Category Archives: Science

Karl Popper Webcast

Webcast discussing Karl Popper’s ideas by Melvyn Bragg with John Worrall, Anthony O’Hear and Nancy Cartwright, BBC (by the way, the BBC does a wonderful job of running web properties – presenting great material and they don’t break web links by removing content).

Karl Popper is one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th Century, whose ideas about science and politics robustly challenged the accepted ideas of the day. He strongly resisted the prevailing empiricist consensus that scientists’ theories could be proved true.

Popper wrote: “The more we learn about the world and the deeper our learning, the more conscious, specific and articulate will be our knowledge of what we do not know, our knowledge of our ignorance”. He believed that even when a scientific principle had been successfully and repeatedly tested, it was not necessarily true. Instead it had simply not proved false, yet! This became known as the theory of falsification.

He called for a clear demarcation between good science, in which theories are constantly challenged, and what he called “pseudo sciences” which couldn’t be tested.

Biomolecules in Motion

Biomolecules in Motion by Kathleen M. Wong:

Proteins are the parts that make living engines run. They supply cells with energy, build muscle and bone, and catalyze countless other reactions that let the spark of life burn bright. To do their jobs, proteins must curl around substrate molecules, stretch to let their substrates go, travel around cells and assemble into work crews.
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Scientists have long believed that when an enzyme is empty, it gapes open like a hungry alligator, and that after it has caught its substrate, it remains closed until the reaction has been completed. Yang’s single-molecule microscopy studies have turned this notion upside-down. “Even when it has substrate, it doesn’t just bind the substrate tightly and stop moving. It’s still flapping,” he says. This constant motion makes perfect sense, considering how fast enzymes operate; some can process a million substrate molecules per minute. “Like a door, it has to be able to swing even without me going in and out.

Seeing Patterns Where None Exists

I call data dredge studies the “Rorschach tests” of epidemiology, because researchers can pull out characteristics about people in almost unlimited combinations to find all sorts of correlations and conclude just about anything they set out to find. Just like the Rorschach test, seeing patterns where none exists, finding connections that are there but not as strongly as believed, and seeing what one expects to see, are common.

Page 8 of Statistics for Experiments by George Box, Willliam Hunter (my father) and Stu Hunter (no relation) shows a graph of the population (of people) versus the number of storks which shows a high correlation. “Although in this example few would be led to hypothesize that the increase in the number of storks caused the observed increase in population, investigators are sometimes guilty of this kind of mistake in other contexts.” And some might make it in this context 🙂

Page: Marketing Science

Google’s Page urges scientists to market themselves:

And that was his main advice to the scientists in the room: take their scientific studies, market them better and make them readily accessible to the world. That way, the world might have a better chance at solving problems like energy consumption, poverty and global climate change.

“Virtually all economic growth (in the world) was due to technological progress. I think as a society we’re not really paying attention to that,” Page said. “Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem.”

To that end, Page urged the group to take on more leadership roles in society, i.e., politics, so that they could control more funding for research and development. He also said that scientists should get in the habit of investing part of their scientific grant money to marketing budgets, in order to get the word out to the media about their research.

Entrepreneurialism should also be more ingrained in university culture, Page said, much like it is at his alma mater Stanford University and Google’s home-base, Silicon Valley. Finally, he called on the scientists to make more of their research available digitally. Even though Google Scholar tries to open access to scientific work, it still falls short.

Himalayas Geology

Mystery of the Himalayas Solved:

The mystery of why the Himalaya mountains and the Tibetan plateau are the highest in the world has at last been answered, with the discovery of a gigantic chunk of rock slowly sinking towards the centre of the Earth. When the massive slab – up to eight times the area of the UK and as thick as a dozen Everests on top of each other – dropped off, the lighter crust above it rebounded upwards like a cork released under water, geophysicists say. This “sudden uplift” would have raised the Himalayas by as much as 2km (1.24 miles) to their present height.

If not for the surge, Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay might have found themselves reaching the “roof of the world” by conquering Aconcagua (6,962m) in Argentina while Everest languished at a mere 6,848m above sea level, 2,000m below its actual peak. The discovery of the missing mantle – the cold, heavy rock beneath the crust – was revealed last week by Professor Wang-Ping Chen at the University of Illinois, whose team used more than 200 super-sensitive seismometers strung across the Himalayas, from India deep into Tibet.
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But some scientists remain sceptical. One geologist at Cambridge, who wanted to remain anonymous because he hadn’t yet read Professor Chen’s paper, suggested that the slab could be the remains of the Tethys Ocean plate. Professor England counters that both the Asian and Indian plates have moved north since then

Aussies Look to Finnish Innovation Model

Aussies look to Finnish Innovation Model:

Australian policy makers are looking to Finland for inspiration in their drive to bring the nation closer to the dream of thriving technological innovation. The country’s president and other Finnish representatives are in Sydney to share with Australian researchers the strides the nation has made in the past three decades. Home of companies such as Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer, Finland has captured the attention of governments looking to shift their economic base away from traditional industries towards a more innovative focus.

