Archive for the 'science' Category

Great article about how the cure to scurvy was discovered, lost and rediscovered.

Discusses new advances in neuroscience, which imply that language is understood using larger portions of the brain than previously thought.

"The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level." Latter day triumph of Plato?

"To improve access to scientific literature, we have created Botanicus, a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. We have been digitizing materials from our library since 1995, focusing primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from our rare book collection." via karinalane.

"The last common ancestor of all life was not a free-living cell at all, but a porous rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that catalysed primordial biochemical reactions. Powered by hydrogen and proton gradients, this natural flow reactor filled up with organic chemicals, giving rise to proto-life that eventually broke out as the first living cells - not once but twice, giving rise to the bacteria and the archaea."

"This strategy for survival, known as autophagy ('eating oneself'), evolved in our ancestors over two billion years ago. Today, all animals rely on it to endure famines, as do plants, fungi and single-cell protozoa."

May be the ultimate weekend killer.

Blog reviewing and excerpting "The Origin of Species"

"She does not always perceive the arm but 'retrieves' it when needed, doctors told the Swiss news agency."

Its sort of amazing that all the high-profile jabs that Republicans have made against government spending have been against totally reasonable science programs that, on the whole, don't really cost that much.

"Some ant nests are so enormous that they are akin to the skeletons of whales. Those of one species of leafcutter ant from South America, for example, can contain nearly two thousand individual chambers, some with a capacity of fifty liters, and they can involve the excavation of forty tons of earth and extend over hundreds of square feet. Coordination within such giant colonies, which can house eight million individual ants, occurs through ant communication systems that are extraordinarily sophisticated and are the equivalent of the human nervous system."

Ensouling bees.

Apparently the brain uses the same areas to remember and to predict. That makes so much sense.

"It turns out that virtually every tree that was alive starting in 1954 has a "spike" — an atomic bomb souvenir."

This would be a good substitute for flying cars, Science.

"It was really overwhelming when I saw that I had arms again."

"A musician who underwent brain surgery to treat a hand tremor played his banjo throughout to test the success of the procedure."

The "Exhibition Preparation" section is, of course, particularly fascinating.

I'm admittedly somewhat late to the party here, and nowhere on this list will you find "taking a break for a few months because we broke it", but for all I know this is a nice rundown of the sorts of things we might expect to be discovered or confirmed by the LHC.