Nudibranches. (Latin for “Naked sea creatures.” Sort of.)
Or try this since the other link seems to be broken.
Category Archives: Other science
From the Days Before Paper and Scissors
I Thought That Was an Oxymoron
I Am Beautiful Too: Slime Mold Rehabilitated
Beautiful slime molds?
You're So Vain
Five Very Unique and Spectacular Clouds
(but not in my coffee)
Pedantic man notes something can’t be very unique. But these are pretty cool-looking.
NYU: Size Doesn't Matter
For vision, at least. Spacing, Not Size, Matters in Visual Recognition, NYU Researchers Find
New York University neuroscientists have concluded that it’s the spacing between letters, not their size, that matters. In general, objects, such as letters, can be recognized only if they are separated by enough space, the “critical spacing.” Objects closer than that spacing are “crowded” and cannot be identified. A broad review of this crowding phenomenon, appearing in the latest issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, shows that this critical spacing is the same for all objects, including letters, animals, and furniture.
No mention if the Rayleigh criterion is responsible for this.
Define Your Terms
There’s quite a bit of physics/science terminology that is defined in a way that doesn’t jibe (or is essentially opposite) of the everyday use of the word, like coincidence. But even within science, different disciplines will interpret terms differently, because of the conventions and anticipated results.
Bandwidth and Community Expectations over at Uncertain Principles.
[W]hether a femtosecond laser is a single-frequency source or a broad-band source really depends on what the expectations of your particular research community are. By the standards of chemistry, it’s incredibly narrow, but for laser spectroscopy types, it’s comically broad.
There’s more. Typically, to a physicist, the Gamma ray portion of the spectrum is comprised of photons that comes from nuclear interactions and X-rays come from atomic interactions, while astronomers tend to use an arbitrary cutoff of 1 MeV to distinguish these from each other.
You're a Spin-1/2 Baryon. How Do You Feel About That?
Proton Therapy – Cost and Benefit
[T]he current question on whether patients do benefit from it better than conventional, less-costly treatment.
‘Proton therapy’ was one answer to the “what good is it?” question of physics when I was working at TRIUMF, and explaining the benefit of basic research wasn’t an option.
Proton therapy is the use of protons to destroy tumors or cancerous cells in a way that is more targeted than other treatments like chemotherapy or EM radiation; I can’t really get into the medical subtleties (dammit, Jim, I’m a physicist, not a physician!). EM radiation will attenuate as it goes onto the body, so if the target is below the surface, you’ll get more energy deposited in the healthy tissue in front of the target. Charged particles lose energy, by ionizing atoms or molecules, in proportion to their speed — faster moving particles don’t spend much time interacting with a given atom — and so as they slow, they are able to deposit more energy. This compounding effect means they deposit a large fraction of their energy in a small region, and the penetration depth where this occurs can be tuned, as it’s proportional to the incident kinetic energy.
So you do far less damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. The question, in Zapperz’s link, is whether that translates into an overall better response of the patients, and a cost/benefit analysis.
Here is a somewhat more detailed explanation of the physics, including a dose vs depth graph for EM, protons and protons with a modulated energy source to spread out the Bragg peak. Protons have an advantage over electrons for this type of treatment: because they are much more massive, they have a much greater tendency to forward-scatter and reach the target.
Why is This Class Necessary?
Do Pre-Meds Really Need That Year of Organic Chemistry?
Feel free to replace this, mentally, with physics, and it can be applied to other endeavors. But here’s a joke that was posted on this topic at slashdot (which I found via another conduit)
A college physics professor was explaining a concept to his class when a pre-med student interrupted him.
“Why do we have to learn this stuff?” he blurted out.
“To save lives,” the professor responded before continuing the lecture.
A few minutes later the student spoke up again. “Wait– how does physics save lives?”
The professor responded. “By keeping idiots out of medical school.”
If You Eat All the Time, Don't Do the Crime
“So the sweaty fingerprint impression you leave when you touch a surface will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods -the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal.”
Dr Bond added there was therefore an indirect link therefore between obesity and the chances of being caught of a crime. “Other research has drawn links between processed foods and obesity and we know that consumers of processed foods will leave better fingerprints,” he said.
A Demo of Demographics
Interactive singles map of the US. There are sliders so you can narrow the age range, and choose your span. It does not adjust for singles in relationships. No, it doesn’t go under 18, you perverts.
[T]he only two places with a surplus of women in the 20-29 age bracket are New Orleans, LA and Springfield, MA? Lynchburg, VA pops up, too, if you lower the minimum required population.