Finland’s research and development spend accounts for 3.5 per cent of its gross domestic product (GDP), a higher percentage than that of most European Union nations. It intends to lift this percentage to four per cent by 2010. Australia’s spending on research in comparison was 1.8 per cent of GDP in 2004/05, below the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) average of 2.3 per cent.

Catnap Benefits

The health benefits of 40 winks

A six-year Greek study has just concluded that people who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.

Too tired to work? Then have a snooze:

The state-backed siesta is part of a â‚¬7 million (Â£4.7 million) campaign begun yesterday by the Health Ministry to encourage the French to sleep more and better. A third of the population does not sleep enough, experts say. Tiredness is blamed for 20 per cent of road and domestic accidents, and for low efficiency at work and school, obesity, depression and many other ills.

A nap a day keeps lost productivity at bay

According to a Cornell University study, sleep-deprived workers cost U.S. industry $150 billion a year in reduced job productivity and fatigue-related accidents.

Patenting Life – a Bad Idea

Patenting Life by Michael Crichton (new book = Next, also The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park…):

Gene patents are now used to halt research, prevent medical testing and keep vital information from you and your doctor. Gene patents slow the pace of medical advance on deadly diseases. And they raise costs exorbitantly: a test for breast cancer that could be done for $1,000 now costs $3,000.

Why? Because the holder of the gene patent can charge whatever he wants, and does. Couldn’t somebody make a cheaper test? Sure, but the patent holder blocks any competitor’s test. He owns the gene. Nobody else can test for it. In fact, you can’t even donate your own breast cancer gene to another scientist without permission. The gene may exist in your body, but it’s now private property.

This bizarre situation has come to pass because of a mistake by an underfinanced and understaffed government agency. The United States Patent Office misinterpreted previous Supreme Court rulings and some years ago began — to the surprise of everyone, including scientists decoding the genome — to issue patents on genes.

This has to be fixed, and here is one way that might help: Continue reading →

Water in Earth’s Deep Mantle

3-D seismic model of vast water reservoir revealed:

n analyzing the data, Wysession first saw large patterns associated with known areas where the ocean floor is sinking down into the earth. Beneath Asia, the fallen Pacific sea floor piles up at the base of the mantle. Right above that he observed an “incredibly highly attenuating region, that is both very damping and slightly slow,” he said. “Water slows the speed of waves a little. Lots of damping and a little slowing match the predictions for water very well.”

Previous predictions calculated that a cold ocean slab sinking into the earth at 1,200 to 1,4000 kilometers beneath the surface would release water in the rock that would escape the rock and rise up to a region above it, but this was never previously observed.

“That is exactly what we show here, the exact depth and high attenuation amounts right above it,” Wysession said. “I call it the Beijing anomaly. Water inside the rock goes down with the sinking slab and it’s quite cold, but it heats up the deeper it goes, and the rock eventually becomes unstable and loses its water. The water then rises up into the overlying region, which becomes saturated with water.

“If you combine the volume of this anomaly with the fact that the rock can hold up to about 0.1 percent of water, that works out to be about an Arctic Ocean’s worth of water.”

Skin Bacteria

Close Look at Human Arm Finds Host of Microbes:

“The skin is home to a virtual zoo,” said Blaser, a microbiologist who last week published online the first molecular analysis of the bacteria living on one small patch of human skin. “We’re just beginning to explore it.” The analysis revealed that human skin is populated by a diverse assortment of bacteria, including many previously unknown species, offering the first detailed peek at this potentially crucial ecosystem.

The work is part of a broader effort by a small coterie of scientists to better understand the microbial world that populates the human body. Virtually every orifice and the digestive tract are swarming with bacteria, fungi and other microbes. By some estimates, only one out of every 10 cells in the body is human.
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Blaser’s team swabbed an area of skin about the size of silver dollar on the right and left forearms of three healthy men and three healthy women. They then used sophisticated molecular techniques to amplify and analyze fragments of bacterial DNA captured by the swabs. The analysis revealed 182 species, the researchers reported. Of those, 30 had never been seen. They identified an additional 65 species when they sampled four of the volunteers eight to 10 months later, including 14 new species.

Continue reading →