Author Archives: curiouscat

Baseball Pitch Designed in the Lab

Five years ago, computer scientist Ryutaro Himeno was testing super-computers by modeling the fluid dynamics of airflow around baseballs. Himeno’s deconstruction of existing pitches led to a strange new one—whirling clockwise as it flew forward, the virtual ball curved as abruptly as its closest relative, the slider, but without sinking. Himeno met with Kazushi Tezuka, who runs baseball training centers in Tokyo and Osaka, and they ironed out the pitch’s mechanics.

As detailed in the books the pair has since authored, a gyroball calls for a complex flip of the fingers during release, ending with the thumb pointed down. At its most effective, the pitch breaks horizontally as it nears the batter, as though shrugging off gravity.

Gravity-Defying Baseball Pitch Ready for U.S. – an update on the article above. Details from the scientist (pdf)

The Magnetic Fridge

A cool new idea from British scientists: the magnetic fridge by Michael Pollitt:

Your kitchen fridge has a compressor, which turns a gas into a liquid, releasing heat (which you’ll feel at the back of the fridge). The liquid is then pumped round the inside walls of the fridge, where it draws heat from the contents; that turns it into a gas, which is pumped on to the compressor.
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A magnetic fridge works like this. Powdered gadolinium (with coarse grains for good heat transfer qualities) is put into a magnetic field. It heats up as the randomly ordered magnetic moments – the electrons with spin – are aligned, or “ordered”, by the field. The newly-acquired heat – a boost of between 2-5C, depending on the gadolinium’s original temperature – is removed by a circulating fluid, like a conventional fridge.

The magnetic field is removed and the gadolinium cools below its starting temperature as the electrons resume their previously disordered state. Heat from the system to be cooled – your fridge interior – can then be transferred to the now cooler metal. Then all you do is endlessly repeat. But unlike conventional fridges, which need very toxic chemicals, the only liquid needed for heat transfer is water, alcohol or, more likely, antifreeze.

40% energy savings are predicted.

The A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science

The United States government bears great responsibility for keeping our environment clean and Americans healthy and safe. And while science is rarely the only factor in public policy decisions, this input should be objective and impartial.

In recent years, however, scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information. To document this abuse, the Union of Concerned Scientists has created the A to Z Guide to Political Interference in Science.
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In 2004, 62 renowned scientists and science advisors signed a scientist statement on scientific integrity, denouncing political interference in science and calling for reform. On December 9, 2006, UCS released the names of more than 10,000 scientists of all backgrounds from all 50 states—including 52 Nobel Laureates—who have since joined their colleagues on this statement.

It is important for the public to have access to type of information. There will always be areas of intersection between science and politics. And there is a role for politicians in science policy. However, covering up data and attempts to promote unscientific conclusions from data, in order to serve political ends, is something that should be condemned. Certainly many will seek to turn political disagreements into condemnation of the opposition, so the mere accusation is not the important factor – the important factor is the evidence of wrongdoing. Then the facts should be debated.
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Big Big Lions

Lions Hunting in the Water

Relentless Enemies program to air on National Geographic in January.

The superlions marooned on an island by Zoe Brennan discusses the program:

“We discovered this tiny sandy island in the Okavango,” says Dereck. “It is extraordinary because it became totally isolated from the mainland 15 years ago when the course of the river changed, and a huge herd of buffalo and lions were trapped on a piece of land measuring 200 square kilometres.”

Through this twist of geographical fate, these two ancient species are now engaged in a desperate battle of survival — watched by six bemused refugee wildebeest and a handful of similarly outnumbered warthogs.

Thus, the island has become a unique, ecological experiment. In order to exist without the customary spectrum of weaker African prey like zebra, giraffe and impala, the Duba lions have had to develop distinct strategies in order to trap the single available food source.

USA Still Leads In Innovation

In innovation, the U.S. still leads by Dr. Venkat Lakshmi:

But this is not entirely the case. The United States is still the center of the world when it comes to innovation and original thinking. In this year’s Nobel Prizes, Americans won in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and economics. The Nobel Prize in literature was won by Turkish writer affiliated with Columbia University. The other exception was the prize for peace. So in four of six categories, the winners were Americans.

In the past few years, the United States has led the innovation in the Internet revolution. Who 10 years ago could imagine three 20-somethings coming up with the idea of posting video clips on the Internet? This led to the creation of YouTube, which was bought out by Google (yet another enterprise put together by two graduate students) for a mind-boggling sum of $1.6 billion.

