Tag Archives: scientific inquiry

Is Dark Matter an Illusion?

Open access letter asks – Is dark matter an illusion created by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vaccum? by Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic, CERN

Assuming that a particle and its antiparticle have the gravitational charge of the opposite sign, the physical vacuum may be considered as a fluid of virtual gravitational dipoles. Following this hypothesis, we present the first indications that dark matter may not exist and that the phenomena for which it was invoked might be explained by the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum by the known baryonic matter.

Let us start with a major unresolved problem. The measured galaxy rotation curves remain roughly constant at large radii. Faster than expected orbits, require a larger central force, which, in the framework of our theory of gravity, cannot be explained by the existing baryonic matter. The analogous problem persists also at the scale of clusters of galaxies.

The favoured solution is to assume that our current theory of gravity is correct, but every galaxy resides in a halo of dark matter made of unknown non-baryonic particles (for a brief review on dark matter see for instance: Einasto, 2010). A full list of the proposed dark matter particles would be longer than this letter; let us mention only weekly interacting massive particles and axions. In spite of the significant efforts dark particles have never been detected…

The scientific inquiry process continues to be used to try and explain the evidence we gather. Unsettled areas of science show how difficult the discovery process is. Once we have settled on theories it is so easy to explain why basic truths of evolution, geology, chemistry… result in what the evidence shows. But getting to the scientific consensus is a challenging process.

Dark Matter Is an Illusion, New Antigravity Theory Says

Physicist David Evans called the new study a “very interesting theoretical exercise,” but he said he isn’t ready to abandon dark matter just yet. “The evidence for dark matter is now very compelling,” said Evans, of the University of Birmingham, who leads the U.K. team for the ALICE detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

For example, in 2006 astronomers unveiled a photo of two colliding galaxies known as the Bullet cluster that purportedly showed the separation of matter from dark matter. A similar effect was observed in the Pandora cluster earlier this summer, said Evans, who was not involved in the study.

Hajdukovic said he is currently expanding his theory to account for these observations. His preliminary calculations, he said, suggest that “what is observed in the Bullet cluster and more recently at the Pandora cluster may be understood in the framework of the gravitational polarization of the quantum vacuum.”

CERN physicist Michael Doser agreed that Hajdukovic’s ideas are “unorthodox” but did not immediately dismiss the new theory…
“In a few years,” Doser said, “we should definitely be in a position to confirm or refute [Hajdukovic’s] hypothesis.”

Cutting the Boarding Time of Planes in Half

I thought I wrote about this several years ago, but I guess I didn’t (I can’t find it, if I did). Experimental test of airplane boarding methods:

The Steen method, on the other hand, orders the passengers in such a way that adjacent passengers in line are sitting in corresponding seats two rows apart from each other (e.g., 12A, 10A, 8A, 6A, etc.). This method trades a small number of aisle interferences at the front of the cabin, for the beneï¬t of having multiple passengers stowing their luggage simultaneously. Other methods, such as Wilma and the Reverse Pyramid also realize parallel use of the aisle in a natural way as adjacent passengers are frequently sitting in widely separated rows.
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We have seen experimentally that there is a marked difference in the time required to board an aircraft depending upon the boarding method used. The evidence strongly supports the heuristic argument from Steen that methods that parallelize the boarding process by more efï¬ciently utilizing the aisle (having more passengers stow their luggage simultaneously) will board more quickly than those that do not. The relative beneï¬t of the application of this theory will grow with the length of the aircraft. Here, we used a 12-row mock airplane, but a more typical airplane with twice that number of rows will gain more by the implementation of parallelized boarding methods.

How this improvement scales with the cabin length is different for each method. For the Steen method, the beneï¬t will scale almost linearly. If the airplane is twice as long, the time savings will be nearly twice as much since the density of luggage-stowing passengers will remain the same and the boarding will still be maximally parallel. For Wilma and random boarding the beneï¬t will not be as strong since the beneï¬ts of parallel boarding are randomly distributed along the length of the cabin instead of being regularly distributed.

