Company Denies its Robots Feed on the Dead
In response to rumors circulating the internet on sites such as FoxNews.com, FastCompany.com and CNET News about a “flesh eating” robot project, Cyclone Power Technologies Inc. (Pink Sheets:CYPW) and Robotic Technology Inc. (RTI) would like to set the record straight: This robot is strictly vegetarian.
Sure, it’s vegetarian, now, because you programmed it that way. What happens when it becomes self-aware?
Fluid jets are normally made by forcing liquid through a nozzle, such as in a squirt gun or a syringe. But in the 10 July Physical Review Letters, researchers report a way to induce a fluid jet to burst from an isolated droplet. The team placed a liquid droplet on a surface and blasted it with focused surface acoustic waves–nano-sized versions of the ground-shaking waves from earthquakes–causing the droplet to shoot upward in a narrow stream. The researchers believe the technique could be useful in drug delivery, biomedical research, and inkjet printing.
Oh, yeah. I could smell the testosterone even with the windows closed. Real men drive Jettas.
Kottke has set up a way to watch the Apollo 11 landing on TV as it aired 40 years ago
For a more authentic feel,
This is just like real TV…if you miss the appointed time, there’s no rewind or anything…the video is playing “live”. I have not done extensive browser testing so it may not work perfectly in your browser.
Yes, that’s right. In 1969 there was no Tivo, or even VHS/beta for the masses. And there may be technical difficulties.
Cosmic Variance has a post linking to Why is Science Important (to which I linked back in February)
It’s worth revisiting, if for no other reason than to give this great quote from the video
“You’ve just seen me walk across red hot coals, at a temperature of over five hundred degrees Celsius. I could tell you that I’m an expert in an ancient form of meditation that lets me block out pain at will. I could then tell you that you could lead a happier life if you follow my teachings. For a small fee, of course.
Or, I could tell you the truth; that walking on hot coals doesn’t require any kind of magical powers. It’s just the case that the coals are a poor conductor of heat, and I walk so quickly that there’s hardly any time for heat transfer to take place.
Separating truth from fraudulent mumbo-jumbo is just one reason why science is important.”
Cocktail Party Physics: NEW VOICES: georgie boy
Dr. Cheadle has never heard of vitamins. Their discovery is decades in the future. But he understands that diet is the issue here, although many colleagues disagree. Dr. Cheadle argues in his 1878 paper against the various other theories about scurvy, including that it is caused by humid and/or cold climates, excess salt in the diet, lack of exercise, and ptomaine poisoning. “There is, however, an invariable factor, without the presence of which all other casual and irregular factors are powerless to set up the disease. This essential factor, it has been proved over and over again, is the absence of certain elements in food. If the body is deprived of these elements, [scurvy] is produced. What these elements are has not yet been absolutely settled with scientific precision, but we know positively that they exist in fresh vegetables, in lime-juice, in milk, and in less considerable degree, perhaps, in some other fresh animal foods.”
5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole
After careful consideration and consultation with members of the local science writing community (only some of them were drunk), we have selected the five most annoying and ubiquitous clichés we think should be sucked into a black hole, forever banished from all future descriptions of science.
Funny — I just saw “shedding light” in several headlines on my RSS feed before getting to this, and “shedding light on black holes” (ouch!) got me ~41k Google hits.
I’m surprised “quantum leap’ isn’t on the list. Quantum means discrete, not big, i.e. the opposite of quantum is continuum.
I’d also add “all heat and no light” because visible light from a blackbody is heat, and it can certainly be used to warm things up. Radiant energy is radiant energy. The problem here is that out experience is with “hot” things is at around 400K or so, where most of the blackbody radiation is in the infrared. So we equate infrared radiation with heat, and they just aren’t synonymous. You can be burned with focused visible light (ask an ant if you don’t believe me — oh, wait, you can’t: they’ve all been burned up). A microwave oven is another example of radiant energy transfer which doesn’t involve the infrared as the source.
Higher Speed Limits Cost Lives, Researchers Find
“This is a failed policy because it was, in essence, an experiment over 10 years. People assumed that increasing the speed limit would not have an impact,” said Friedman. “We’ve shown that something has happened and it’s quite dramatic.”
Umm, really? People assumed that if you drive faster, with its associated reduction in response times and increase in collision energy, that there would be no effect? I think people wanted the higher speed limit despite the higher risk it entailed, in part because of other safety advances.
Friedman uses the example of the 3,000 people who died in the September 11th terrorist attacks.
“That tragic event has led to a whole foreign policy,” he said. “We estimate that approximately 12,500 people died as a result of a policy to deregulate speed enforcement — four times what happened on September 11th — and yet changing the policy to reduce speed limits may be very difficult.”
What they don’t say is that despite the extra ~1250 deaths per year from the higher speed, overall deaths have fallen, and the rate per vehicle-mile has dropped dramatically over the years. Per mile traveled, you’re about half as likely to die as compared to 1980.
The problem with simply presenting a number is that there is no basis for a valid comparison. The apples-to-oranges 9/11 fatalities number is given instead. The graph shows about 15,000 fatalities per year, currently, making this a 9% increase, which discounts the possibility of other influences such as more cars on the road and more miles being traveled, which the fatality rate statistic indicates. (Though that can be influenced by many things as well)
A more meaningful analysis might go something like this. My upcoming vacation will entail me driving perhaps 1,000 miles. I can drive slower if I choose, but I have to consider if saving a half-hour of travel is worth it. Since being on the road for ~8 hours means fatigue comes into play, it might actually be safer to cut down on the travel time. If the fatality rate is 2 per 100 million miles, this means a statistical chance of 0.002%, which is quite small. And we’re talking about increasing this by 10%, to 0.0022%. The sin-by-omission in the article has you focusing on the dramatic large number rather than the overall picture.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, has returned its first imagery of the Apollo moon landing sites. The pictures show the Apollo missions’ lunar module descent stages sitting on the moon’s surface, as long shadows from a low sun angle make the modules’ locations evident.
The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, or LROC, was able to image five of the six Apollo sites, with the remaining Apollo 12 site expected to be photographed in the coming weeks.
That’s gonna shut the conspiracy nutjobs up. Oh, wait. No, it probably won’t.