US reserves of rare earth elements assessed for first time
“Rare earth” is an alternative name for the lanthanides – elements 57 to 71 – plus yttrium and scandium. The elements are integral to modern life, and are used in everything from disc drives, hybrid cars and sunglasses to lasers and aircraft used by the military.
China controls 97 per cent of the world’s supply and has been tightening its export quotas, sparking concerns that the rare earths could live up to their name.
Sgt. Byrd has been geocaching for years. He says the skills that geocaching instills; situational awareness, an eye for the unusual and quick detective work, help keep him safe when he’s finding and defusing bombs.
Just so you know, the part where things blow up is not the geocaching part.
Did you know that 73.4% of statistics are made up?
I’ve run across several posts all referencing a recent journal article, Retractions in the scientific literature: do authors deliberately commit research fraud?, which parrot (and possibly distort) the information in the abstract — that US researchers are the worst purveyors of fraud, such as this article: US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds
I wanted to check on that, because it’s not an unknown phenomenon for a article to incorrectly summarize research and so I looked at the article, linked above, to see the abstract
All 788 English language research papers retracted from the PubMed database between 2000 and 2010 were evaluated.
Well, that’s a bit of bias, since people in the US are more likely to publish in English-language journals, but that’s not necessarily true for countries where English is not the native language. It also assumes all fraud is caught and results in a retraction. But beyond that I wanted numbers to look at, since I know there are a lot of articles published in the US, and if they are simply saying that there are more fraudulent articles published in the US, it is pretty meaningless. While I don’t have access to the journal, it turns out that an analysis has already been done. US scientists “more prone” to fake research? No., with some followup in Rates of Scientific Fraud Retractions
The likelihood of a given paper being retracted as fraudulent is higher for China and India than for the US, and significantly so. The finding that the fraud rate is higher is higher-impact journals may be due to having more scrutiny and that we’re simply missing fraud in journals that are not widely read.
I think it’s also important to note (as the paper’s author does) that the overall rate of fraud is low. Using these criteria, it is less than 200 cases out of more than six million papers, or 0.0032%. In other words, for every 31,000 journal articles you read (from all sources), on average one of them will be fraudulent. If you limit yourself to US authors, the number drops to one in only 21,600.
Uncertain Principle: Trapped Antihydrogen
What’s the point of making antimatter if you can’t use it to blow stuff up? The point is to understand the laws of physics better. If you can do spectroscopy of anti-atoms, it will tell us a lot about whether antimatter obeys the same laws as ordinary matter, which might provide a clue as to why everything we see seems to be made of ordinary matter. You could also use it to test how antimatter interacts with gravity, which is something we don’t currently have any way to test.
But if the history of chemistry lays only dubious claim to being the greatest adventure in all of history, it certainly is an adventure: quite different from the nerdy stereotype of the history of science, and much more like Captain Kirk than Science Officer Spock. Such is the lesson of Patrick Coffey’s lively survey, Cathedrals of Science. The men (mostly) and women (more every year) who make this history fight for jobs and recognition just like ballplayers, doctors, artists, actors, and accountants who strive to reach the top of their profession. Along the way, they prefer their friends, sabotage their enemies, and tilt playing fields the world assumes are level. Those of us who work in a place that bestows awards and collects oral histories know that every sort of personality can be a great scientist: the bold, the shy, the plodding, the brilliant, the generous, the spiteful, the humble, and those with more self-assurance than a shark in a minnow tank.
Oh, sure, they show all the scenes where he nails it. But how many skinned knuckles did he suffer through to get this good?
American Drink: Ice Part 2: How to Make the Best F***ing Ice Ever
3. Boil the water
Totally optional in my opinion. If you want super clear ice, boil it to get rid of trapped gasses. I don’t bother much. I’ve already impressed myself just by getting out of bed in the morning and getting out of my jammies. j/k I’m still in my jammies. If you happen to boil water for French Press coffee in the morning, boil extra but don’t go out of your way for it and again, filtered tap water is just fine.
A particular ice tray is recommend in the post, and I had seen it before, but it (and other new silicone ice trays I’ve seen) suffer from one major flaw: there is no “cheater” slot connecting adjacent cube spaces, which would allow water to move between them and even the levels. This makes it hard to fill with water that’s not straight out of the tap, without spilling; one hand is occupied by pouring, and for most of us that leaves only one hand to hold the tray (if you aren’t named Zaphod Beeblebrox). I’m not sure if this is a design oversight, or a structural limitation imposed by using silicone.
(Apologies if this is overly rant-y. I’ve been suffering though a discussion from a creationist that boils down to “information” can’t increase, therefore evolution is impossible. I’m therefore a little sensitive to the topic of information and thermodynamics)
Demonic device converts information to energy
The laws of physics say that you can’t get energy for nothing — worse still, you will always get out of a system less energy than you put in. But a nanoscale experiment inspired by a nineteenth-century paradox that seemed to break those laws now shows that you can generate energy from information.
Of course, the key word is seemed. This is my main peeve here. The all-to-common insinuation that some law of nature has been violated.
Of course, later on (not paragraph 19, though), they admit
The experiment does not actually violate the second law of thermodynamics, because in the system as a whole, energy must be consumed by the equipment — and the experimenters — to monitor the bead and switch the voltage as needed. But it does show that information can be used as a medium to transfer energy, says Sano. The bead is driven as a mini-rotor, with a information-to-energy conversion efficiency of 28%.
I’m not sure how they get to “information is a medium to transfer energy,” and from that to “information is converted to energy.”
There’s a somewhat better article, via Dr. SkySkull
[T]here is energy in information. To store a bit of information a system like a computer memory needs to be put into a defined state, either a ’1′ or a ’0′.
That seems more reasonable — storing information (and all information needs to be stored) requires energy, so there is energy in information storage. But what is being presented as “information” is just the state of a system; one could just as easily say there is energy in e.g. an electron’s orientation in a magnetic field (or the location of a polystyrene bead, as in this case), and skip the discussion about information.
It sounds like a version of the Brownian ratchet, where a paddle would spin in only one direction from random collisions, because the ratchet would impede motion in the other direction. It fails because the ratchet, too, would be subject to collisions, and fail to work if everything were at the same temperature. Here, the mechanical ratchet has been replaced by an electric field, which is not in thermal equilibrium. You expend energy determining when to change the field.
I’m glad I didn’t run into any stories that called it “pure energy.” Oh, crud.
Edit (11/22) Sean does a summary, which makes a lot more sense.
The connection is not that “information carries energy”; if I tell you some information about gas particles in a box, that doesn’t change their total energy. But it does help you extract that energy.
How Do You See Interference Between Independent Lasers?
[T]his is traditionally done with a single laser and two slits. In principle, you ought to be able to do it with two completely independent lasers of the same wavelength, and see an interference pattern that way. In practice, though, this is very hard to do, as the phase difference between two independent lasers will jump around randomly at a very high rate. At any given instant, the two lasers will interfere with each other to make a nice double-slit pattern, but the positions of the bright and dark spots will shift around randomly, so fast that your eye can’t follow them.
