There is something delightful about riding a bicycle. Once mastered, the simple action of pedaling to move forward and turning the handlebars to steer makes bike riding an effortless activity.
Scientists have produced an oxide glass with unprecedented toughness. Under high pressures and temperatures, they succeeded in paracrystallizing an aluminosilicate glass: The resulting crystal-like structures cause the glass to withstand very high stresses and are retained under ambient conditions.
You can see more of photographer Ole Bielfeldt's remarkable work -- including a video of a struck match -- on his Instagram feed. https://www.instagram.com/macrofying/
“Man the Hunter has dominated the study of human evolution for nearly half a century & pervaded popular culture. [But] it was the arrival of agriculture that led to rigid gendered roles & economic inequality. Hunting belonged to everyone.”
@morecowbell@Sheril No, they use words that are fit to describe their observations. In this case how there are, previously tried to insufficiently categorize as f.e. Intersex, a whole range of people with sex markers that are on a spectrum between the two most common phenotypes commonly described as male and female.
This is not just word juggling, it's science that should become part of sex education but is heavily fought. Your denial doesn't change anything about this.
The first lab-grown burger cost $330,000 to create in 2013. The price has fallen to just under $10 per burger today, which is remarkable progress in just a decade.
It’s a remarkable scientific success, but the general public is divided over whether it will eat cultured meat (CM) products. Would you?
@TheConversationUS I would be happy to have a hamburger that cuts down on the unbelievable cruelty of animal factory farming, while also at the same time stopping the total environmental collapse of this planet caused by animal factory farming.
How can we possibly expect folks to understand the emergence of new #COVID variants given most lack a basic understanding of evolution? #science#health
New article by Thomas Hostler in the Journal of Trial and Error:
“There is a high chance that without intervention, increased expectations to engage in open research practices may lead to unacceptable increases in demands on academics.”
Probably unpopular point of view: I hate the phrase “science communicator” & always have. We don’t have history or policy communicators - just historians and policy experts who can share their subject. Saying science needs a “communicator” just serves to isolate it as a weird hard thing that needs special magic powers to access. It implies that communication isn’t a normal part of science, but it is (or should be). Also, it undervalues teachers, who communicate science all the time. #science
@helenczerski Scientific research is uniquely dependent on public funding, which is why we need a translation layer between the esoteric language we use to communicate with each other and the lay public.
In that respect, I think there is an important distinction between "scientist" and "researcher"; I teach science, but I do research.
I'm also an off-putting nerd who appreciates the science communicators that inspire the researchers that I mentor in my lab to study science in the first place.
The TRAPPIST-1 system is an extraordinary natural lab for studying planetary habitability: 7 Earth-size planets orbiting a nearby dim, red star. All 7 pass in front of their star, so we can watch the way they block its light. (2/n) #science#life#astronomy
Yes, these hauntings are very appropriate. I think the need to regulate where the science golem is directed is another reason the machine cannot be completely disconnected from philosophy and other modes of thought. Empiricism doesn't really justify itself! 😅
A big problem is that the field has always been dominated by a focus on physics - whether or not you agree with it, a small book I recommend is Mayr's 'What Makes Biology Unique'
"Christopher Nolan's #Oppenheimer explores the work of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer & colleagues to create the atomic bomb.
Yet, the film fails to depict a key part of the story, using 2 female scientists as stand-ins for ALL of the women who contributed."
Hundreds of women were essential to the Manhattan Project, including Nobel Prize winning physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer. But they are largely absent in the #film.
@Sheril I mean, it’s a Nolan film. Of course it ignores most of the women. Women are only important to Nolan in how they motivate men. It’s my primary criticism of him and why I don’t care for his work.
@Sheril I went and watched it today and one thing that struck me was how it consisted of cishet white men almost exclusively. There was a very short scene where a female scientist argued that radiation would affect her as much as every one else, therefore she should be allowed to work on the project, but that was it. All women in the movie had supporting roles as wives or assistants or they were depicted as mere objects of pleasure.
I just realized that, in Grover’s algorithm, the Hadamard transform is NOT being used as a state transition, even though Grover derives it as one and describes it as one.
It is being used in its conventional way, as an isomorphic transform for computational convenience.
The current state is transformed to a ‘frequency domain’. All components but the original ‘average’ and the solution are rotated. The state is transformed back.
The UK is to rejoin the EU’s Horizon research scheme AND Copernicus (the Earth observation satellite system). Very cheering news to start the day!
