Science Geekery!

[Poop Fresh-Herbed Pickles]

James Randi on homepathy:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U[/youtube]

This video is just fine even without sound.

He looks like he could be an extra from Lord of the Rings or something.

[Bizarro]

Did we already talk about the world seed vault being built in the arctic? Fascinating stuff.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[Bizarro]

famous uncontacted tribe in recent photos actually discovered in 1910

[matthew]

6 Top-Secret Aircraft that are Mistaken for UFOs

[Doctor Rock]

6 Top-Secret Aircraft that are Mistaken for UFOs

The comments to that are hilarious.  This shouldn't be in Science Geekery.  This should be in the A Sucker Is Born Every Minute section. 

[Bizarro]

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/482

[matthew]

The comments to that are hilarious.  This shouldn't be in Science Geekery.  This should be in the A Sucker Is Born Every Minute section. 

I actually posted it for the comments.


<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/RM9o4VnfHJU" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/RM9o4VnfHJU</a>

http://www.mbari.org/news/news_releases/2009/barreleye/barreleye.html

[Bizarro]

Nickel "Famine" Led to Oxygen-Breathing Life?
 
Life as we know it may have evolved because Earth's early oceans ran low on nickel, a new study suggests.

The metal is an important nutrient for a class of bacteria known as methanogens, which produce methane, a gas that reacts easily with oxygen.

Methanogens flourished on early Earth, presumably filling the atmosphere with methane gas, said study leader Kurt Konhauser, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Alberta.

"The methanogenic bacteria were very happy until 2.5 billion years ago," he said.

At that point, rocks from the era show that atmospheric oxygen started to rise, which would suggest that methane levels dropped. But the exact reason for the oxygen spike has been a long-standing puzzle.

Konhauser's team looked for an answer in rocks found in Ontario, Canada, that formed on the ancient sea floor.

"Studying them gives a history of seawater," he said.

What they found is that older rocks had metal concentrations high in nickel, while the rocks that formed after them had less of the nutrient.

The scientists suggest that cooling of the Earth's mantle decreased eruptions of nickel-rich volcanic rock, which meant that less nickel was being weathered from the rocks and dissolved in the oceans.

This nickel "famine" starved the methanogens, spurring a gradual decline in atmospheric methane, the researchers think.

Meanwhile, a class of photosynthetic bacteria known as cyanobacteria, which had been on the scene since 2.7 to 2.8 billion years ago, was continuing to produce oxygen.

With less methane around to tie it up, oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere, eventually creating conditions for oxygen-breathing life to dominate.

The finding, Konhauser added, would help explain why there was a 300- to 400-million-year delay between when cyanobacteria appeared and oxygen began building up in the atmosphere.

[matthew]

Interesting.

I love this:

a 300- to 400-million-year delay

[Bizarro]

The Next Age of Discovery

In a 21st-century version of the age of discovery, teams of computer scientists, conservationists and scholars are fanning out across the globe in a race to digitize crumbling literary treasures.

In the process, they're uncovering unexpected troves of new finds, including never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle. Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable -- blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll. Now, scholars are studying these works with X-ray fluorescence, multispectral imaging used by NASA to photograph Mars and CAT scans used by medical technicians.

A Benedictine monk from Minnesota is scouring libraries in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia for rare, ancient Christian manuscripts that are threatened by wars and black-market looters; so far, more than 16,500 of his finds have been digitized. This summer, a professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky plans to test 3-D X-ray scanning on two papyrus scrolls from Pompeii that were charred by volcanic ash in 79 A.D. Scholars have never before been able to read or even open the scrolls, which now sit in the French National Institute in Paris.

By taking high-resolution digital images in 14 different light wavelengths, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet, Oxford scholars are reading bits of papyrus that were discovered in 1898 in an ancient garbage dump in central Egypt. So far, researchers have digitized about 80% of the collection of 500,000 fragments, dating from the 2nd century B.C. to the 8th century A.D. The texts include fragments of unknown works by famous authors of antiquity, lost gospels and early Islamic manuscripts.

Among their latest findings: An alternate version of the Greek play Medea, later immortalized in a version by Euripides, on a darkened piece of papyrus, dated to the 2nd century A.D. In the newly discovered version -- written by Greek playwright Neophron -- Medea doesn't kill her children, says Dirk Obbink, director of Oxford's Oxyrhynchus Papyri Project.

War and political instability in artifact-rich regions such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where untold numbers of antiquities have been lost through looting and destruction, have ignited the push to digitize rare documents. Recent tragedies, such as the earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, and the collapse this past March of the Cologne city archives in Germany, where conservationists are still working frantically to retrieve texts from the rain-soaked rubble, serve as reminders of how quickly cultural relics can be wiped out.

For as long as great manuscript collections have existed, their contents have been vulnerable. The ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt burned down in 48 B.C., incinerating works by Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles; today, out of more than 120 plays by Sophocles, only seven survive.