I am not optimistic that airlines will even test out this method. People tend to think companies apply sensible, proven concepts and methods. But that is much less likely to be done than people think. The failure of many places to use simple queuing theory improvement (customers should form one line and be served the next available person not form many individual lines) is one example of failures by companies to apply decades old proven better methods. The poor adoption of multivariate designed experiments is another. Applying better ideas is a process that is not done very efficiently in business, health care, education or even science and engineering – in fact in any human endeavor. This is a waste that impacts each of us every day. It is also an opportunity for you to gain advantages just by applying all the good ideas lying around that others are ignoring. You need to test the ideas out in your setting (using the PDSA cycle in an organizational context a good method).

MIT Scientists Find New Drug That Could Cure Nearly Any Viral Infection

New drug could cure nearly any viral infection

The drug works by targeting a type of RNA produced only in cells that have been infected by viruses. “In theory, it should work against all viruses,” says Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist in Lincoln Laboratory‘s Chemical, Biological, and Nanoscale Technologies Group who invented the new technology.
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There are a handful of drugs that combat specific viruses, such as the protease inhibitors used to control HIV infection, but these are relatively few in number and susceptible to viral resistance.

Rider drew inspiration for his therapeutic agents, dubbed DRACOs (Double-stranded RNA Activated Caspase Oligomerizers), from living cells’ own defense systems. When viruses infect a cell, they take over its cellular machinery for their own purpose — that is, creating more copies of the virus. During this process, the viruses create long strings of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), which is not found in human or other animal cells.

As part of their natural defenses against viral infection, human cells have proteins that latch onto dsRNA, setting off a cascade of reactions that prevents the virus from replicating itself. However, many viruses can outsmart that system by blocking one of the steps further down the cascade.

Rider had the idea to combine a dsRNA-binding protein with another protein that induces cells to undergo apoptosis (programmed cell suicide) — launched, for example, when a cell determines it is en route to becoming cancerous. Therefore, when one end of the DRACO binds to dsRNA, it signals the other end of the DRACO to initiate cell suicide.

Combining those two elements is a “great idea” and a very novel approach, says Karla Kirkegaard, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University. “Viruses are pretty good at developing resistance to things we try against them, but in this case, it’s hard to think of a simple path pathway to drug resistance,” she says.

Each DRACO also includes a “delivery tag,” taken from naturally occurring proteins, that allows it to cross cell membranes and enter any human or animal cell. However, if no dsRNA is present, DRACO leaves the cell unharmed.

Very cool stuff and potentially hugely beneficial. Just a reminder: this works against viruses – not bacteria (just as antibiotics do not work against viruses).

Quantum Information Theory Postulated As Source of Emergent Theory of Gravity

I love the advances we have made using our understanding of science and engineering, like the internet, air conditioning and antibiotics. I also love the discussion of research where we really have only educated guesses about what the scientific inquiry process is telling us about the way things are. This research from the University of York is very interesting.

Escaping gravity’s clutches: the black hole breakout

Professor Braunstein says: “Our results didn’t need the details of a black hole’s curved space geometry. That lends support to recent proposals that space, time and even gravity itself may be emergent properties within a deeper theory. Our work subtly changes those proposals, by identifying quantum information theory as the likely candidate for the source of an emergent theory of gravity.”
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Dr Patra adds: “We cannot claim to have proven that escape from a black hole is truly possible, but that is the most straight-forward interpretation of our results. Indeed, our results suggest that quantum information theory will play a key role in a future theory combining quantum mechanics and gravity.”

It is too bad the University of York supports closed science and allows work to be withheld from the public to support outdated publishers business models. Luckily scientists often support open science and publish material openly – I have provided a link for those interested in science instead of the link the University of York gives to a publishers closed system.

Black Hole Evaporation Rates without Spacetime

Verlinde recently suggested that gravity, inertia, and even spacetime may be emergent properties of an underlying thermodynamic theory. This vision was motivated in part by Jacobson’s 1995 surprise result that the Einstein equations of gravity follow from the thermodynamic properties of event horizons. Taking a first tentative step in such a program, we derive the evaporation rate (or radiation spectrum) from black hole event horizons in a spacetime-free manner. Our result relies on a Hilbert space description of black hole evaporation, symmetries therein which follow from the inherent high dimensionality of black holes, global conservation of the no-hair quantities, and the existence of Penrose processes. Our analysis is not wedded to standard general relativity and so should apply to extended gravity theories where we find that the black hole area must be replaced by some other property in any generalized area theorem.

What Happens If the Overuse of Antibiotics Leads to Them No Longer Working?