It doesn’t really make up for the stupidity of leaving in the first place, or the damage done to our research base when our contributions stopped, though.
@kentindell@helenczerski@CrackedWindscreen the only potential party of a new UK Government is so much in thrall to the worst of right wing England, that they are at pains to tell us how little they intend to change from the incompetent right wing fools who currently hold the position. Their strapp line seems to be. "The same shit, delivered more competently."
Where we use a method originally used for AGN to answer the question whether
we can use variability in individual X-ray lines to probe the variable stellar wind.
And the answer is: yes, we can!
The paper (submitted not yet refereed) is:
"Stellar wind variability in Cygnus X-1 from high-resolution excess
variance spectroscopy with Chandra" by Härer et al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14201
@MichaelKlann thank you 😊
We just got the news that the paper was accepted a few days ago (thus the re-boost of the post) 😊 It was actually a very good refereeing process that improved the paper!
@vicgrinberg you are welcome! 😃 I just saw the post of acceptance! Congratulations and have a nice weekend! And keep on creating those drawings please! 😄
If leaders in the Global North had shown true leadership 50 years ago — or perhaps 40 years ago or even 30 years ago — and begun an urgent shift away from fossil fuels and away from the mantra of growth-at-all-costs, then maybe we would be in a position today where some form of modern society could be maintained without enduring catastrophic collapse.
But they did not make that choice. They did not display any vision or show true leadership. Instead, they did the exact opposite.
Since 1990, greedy capitalists and the governments they own have doubled down (see attached graphs), completely wrecking our climate and environment, placing not only humans but thousands of other plant and animal species in grave danger of extinction.
If you've been following me for a while and reading my posts, chances are you already understand how bad our current situation really is. But if you're just being introduced to this topic, or if you simply want to learn more about our impossible predicament, then here is an article filled with relevant information:
@breadandcircuses
Came across a Mastodon post linking to a blog supporting continued growth.
It's hard to understand how apparently intelligent people can think, "We've continued to grow and increase greenhouse gases for the last 50 years knowing that it will result in climate change and now we should do some more growth because that will stop climate change."
But that seems to be the line taken.
@breadandcircuses People are not used looking ahead more than a couple of months. The #climatecatastrophe is happening in slow time. Humanity is almost literally the frog which is being boiled slowly to death. Because many greedy very rich people want to continue making huge profits regardless of the costs for the rest of humankind.
I believe the most important phrase in science in coming decades will be "ontological shock." Our approach to scientific advancement thus far has largely focused on observing matter and energy at micro and macro scales, but it is clear that observation alone does not explain the behavior of said matter and energy.
In quantum mechanics, we see we do not understand the behavior of the tiniest constituents of matter.
In our observation if distant galaxies, we see we don't understand the nature of matter on a macro scale (ie: socalled "dark matter).
We have reached our limit of understanding by looking only at matter as a physical phenomenon, and we are on the brink of a new paradigm that will upheave everything we thought we knew.
This will overhaul our understanding of the nature of spacetime, quantum fields, and consciousness, through a "nonlocal" lens.
Modern physics cannot prove this statement true, but we know it to be true, indicating a significant, fundamental gap in the strictly materialist view of the universe.
I don't think anyone is saying physics is useless, but my personal belief is that the next breakthrough will NEED to bridge the gap I just mentioned above.
The fact that this very conversation has escalated in tone and resulted essentially in name-calling is exactly what I'm talking about with my original post about "ontological shock." People cannot even talk about the POSSIBILITY of an upset to the current paradigm without becoming emotional.
Maybe it's because we are on social media, but I don't think so.
My original post is also, admittedly, unscientific. I stated a feeling I have, nothing more. I could be wrong, and I would accept that possibility. It might even be best if I am wrong. But we owe it to ourselves to keep open minds and treat each other with respect.
The tick-borne disease has not caused any deaths, health officials say, but people with alpha-gal syndrome have described it as bewildering and terrifying.
In 1916, 23 yr old chemist Alice Ball discovered a breakthrough in treatment for Leprosy (Hansen’s Disease). She was the 1st woman & 1st Black chemistry professor at UHawaii.
Tragically, Ball passed away months after her discovery due to complications from a lab accident.
What happened next? Arthur Dean, head of her dept, continued the work publishing Ball’s process as “Dean’s method.”
@Sheril I want to know more about this "lab accident" given that Dean subsequently grabbed credit for her work. If only Hercule Poirot had been available to investigate. 😉