While conservationists are quick to stress that pixels and bytes can never replace priceless physical artifacts, many see digitization as a vital tool for increasing public access to rare items, while at the same time creating a disaster-proof record and perhaps unearthing new information.

A digital arms race has been heating up in recent years as companies pour millions into large-scale digitization projects, including Microsoft's effort to scan 80,000 books at the British Library and IBM's multimillion-dollar project to create a virtual version of China's Forbidden City. The Ford Foundation and other organizations are funding a drive to translate and digitize some 700,000 manuscripts in Timbuktu, Mali. The world's oldest functioning monastery, St. Catherine's in Egypt, is digitally photographing its collection of roughly 5,000 scrolls and manuscripts, including the Codex Sinaiticus, which dates to 330 A.D. and is thought to be the oldest Bible in the world.

Last month, the United Nations launched a "World Digital Library" with materials from 30 libraries and archives around the world, including the oracle bones, which hold the earliest Chinese writings, and an 8,000-year-old rock painting from South Africa. The project, which cost $10 million in private donations, has images of 1,200 texts and artifacts and is expected to grow to house millions of items.

One of the most ambitious digital preservation projects is being led, fittingly, by a Benedictine monk. Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's Abbey and University in Minnesota, cites his monastic order's long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration.

His mission: digitizing some 30,000 endangered manuscripts within the Eastern Christian traditions, a canon that includes liturgical texts, Biblical commentaries and historical accounts in half a dozen languages, including Arabic, Coptic and Syriac, the written form of Aramaic. Rev. Stewart has expanded the library's work to 23 sites, including collections in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, up from two in 2003. He has overseen the digital preservation of some 16,500 manuscripts, some of which date to the 10th and 11th centuries. Some works photographed by the monastery have since turned up on the black market or eBay, he says.

Among the treasures that Rev. Stewart has digitally captured: a unique Syriac manuscript of a 12th-century account of the Crusades, written by Syrian Christian patriarch Michael the Great. The text, a composite of historical accounts and fables, was last studied in the 1890s by a French scholar who made an incomplete handwritten copy. Western scholars have never studied the complete original, which was locked in a church vault in Aleppo, Syria. Rev. Stewart and his crew persuaded church leaders to let them photograph it last summer. A reproduction will be published this summer, and a digital version will be available through the library's Web site.

In February, Rev. Stewart traveled to Assyrian and Chaldean Christian communities in Kurdish villages in northern Iraq, where he hopes to soon begin work on collections in ancient monastic libraries. "You have these ancient Christian communities, there since the beginning of Christianity, which are evaporating," he says He's now seeking access to manuscript collections in Iran and Georgia.

With his black monk's habit, trimmed gray beard and deferential manner, Rev. Stewart has been able to make inroads into closed communities that are often suspicious of Western scholars and fiercely protective of their texts. Armed with 23-megapixel cameras and scanning cradles, he sets up imaging labs on site in monasteries and churches, and trains local people to scan the manuscripts.

Once the labs are set up, the projects cost roughly $20,000 a year in private donations. A similar effort to digitize Greek New Testament manuscripts by the Texas-based Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts costs roughly $10,000 a week for staffing, travel and equipment.

Even as companies such as Google try to take digital archiving mainstream, uploading entire collections remains prohibitively expensive. Scanning books costs roughly 10 cents a page for regular books, and up to $100 or even $1,000 per book for rare manuscripts that require special handling and care.
Discuss

    * What are the best online archives for historical documents, art and artifacts? Share your favorite sources at Journal Community.

Many conservationists are pessimistic about the prospect of putting entire library collections online within our lifetimes. The New York Public Library -- one of the library collections partnering with Google -- has digitally archived some 800,000 items, including 30,000 in the last nine months, but still has close to 50 million books and artifacts available only in print.

"In the current economic climate, the idea of really broad, deep digitization of a large scale is really off the table for the next couple of years," says Joshua Greenberg, director of digital strategy and scholarship for the New York Public Library. "It's a shame, because we're at the point where we really know how to do it."

An even more pressing concern for some scholars is that shoddy imaging work might damage manuscripts or fail to capture key details, such as binding styles, which give clues to a manuscript's date and origin. Some experts say the push toward online archiving could ultimately hurt scholarly work by creating the illusion that everything is available online, when the digital record remains full of holes. In the age of instant information, physical artifacts seem increasingly at risk of being rendered obsolete.

For now, curators and conservationists say capturing endangered manuscripts should be a top priority.

"This could be our only chance," says Daniel Wallace, executive director of the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts, the Texas-based center that is attempting to digitally photograph 2.6 million pages of Greek New Testament manuscripts scattered in monasteries and libraries around the world. The group has discovered 75 New Testament manuscripts, many with unique commentaries, that were unknown to scholars. Mr. Wallace says one of the rare, 10th century manuscripts they photographed was in a private collection and was later sold, page by page, for $1,000 a piece. Others are simply disintegrating, eaten away by rats and worms, or rotting.