Antibiotics have been a miraculous tool to keep up healthy. Like vaccines this full value of this tool is wasted if it is used improperly. Vaccines value is wasted when they are not used enough. Antibiotics lose potency when they are overused. The overuse of anti-biotics on humans is bad (especially the huge amount of just lazy, not scientific use). But the massive overuse in livestock is much worse, it seems to me.

The health system in the USA is broken in a huge way in which it is broken is the failure to address creating systemic behavior that promotes human health and instead just treating illness. It is much better to avoid a situation where we breed super bugs and then try to treat those super bugs that have evolved to be immune to the antibiotics we have to use.

When antibiotics no longer work

While the source of the current salmonella outbreak remains murky, we can reasonably speculate about the genesis of the bug’s drug-resistance: the reportedly endemic overuse of antibiotics by the agricultural industry.

Drugs are given to livestock for multiple reasons. An obvious one is for the treatment of diseases. When livestock are sick, veterinarians administer a significant dosage in hopes of eliminating the animal’s affliction. Another reason is preventative. Animals in close quarters are more susceptible to infection, so farmers will often administer medicine to healthy animals in order to nip anything nasty in the bud. Most controversially, though, members of the agricultural industry use antibiotics for the express purpose of promoting livestock growth.

It’s a well-known, if not entirely intuitive, fact that healthy animals who are fed small, or “sub-therapeutic,” doses of antibiotics will wind up larger than their unmedicated counterparts. In many such cases, these drugs are given to livestock through their feed or water, and without the prescription or oversight of a veterinarian, according to Dr. Gail Hansen, a senior officer at the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming.

An estimated 80 percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. are given to food-producing livestock, according to the FDA. And approximately 83 percent of that medicine is “administered flock- or herd-wide at low levels for non-therapeutic purposes, such as growth promotion and routine disease prevention,” according to a lawsuit filed against the FDA in May. These figures could have very real consequences for public health, because the Catch-22 of this antibiotic abandon is the widespread development of drug-resistant bacteria, colloquially referred to as “super-bugs.”
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In 2006, the European Union banned all use of antibiotics on livestock for growth promotion. And the U.S. Senate will consider similar legislation this year. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., reintroduced the “Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act” last month, which would significantly rein in agricultural drug use, and strictly prohibit the application of sub-therapeutic doses of drugs that have benefits for humans.

Still, the agricultural industry disputes data about its use of antibiotics and the rise of super-bugs, and it has aggressively fought efforts to legislate the matter. As a result, it’s hard to tell how far the legislation might proceed.

The end of the era of antibiotics

How did this happen? The driving forces are Darwin and human carelessness. Bacteria are constantly evolving, adapting to the changing conditions they face. Antibiotics usually kill bacteria. But sometimes a bacteria will develop a biological defense – particularly if too small a dose is used.
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Antibiotics require a prescription in America, but our nation is still very much a part of the problem. Patients routinely demand these drugs, and doctors acquiesce, for respiratory infections and other ailments that will not respond to antibiotics because they are caused by a virus. We use soap with antimicrobial agents when regular soap does equally well. And we allow farmers to feed antibiotics to livestock in horrifying amounts, not to treat illnesses but to make farming more efficient.

The Potential Role of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations in Infectious Disease Epidemics and Antibiotic Resistance

This working group, which was part of the Conference on Environmental Health Impacts of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations: Anticipating Hazards—Searching for Solutions, considered the state of the science around these issues and concurred with the World Health Organization call for a phasing-out of the use of antimicrobial growth promotants for livestock and fish production. We also agree that all therapeutic antimicrobial agents should be available only by prescription for human and veterinary use.

Antibiotic Resistance in Livestock: More at Risk Than Steak
Continue reading →

The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma

They Might be Giants once again provide an enjoyable view into the wonders of science. Previously they published the video, The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas. They published an updated video, a couple years ago, which captures the best current understanding based on the scientific inquiry process: Why Does the Sun Really Shine? (The Sun is a Miasma of Incandescent Plasma).

I really do love, They Might be Giants. Even before their focus on science I enjoyed their music. But they have done wonders with all their recent work. Go Giants. Get their DVD: Here Comes Science.

