why don't plants freeze in the winter? (: most of cold-blooded and not-blooded-at-all organisms have these kind of proteins, complexes, chemicals, etc. it's called cold shock response. - hia

Around 10,000 years ago wheat evolved from goat grass and other primitive grains. The scientists used cross-pollination and seed embryo transfer technology to transfer some of the resilience of the ancient ancestor of wheat into modern British varieties. The process required no genetic modification of the crops. - Halil from Bookmarklet

Cross pollination is one thing, (seed) embryonic transference of genetic material is essentially GM, as Victor says, it's semantics and they are trying to come across as a non-GM food. If there was no genuine GM or any kind of fiddling, why even mention that it's not GM in the first place as it should be clear from the experimental methods used! Also, they say the tests need to be... more... - Halil

Perhaps lit by Native Americans hundreds or thousands of years ago, it is fed by a new type of geologic process that hasn't been recorded before in nature, Schimmelmann told OurAmazingPlanet. Typically, this type of gas is thought to come from deeply submerged, ancient and extremely hot deposits of shale, a kind of rock. Temperatures have to be near the boiling point of water or hotter to break down the large carbon molecules in shale and create smaller molecules of natural gas, Schimmelmann explained. - Eric from Bookmarklet

It’s important to understand our relationship with the microbial world. Most microscopic organisms benefit humans, other organisms or the environment in some way — for example, they help us digest our food and keep bad bugs in check. At the same time, we are never far away from one of the 1,400 kinds of disease-causing microbes that are capable of infecting people; many infect animals, too. Of these microbes, known as pathogens, about 500 can be transmitted from humans to other humans. And around 150 of them can cause epidemics — rapidly spreading outbreaks of serious, sometimes life-threatening, disease. Each pathogen has its own “footprint” (or potential footprint) on our human health and social, political and economic landscapes. Far too often the public — and policy makers and journalists — confuse those infectious diseases that can be life-threatening for a limited number of individuals with those that can cause widespread damage to society as a whole. A disease in the former... more... - Eric from Bookmarklet

Completely mind-blowing... Wolfram presents highlights from his big fat NKS book: starts very simple with cellular automata, but eventually rule 110 becomes a universal computation machine which can emulate Ricci tensor from relativity and Feynman diagrams in quantum physics. Imagine an experiment where the universe is a Turing machine. The discussion of his Principle of Computation Equivalence is important for the limits of current science and the foundations of mathematics. Computational irreversibility shows how nature is undecidable in Godel's sense, and thus is unpredictable... we can only observe how complex things will evolve :-) - Adriano

See the beautiful tattoo visualization via Monica Quast, who is a Ph.D. student at the University of Campinas, Brazil, working on bivalve phylogeography. The organisms depicted are (going clockwise): a cyanobacterium, a foraminiferan, 3 diatoms, an oak leaf and acorn, a Spirogyra cell, a red cage fungus, a stauromedusa, a nautilus, a tardigrade, an ophiuroid, and a badger. \\ At first biologists could draw only small trees, typically with a dozen branches at most. They were held back by the fact that a group of species may possibly be related in many different ways. If a biologist adds more species to a group, the possibilities explode. For 80 species, there are more trees than there are atoms in the known universe. Simply comparing every single tree would be impossible. Fortunately, mathematicians developed statistical methods for searching quickly through potential trees to find the ones that do the best job of explaining all the evidence. - Adriano

A team of engineers in the US has fabricated flexible, skin-like arrays of nanowire transistors that convert mechanical motion into electronic signals and are as sensitive as a human fingertip, according to the researchers. This means that the arrays could help robots to adjust intuitively the force they use to grasp things, be used in human prosthetics, as well as offer new ways for us to interface with a variety of electronic devices. - Halil from Bookmarklet

"Astronomers have found a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone — the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces. (...) Kepler-62e is 60 percent larger than Earth, while Kepler-62f is about 40 percent larger, making both of them “super-Earths.” They are too small for their masses to be measured, but astronomers expect them to be composed of rock and water, without a significant gaseous envelope. As the warmer of the two worlds, Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth, according to computer models. More distant Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean. Otherwise, it might become an ice-covered snowball. “Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions. Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly,” said Harvard astronomer and co-author Dimitar Sasselov." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thank you, @Amira!! :) - Harold Cabezas