I agree that the USA continues to lead especially in those 2 areas. Those winning Nobel Prizes normally made their breakthrough decades before. My guess is the United States will not have as large a percentage of winners from 2020-2029 as it did from 1990-1999 (and I can’t image many people would disagree). And the USA continues to do very well at commercializing innovation. Others are catching up, but still the USA is doing very well in this area – it seems to be the strongest position for the USA (among things such as manufacturing, basic science research, activity in space, k-12 science and engineering education, health care, robotics, science and engineering higher education…).

Scientists Building a Safer Mosquito

Scientists building a better mosquito by Catherine Clabby:

Eliminating the pests appears impossible. But scientists are attempting to re-engineer them so they cannot carry disease. If they manage that, they must create enough mutants to mate with wild insects and one day to outnumber them.

Researchers chasing this dream, including an N.C. State University entomologist, know they may court controversy. Genetically modified crop plants such as soybeans, corn and cotton have become common in the United States, but an altered organism on wings would be a first.
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Gould is working on the project with scientists on four continents. They landed $19.7 million under a Grand Challenges in Global Health grant offered by the Gates philanthropy and a National Institutes of Health foundation. The funders selected researchers ready to collaborate rather than compete on risky research aimed at solving massive health threats in poor places.

The genetic tinkering is focused at first on dengue, a tropical virus re-emerging in Asia, Latin America and Africa. While dengue claims a fraction of the million or more victims that malaria kills annually, it strikes 50 to 100 million people each year with severe flu symptoms. Outbreaks disrupt families and communities and overburden health systems.

Ageless Turtles

All but Ageless, Turtles Face Their Biggest Threat: Humans by Natalie Angier:

Dr. Christopher J. Raxworthy, the associate curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History, says the liver, lungs and kidneys of a centenarian turtle are virtually indistinguishable from those of its teenage counterpart, a Ponce de Leonic quality that has inspired investigators to begin examining the turtle genome for novel longevity genes.

“Turtles don’t really die of old age,” Dr. Raxworthy said. In fact, if turtles didn’t get eaten, crushed by an automobile or fall prey to a disease, he said, they might just live indefinitely.

Turtles have the power to almost stop the ticking of their personal clock. “Their heart isn’t necessarily stimulated by nerves, and it doesn’t need to beat constantly,” said Dr. George Zug, curator of herpetology at the Smithsonian Institution. “They can turn it on and off essentially at will.”

Physics Concepts in 60 Seconds

Physics Concepts in 60 Seconds from Symmetry Magazine (from Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center). The magazine is open access journal funded by the US Department of Energy. The complete antimatter in 60 seconds by Michael Doser, CERN:

Antimatter is made up of particles with equal but opposite characteristics of everyday particles of matter. Consider this analogy: dig a hole, and make a hill with the earth you’ve excavated. Hole and hill have equal but opposite characteristics— the volume of the earth in the hill, and that of the hole where the earth was removed. For particles, properties like electrical charge are opposite to their antiparticles—one positive, one negative. Also, antimatter will annihilate its matter counterpart in a burst of energy, just like the hill will fill the hole, leaving neither.

The universe seems to contain no significant amounts of antimatter, despite expectations that both should have been created equally during the big bang. So where did all the antimatter go? One possible explanation could be a subtle and unexpected difference in the properties of matter and antimatter, leading to a slight excess of matter which survived the initial cataclysm of matter-antimatter annihilation.

Experimenters at CERN, Fermilab, SLAC and KEK are producing antimatter in particle accelerators to search for and study this difference. Antimatter also has real-life medical applications, such as positron emission tomography—PET scans. But because producing antimatter even in minuscule quantities is very difficult, it will unfortunately never power any future Starship Enterprise.

Diving Mandarin Ducklings

Bummer BBC refused to let us watch this on You Tube and their videos rarely work and are hard to find so I just removed the link. You can try them Via: Inky Circus

The video was very cute.

How Does the Immune System Remember

Scientists find key to immune system’s ability to remember

The protein, which scientists call Lck, is essential for immune system T cells – white blood cells that attack virus-infected cells, foreign cells and cancer cells… Lck is important in helping “naive” T cells – those cells that have never been exposed to a particular pathogen – capture the receptor template of the invading agent and store it for future reference… Following infection or vaccination, Lck initiates a biochemical chain of events that vastly increases the number of T cells that march off to combat the invader.

After the infection subsides, the number of T cells marshaled to fight that agent decreases dramatically. But a smaller subset, known as “memory” cells, retains the imprint of its previous encounter should the pathogen make a return appearance. According to the study, while Lck primes naive cells to fight a pathogen, it is not required by memory cells, which initiate the fast and furious response when that same pathogen comes calling again years later. Unlike naive T cells, which are confined to the lymphatic system, memory T cells are found everywhere in the body, enabling them to sense and react more quickly when an infectious agent is reencountered.