A cascade of groundbreaking discoveries in the past decade, unleashed by new technology, has stoked the sense of urgency. Multispectral imaging -- originally developed by NASA to capture satellite images through clouds -- has proved remarkably effective on everything from ancient papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts that were scraped off and written over when scribes recycled parchment pages. Using the technique, which captures high-resolution images in different light wavelengths, scholars can see details invisible to the naked eye: For example, infrared light highlights ink containing carbon from crushed charcoal, while ultraviolet light picks up ink containing iron.

Researchers in Baltimore discovered a veritable library of ancient texts hidden in the pages of a single 13th-century Greek prayer book, including an unknown commentary on Aristotle and two missing treatises by the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Recently, multispectral imaging has gotten much less expensive, allowing researchers to take their equipment into the field. The next frontier, researchers say, is using CAT scan and X-ray technology to read brittle scrolls without even unrolling them.

This summer, a new project to decode ancient manuscripts with multispectral imaging will begin at the University of Michigan, Berkeley, and Columbia. The project, led by scholars from Brigham Young, will scan 400 papyrus pieces. Among the specimens: papyrus fragments from rolls that were stuffed inside mummified Egyptian crocodiles in the 1st century B.C., which are thought to contain ancient legal documents, contracts and perhaps literary works. Their efforts could reveal text that scholars have been laboring to read for decades, including a partially obscured play by Euripides.

"It's being called a second Renaissance," says Todd Hickey, a curator of papyri at the University of California, Berkeley, which has some 26,000 pieces of papyrus, many still unread. "It's revealing things that we didn't have a hope of reading in the past."

[Bizarro]

This is a photograph of the sun. Look in the bottom left corner. See those two dots?

Those are the silhouettes of the space shuttle and the Hubble.

[Bizarro]

Wind-powered drive-in opens in Illinois.

[Bizarro]

Particles Larger Than Galaxies Fill the Universe?
Charles Q. Choi
for National Geographic News
June 2, 2009
 
The oldest of the subatomic particles called neutrinos might each encompass a space larger than thousands of galaxies, new simulations suggest.

Neutrinos as we know them today are created by nuclear reactions or radioactive decay.

According to quantum mechanics, the "size" of a particle such as a neutrino is defined by a fuzzy range of possible locations. We can only detect these particles when they interact with something such as an atom, which collapses that range into a single point in space and time.

For neutrinos created recently, the ranges they can exist in are very, very small.

But over the roughly 13.7-billion-year lifetime of the cosmos, "relic" neutrinos have been stretched out by the expansion of the universe, enlarging the range in which each neutrino can exist.

"We're talking maybe up to roughly ten billion light-years" for each neutrino, said study co-author George Fuller of the University of California, San Diego.

"That's nearly on the order of the size of the observable universe."

"Small" Physics, Writ Large

Neutrinos have no charge, and their masses are so tiny they have yet to be accurately measured.

This means that neutrinos, which zip around at nearly the speed of light, can pass through normal matter largely undisturbed.

Most neutrinos that affect Earth come from the sun. Billions of solar neutrinos pass through the average human every second.

While trying to calculate masses for neutrinos, Fuller and his student Chad Kishimoto found that, as the universe has expanded, the fabric of space-time has been tugging at ancient neutrinos, stretching the particles' ranges over vast distances.

Such large ranges can remain intact, the scientists suggest in the May 22 issue of Physical Review Letters, since neutrinos pass right through most of the universe's matter.

An open question is whether gravity—say, the pull from an entire galaxy—can force a meganeutrino to collapse down to a single location.

"Quantum mechanics was intended to describe the universe on the smallest of scales, and now here we're talking about how it works on the largest scales in the universe," Kishimoto said.

"We're talking about physics that hasn't been explored before."

According to physicist Adrian Lee at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not part of the study team, "gravity is a real frontier these days that we don't really understand.

"These neutrinos could be a path to something deeper in our understanding with gravity."

(Related: "At Ten, Dark Energy 'Most Profound Problem' in Physics.")

Follow the Gravity?

But answers to such questions depend on eventually detecting these predicted meganeutrinos.

Although they should be extraordinarily common in the universe, the relic neutrinos now have only about one ten-billionth of the energy of neutrinos generated by the sun.

"This makes relic neutrinos near impossible to detect directly, at least with anything one could build on Earth," study co-author Fuller said.

Still, the fact that there are so many relic neutrinos means that together they likely exert a significant gravitational pull—"enough to be important for how the universe as a whole behaves," Fuller added.

Dark matter, for example, has never been directly observed. But astrophysicists have found proof that dark matter exists based on its effect on colliding galaxies.

"So by looking at the growth of structures in the universe," Fuller said, "you might be able to detect relic neutrinos indirectly by their gravity."

[Jesse]

cool.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxMXR97NIp0[/youtube]

[Bizarro]

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/multimedia/ero/index.html

New images from the refurbished Hubble.