"IBM scientists using a special microscope they invented to move atoms around on a surface. The movie, titled "A Boy and His Atom," consists of nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action and tells the simple story of a boy named Atom who dances and plays with an atom. By drawing viewers in with the film (a technological marvel that will no doubt be passed around far and wide), IBM then uses an engrossing behind-the-scenes clip to tell its larger story—about how the company has worked at the nanoscale for decades to explore the limits of data storage, among other things with real-world applications. (...) Today's electronic devices need roughly 1 million atoms to store a single bit of data. But IBM researchers have shown that only 12 atoms are actually needed to store one bit. The implications for data storage are astonishing—it means that one day, every movie ever made could be stored in a device the size of a fingernail." - Amira from Bookmarklet

he dalloslar he. bu kafayla olur o is 100 yila. - kunthar

what made you look this up, if it's ok to ask? - Halil

“Better living through data? When a pioneer of data collection and organization turned his analytical tools on himself, he revealed the complexity of automating human judgment and the difficulty of predicting just what is predictable. (...) The question is, what’s the space with all possible models that you can imagine using? A good way to describe that space is to think about computer programs. (...) I’ve discovered that very simple programs can serve as remarkably accurate models for lots of things that happen in nature. In natural science, that gives us a vastly better pool of possible models to use than we had from just math. We then see that these may be good models for how nature works. They tell us something about how nature is so easily able to make all this complicated stuff that would be very hard for us to make if we just imagined that nature worked according to math. Now we realize that there’s a whole different kind of engineering that we can do, and we can look at all of these possible simple programs and use those to create our engineering systems." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"This is different from the traditional approach. (...) As we accumulate more data, there will certainly be patterns that can be seen, and things that one can readily see that are predictable. You can expect to have a dashboard—with certain constraints—showing how things are likely to evolve for you. You then get to make decisions: Should I do this? Should I do that? But some part of... more... - Amira

In September 2012, hundreds of amateur and professional photographers had the rare opportunity go behind-the-scenes at ten of the world's leading particle physics laboratories. A stark black-and-white photo of an access tunnel 1,500 meters underground at the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics' Gran Sasso National Laboratory and a colorful close-up of a detector at INFN's Frascati National Laboratory that wouldn't be out of place in a building by Antoni Gaudi have won the top prizes in the second InterActions Physics Photowalk. - Eric from Bookmarklet

"[Thomas] Jefferson’s language emphasized the requirement of newness, or novelty, and bespoke the necessity of an inventive step. It also implied that products made by nature, which were held to belong to everyone, were not to be removed from common possession. Thus products of nature such as the naturally occurring elements in the periodic table or the creatures of the earth, being neither new in the world nor made by man, were taken to be ineligible for patents. So, tacitly, were laws of nature, natural manifestations, abstract ideas, and thought. (...) Judge Moore did acknowledge that Myriad’s patents “raise substantial moral and ethical issues” about the allowance of property rights in “human DNA—the very thing that makes us humans, and not chimpanzees,” and she allowed that BRCA DNA “might well deserve to be excluded from the patent system.” But she considered such a “dramatic” destruction of property rights properly the province of Congress, not the courts. Against this strict... more... - Amira

"A famous example cited in numerous briefs in the current appeal involved Dr. Jonas Salk's development and invention of the polio oral vaccine in 1952. When his life-saving treatment was announced, he said the people would "own" the vaccine, adding "Could you patent the sun?" -- http://www.cnn.com/2013... // A ruling from the court is expected in June. // See also: Biological patent, Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

1) Bilaterally symmetric - or zygomorphic flowers - have evolved several times and are associated with pollinator specialisation. The different types of petals form in response to gradient of the gene CYCLOIDEA (CYC), which is strongly expressed at the top or dorsal side of the flower bud, and not expressed on the bottom or ventral side. Such a gradient is seen in both bilaterally symmetric and radialy symmetric flowers. The different types of flowers differ in how they respond to the gradient. - Halil from Bookmarklet

2) Most species in the Gesneriaceae possess zygomorphic flowers, probably in response to pollinator adaptations. We isolated Gcyc, the Gesneriaceae homologue of CYCLOIDEA (a gene involved in the expression of floral symmetry in Antirrhinum), from a range of taxa with zygomorphic and actinomorphic flowers. The results indicated that the gene is still active in those species that possess... more... - Halil

yes, i was bored and this is what i'm reading, does that make me sad? lol - genetics is actually quite fascinating, but biochemical genetics rocks!!! def: biochemical genetics the science concerned with the chemical and physical nature of genes and the mechanism by which they control the development and maintenance of the organism. http://medical-dictionary.thef... - Halil

Previous attempts at developing a quantum computer have centered on trapping an atom in an electromagnetic vacuum chamber. The way the team has designed it, a computer would be able to read the direction of the atom's nucleus, up or down, the same way computers today read in a binary code of ones and zeros. For this reason, the success and failure of a quantum computer depends on the reliability of the machine's interpretation of the nucleus' positioning - something the scientists believe they are closing in on. "We have achieved a read-out fidelity of 99.8 percent, which sets a new benchmark for qubit accuracy in a solid-state device," said Professor Andrew Dzurak. These qubits, or quantum bits, are the building blocks of quantum computers and, as the researchers point out, by placing the atom in a silicone chip, it will be more easily operated electrically. "Silicon is the dominant material in the microelectronics industry, which means our qubit is more compatible with existing... more... - Eric from Bookmarklet

