Monthly Archives: December 2011

A Visit from the Stork

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Why doesn’t America like science?

The views that Bloomberg considers “mind-boggling” are not outliers, or not outside the coastal areas such as New York, where he resides.
But common or not, the spread of this sentiment is leaving many American scientists alarmed. Last month, New Scientist magazine warned in an editorial that science is now under unprecedented intellectual attack in America. “When candidates for the highest office in the land appear to spurn reason, embrace anecdote over scientific evidence, and even portray scientists as the perpetrators of a massive hoax, there is reason to worry,” it thundered.

Perhaps people think that new products and innovation are the result of the technology fairy, rather than application of the underlying science and that the technology works by magic.

They Didn't Take it to Cuba

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CSM Exclusive: Iran hijacked US drone, says Iranian engineer

[T]his engineer’s account of how Iran took over one of America’s most sophisticated drones suggests Tehran has found a way to hit back. The techniques were developed from reverse-engineering several less sophisticated American drones captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer says, and by taking advantage of weak, easily manipulated GPS signals, which calculate location and speed from multiple satellites.

I’m pretty sure “weak, easily manipulated GPS signals” is a sphincter-clench-inducing phrase in some circles.

I Hope this Makes the Top 10 List of Top 10 Lists

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Physics World reveals its top 10 breakthroughs for 2011

[A]fter much debate among the Physics World editorial team, this year’s honour goes to Aephraim Steinberg and colleagues from the University of Toronto in Canada for their experimental work on the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Using an emerging technique called “weak measurement”, the team is the first to track the average paths of single photons passing through a Young’s double-slit experiment – something that Steinberg says physicists had been “brainwashed” into thinking is impossible.

Science in Action

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Closest Type Ia supernova in decades solves a cosmic mystery

Nugent says, “We caught the supernova just 11 hours after it exploded, so soon that we were later able to calculate the actual moment of the explosion to within 20 minutes. Our early observations confirmed some assumptions about the physics of Type Ia supernovae, and we ruled out a number of possible models. But with this close-up look, we also found things nobody had dreamed of.”
…
“The early-time light curve also constrained the radius of the binary system,” says Nugent, “so we got rid of a whole bunch of models,” ranging from old red giant stars to other white dwarfs in a so-called “double-degenerate” system.

This is what it’s all about: getting data to refine your models.

A Camera The Flash Would Love

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First the good: The website.

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionth of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nano-second long event.

Unfortunately, there’s also this video (or, more specifically, the first few seconds of this video), which I saw before finding their site.

You need to a flashplayer enabled browser to view this YouTube video

We have built a virtual slow-motion camera where we can see photons, or light particles, moving through space.

Prof. Raskar has whipped out (and abused) his poetic license: you cannot literally see photons moving through space. You only know light is there if it scatters into your sensor — if it is light that simply goes by you/it, you would never know it’s there. If you shine a laser out into space, you don’t see that light — you only see light that scatters back to you. Unfortunately, by leading off with that sound bite, I fear everybody who sees the video is going to be repeating that line: OMG, we can see actual photons moving through space!

What they have recreated is a way to visualize the photons or a wavefront moving through space. Which is no small feat and is very cool.

And I just saw that Rhett has a post up about this, with some details of how it works, and is also repulsed by the sound-bite. I don’t have a huge problem with the trillion fps claim, because they are pretty clear that this is a virtual, post-processed effect, where you are sort of combining strobe and stop-action to give you the result, with the caveat that the stop-action is static — this generally wouldn’t work if anything were moving.

Getting One's House in Order

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Science: A New Mission to Explain

A recent BBC analysis of its science coverage in its own news reports revealed that 75% came from press releases, and only a tiny fraction contained views not expressed in those press releases.

This lip service is not good enough, and editors should wise up that science journalism has lost its edge and demand reform. It has also become uncritical and therefore not journalism. Too many who profess to practice journalism are the product of fashionable science communication courses that have sprung up in the past fifteen years. It’s my view that this has resulted in many journalists being supporters of, and not reporters of, science. There is a big difference.

Good points. The irony is that this is from the Huffington Post, which has a reputation for reporting and supporting some dodgy medical science, such as antivax tripe and homeopathy.