Their previous video, The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas, Continue reading →

Evolution in New York City Wildlife

Evolution Right Under Our Noses by Carl Zimmer

White-footed mice, stranded on isolated urban islands, are evolving to adapt to urban stress. Fish in the Hudson have evolved to cope with poisons in the water. Native ants find refuge in the median strips on Broadway. And more familiar urban organisms, like bedbugs, rats and bacteria, also mutate and change in response to the pressures of the metropolis. In short, the process of evolution is responding to New York and other cities the way it has responded to countless environmental changes over the past few billion years. Life adapts.
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Dr. Wirgin and his colleagues were intrigued to discover that the Hudson’s population of tomcod, a bottom-dwelling fish, turned out to be resistant to PCBs. “There was no effect on them at all,” Dr. Wirgin said, “and we wanted to know why.”

In March, he and his colleagues reported that almost all the tomcod in the Hudson share the same mutation in a gene called AHR2. PCBs must first bind to the protein encoded by AHR2 to cause damage. The Hudson River mutation makes it difficult for PCBs to grab onto the receptor, shielding the fish from the chemical’s harm.

The AHR2 mutation is entirely missing from tomcod that live in northern New England and Canada. A small percentage of tomcod in Long Island and Connecticut carry the mutation. Dr. Wirgin and his colleagues concluded that once PCBs entered the Hudson, the mutant gene spread quickly.

Carl Zimmer again does a good job of explaining science in an engaging way. It is interesting to learn about science and evolution in urban environments. Lots of life manages to survive the challenges of urban life and it is interesting to learn what scientists are finding about that life.

More Dark Matter Experiment Results

A dark-matter experiment deep in the Soudan mine of Minnesota now has detected a seasonal signal variation similar to one an Italian experiment has been reporting for more than a decade.

The new seasonal variation, recorded by the Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology (CoGeNT) experiment, is exactly what theoreticians had predicted if dark matter turned out to be what physicists call Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs).

“We cannot call this a WIMP signal. It’s just what you might expect from it,” said Juan Collar, associate professor in physics at the University of Chicago. Collar and John Orrell of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who lead the CoGeNT collaboration, are submitting their results in two papers to Physical Review Letters.

WIMPS might have caused the signal variation, but it also might be a random fluctuation, a false reading sparked by the experimental apparatus itself or even some exotic new phenomenon in atomic physics, Collar said.

Dark matter accounts for nearly 90 percent of all matter in the universe, yet its identity remains one of the biggest mysteries of modern science. Although dark matter is invisible to telescopes, astronomers know it is there from the gravitational influence it exerts over galaxies.

Theorists had predicted that dark matter experiments would detect an annual modulation because of the relative motion of the Earth and sun with respect to the plane of the Milky Way galaxy.
Continue reading →

New Discovery Finds Fungi Different From All Known Forms is Ubiquitous

A New, Somewhat Moldy Branch On The Tree Of Life

Many fungi are already familiar. There are mushrooms, yeasts, molds like the one that makes penicillin, plant diseases such as rusts and smuts. Mildew in your shower is one, along with athlete’s foot. There are even fungi that infect insects — as well as fungi that live on other fungi.

Biologists figure they’ve probably only cataloged about 10 percent of all fungal species. But they thought they at least knew all of the major groups.
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They found novel bits of DNA — related to fungi, but clearly different from all of the known varieties — just about everywhere, “including pond water, lake water, freshwater sediments and marine sediments,” Richards says. “Almost everywhere we looked we found this novel group.”

They then brought samples back to the lab and devised a technique to make the organisms containing this novel DNA glow under a microscope. As a result, they’ve managed to get a few glimpses of these mysterious life forms, which they have named cryptomycota.

“We know they have at least three stages to their life cycle,” Richards says. “One is where they attach to a host, which are photosynthetic algae. Another stage … they form swimming tails so they can presumably find food. And [there’s] another stage, which we call the cyst phase, where they go to sleep.”

Science continues to explore and find new wonders around us. There is so much still to learn.

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge

The Architecture of Access to Scientific Knowledge from lessig on Vimeo.

Larry Lessig speaks at CERN about the proper use of copyright and the moral case for open access. As I have written many times, I strongly believe our society is better off when science is open. I believe we now are allowing a few greedy institution (that seek to restrict science for the benefit of their organization) to pay our politicians to damage society for the benefit of a few donors.