Better detector For the current study, Giustina and her colleagues redid the experiment with entangled photons, or particles of light. This time, however, they didn't have to rely on the assumption that the photons they caught were representative of the ones that got away. The physicists were able to eliminate the loophole using a different version of Bell’s check so that it didn't require an assumption of fair sampling. They also eliminated the loophole by catching many more photons using ultrasensitive, superconducting photon detectors kept near absolute zero. Every time a photon hit the detector, it caused an increase in the electrical resistance to current. And although most physicists now accept the strange laws of quantum mechanics, the new experiment makes it even harder to claim that hidden variables — those yet to be dreamed up by scientists — explain particles' strange behavior. - Eric from Bookmarklet

In February, the United States Preventive Services Task Force recommended that postmenopausal women refrain from taking supplemental calcium and vitamin D. After reviewing more than 135 studies, the task force said there was little evidence that these supplements prevent fractures in healthy women. Moreover, several studies have linked calcium supplements to an increased risk of heart attacks and death from cardiovascular disease. Others have found no effect, depending on the population studied and when calcium supplementation was begun. - Halil from Bookmarklet

I think the study is lacking in showing Vit D synergy with calcium response as well as including parathyroid health. - Janet:#TeamMonique from FFHound!

Sam Ting got all the headlines two weeks ago with his first release of data from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, but this news from an Earth-bound detector may ultimately prove more momentous. Here’s what happened, and why it’s so interesting. WIMPs A leading candidate for dark matter, which scientists believe makes up about 27 percent of the universe but which they have never directly observed, are the delightfully named WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. These are theoretical, and they are just what they’re called: they almost never interact with normal matter, and they’re large because they make up a lot of the universe. - Eric from Bookmarklet

AND? - MoTO #TeamMonique

What's more, prehistoric women who could see the sex organs of their scantily clad male counterparts may have helped influence the evolution of larger genitals in men by choosing to mate with partners who were bigger. - Halil from Bookmarklet

Not in the least. Or most :) - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

A study published online July 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that in the case of insects that developed resistance to a powerful plant toxin, the same adaptations have occurred independently, in separate species in different places and times. The paper examines 18 insect species across four orders -- beetles, butterflies and moths, flies, and true bugs -- that all feed on plants containing powerful toxins called cardenolides. - Halil from Bookmarklet

By examining molecular changes in the sodium pump gene, the researchers found the mutation N122H in all four orders of insects studied. Furthermore, they discovered a second mutation in the same gene that also conferred resistance in 11 of the 18 species. "This is truly a remarkable level of evolutionary repeatability and suggests that evolving resistance to the plant toxin had very few effective options," said Agrawal. - Halil

please see http://ff.im/1f6Ir5 fascinating stuff! - Halil

For upper class male consumers, DIY home improvement offers the means of unleashing the inner suburban craftsman who relishes in physical labor. In contrast to their day jobs, upper class men enjoy the process of toiling away on various projects and feeling self-fulfilled in the process. - Halil from Bookmarklet

For lower class male consumers, a different pattern emerges. Work around the house allows lower class men to assert their identities, and in particular, construct an identity of the family handyman relative to their female partners. In this way, lower class men find meaning in their DIY home improvement projects as a masculine form of caring for their families and providing them with better homes than otherwise possible due to their subordinate economic and social standing. - Halil

It sounds like a Kraftwerk track, but this is in fact an audio representation of the Big Bang based on scientific measurements. The physicist John Kramer has produced the sounds using the new data from the ESA’s Planck Mission analysis of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. - Halil from Bookmarklet

very interesting! - Halil

The theory that entangled particles, once separated, are still capable of reflecting each other instantly is a phenomenon even Albert Einstein seemed unsettled by, famously calling it, when done at a distance, "spooky." Decades after the great scientist's death, however, researchers are ready to put it into action at a distance that's never been seen before - 250 miles. As explained in a proposal published by the Institute of Physics and the New Physics Journal, researchers explain how, with only a few small changes to the International Space Station (ISS), they would be able to test the theory of quantum entanglement over a distance nearly three times that done so far. - Eric from Bookmarklet

"Scientists at the University of California Los Angeles have found a way to create stunningly detailed 3D reconstructing of platinum nanoparticles at an atomic scale. These are being used to study tiny structural irregularities called dislocations." Read the paper here: http://dx.doi.org/10... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum." - Amira

"For clearly the first particles of things // did not all place themselves in due order // by their own planning or intelligence, // nor did they through some agreement assign // the motions each of them should have. Instead, // since there are many of them and they change // in many ways through all the universe, // they are pushed, energized by collisions, // for a limitless length of time, and then, /// having gone through every kind of motion // and combination, they at length fall into // those arrangements which make up and create // this totality of things, which also, // once suitably set in patterned motion, // has been preserved through many lengthy years. // (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Since earth // was made by nature. Seeds of things themselves, // jostling freely here and there in various ways // and forced to random, confused collisions, // produced nothing—then finally those ones // suddenly united which could become, // every time, the beginnings of great things. (...) Since the moment earth was first created, // that day sea, land, and rising sun were born, //... more... - Amira

See also: How Epicurus’ ideas survived through Lucretius’ poetry, and led to toleration http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... Lucretius: ‘O unhappy race of men, when they ascribed actions to the gods’ http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post... #universe #atoms #higgsboson #ancient #poetry - Amira