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A Science Minute
- Thread starter Randall
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Accelerator sets world record
Most powerful high-energy particle beam for a neutrino experiment ever generated
A key element in a particle-accelerator-based neutrino experiment is the power of the beam that gives birth to neutrinos: The more particles you can pack into that beam, the better your chance to see neutrinos interact in your detector. Scientists have announced that Fermilab has set a world record for the most powerful high-energy particle beam for neutrino experiments ... Read More Here
Most powerful high-energy particle beam for a neutrino experiment ever generated
A key element in a particle-accelerator-based neutrino experiment is the power of the beam that gives birth to neutrinos: The more particles you can pack into that beam, the better your chance to see neutrinos interact in your detector. Scientists have announced that Fermilab has set a world record for the most powerful high-energy particle beam for neutrino experiments ... Read More Here
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Engineers give invisibility cloaks a slimmer design
Researchers have designed a new cloaking device that overcomes some of the limitations of existing 'invisibility cloaks.' In a new study, electrical engineers have designed a cloaking device that is both thin and does not alter the brightness of light around a hidden object. The technology behind this cloak will have more applications than invisibility, such as concentrating solar energy and increasing signal speed in optical communications ... Read More Here
Researchers have designed a new cloaking device that overcomes some of the limitations of existing 'invisibility cloaks.' In a new study, electrical engineers have designed a cloaking device that is both thin and does not alter the brightness of light around a hidden object. The technology behind this cloak will have more applications than invisibility, such as concentrating solar energy and increasing signal speed in optical communications ... Read More Here
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
DNA barcoding detects contamination and substitution in North American herbal products
Background
Herbal products available to consumers in the marketplace may be contaminated or substituted with alternative plant species and fillers that are not listed on the labels. According to the World Health Organization, the adulteration of herbal products is a threat to consumer safety ... We used DNA barcoding to conduct a blind test of the authenticity for (i) 44 herbal products representing 12 companies and 30 different species of herbs ... only 2/12 companies had products without any substitution, contamination or fillers. Some of the contaminants we found pose serious health risks to consumers ... Read More
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Unfortunately the page does not show product names. What is the point of making such claims without alerting consumers to which products received the highest and lowest ratings? Can this study even be trusted? It wouldn't be the first time a medical paper has contained unsubstantiated claims. Personally I'm a big supporter of nutritional supplements, and I think we need more information on this, especially if the claims are true. If anyone can find details on this study that include the product labels, please link it up to this post!
Background
Herbal products available to consumers in the marketplace may be contaminated or substituted with alternative plant species and fillers that are not listed on the labels. According to the World Health Organization, the adulteration of herbal products is a threat to consumer safety ... We used DNA barcoding to conduct a blind test of the authenticity for (i) 44 herbal products representing 12 companies and 30 different species of herbs ... only 2/12 companies had products without any substitution, contamination or fillers. Some of the contaminants we found pose serious health risks to consumers ... Read More
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Unfortunately the page does not show product names. What is the point of making such claims without alerting consumers to which products received the highest and lowest ratings? Can this study even be trusted? It wouldn't be the first time a medical paper has contained unsubstantiated claims. Personally I'm a big supporter of nutritional supplements, and I think we need more information on this, especially if the claims are true. If anyone can find details on this study that include the product labels, please link it up to this post!
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Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
The Augmented Reality Sandbox allows students to interact with a miniature landscape, sculpting mountains, valleys, rivers and even volcanoes, with off the shelf readily available parts ... Developed by researchers at UC Davis, the Augmented Reality Sandbox lets users sculpt mountains, canyons and rivers, then fill them with water or even create erupting volcanoes ... ( Article )
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve ... Rest of Article Here
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
New DARPA project aims to do away with IT updates:
"... a computer system that has the ability to outlive over 100 years of technological change ... the program is aimed at making advances in the design and implementation of long-lived software systems that have the ability to dynamically adapt to changes in the resources they depend upon, and the environments in which they operate ..."
Rest of the article here: New DARPA project aims to do away with IT updates | ZDNet
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RU_Insane
Skilled Investigator
Science is a form of rational inquiry, a particular one suited to investigating the natural world. But there's other forms of inquiry (or knowledge production) that don't use the scientific method as we understand it today...I think.
People who think that science can find out the truth about anything and everything are fooling themselves. Thankfully, those people seem far and in between, from my experience.
People who think that science can find out the truth about anything and everything are fooling themselves. Thankfully, those people seem far and in between, from my experience.
Randall
J. Randall Murphy
Thanks for your comment. I like science and I have a lot of respect for scientists. I'm not a scientist myself, but I'm always glad to have the opportunity to have a discussion with one who can express what they're doing in terms I that don't require a degree first in order to comprehend. The ones I'm thankful are far and few between are the ones that are the academic elitists and technocrats who think that the whole world should be run according to their algorithms. That's what got us into the nuclear energy mess we're in now, and I tend to think that all the EM radiation we're swimming in on a daily basis could have more of a negative impact than they think too.
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Thanks for posting this. This is a great video of computer simulations on the filament structure of the universe. There are other similar videos on YouTube that show flyby's of these structures. For over a decade, astronomers have added up the mass of the baryons in the universe (anything made up of protons and neutrons, which is most of the ordinary matter, and it was always low to what was predicted by the Lambda-CDM model/Planck Satellite data. Recent research has confirmed that a lot of this discrepancy is tied up in gas associated with the filaments, thus giving more credence to the Lambda-CDM model for the evolution of the universe.
The cosmic web: seeing what makes up the universe