The Cryptic Kryptos

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Clues to Stubborn Secret in C.I.A.’s Backyard

Jim Sanborn, the sculptor who created “Kryptos” and its puzzles, is getting a bit frustrated by the wait. “I assumed the code would be cracked in a fairly short time,” he said, adding that the intrusions on his life from people who think they have solved his fourth puzzle are more than he expected.

So now, after 20 years, Mr. Sanborn is nudging the process along. He has provided The New York Times with the answers to six letters in the sculpture’s final passage. The characters that are the 64th through 69th in the final series on the sculpture read NYPVTT. When deciphered, they read BERLIN.

Visualizing Your Microwave Oven

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I don’t have a microwave oven, but I do have this big clock that can cook things.

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The guy who did the video has a blog, and from that I’m a little surprised at some of the commentary in the video.

The absorption by the “salty water” isn’t correct — water isn’t absorbing the microwaves because it’s salty; it’s a polar molecule and will respond to the oscillating electric field all by itself. Ions would do this too, so having a dissolved salt probably doesn’t hurt or even helps, but distilled water will absorb microwaves and heat up. This is immediately followed by “turns the microwaves into heat,” which treats heat like a substance. The water is heated, but does not contain heat.

You also can’t see steam coming out of the glass, because you can’t see steam — it’s the vapor phase of water, and is not visible. What you can see are small water droplets, after the vapor has begun to coalesce. Yeah, I know that steam is used colloquially like this, but I expect better of a scientist.

National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010

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National Geographic’s Photography Contest 2010

National Geographic is once again holding their annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30th. For the past eight weeks, they have been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to rate them as well. National Geographic was again kind enough to let me choose some of their entries from 2010 for display here on The Big Picture. Collected below are 47 images from the three categories of People, Places and Nature. Captions were written by the individual photographers.

Not to Be Confused With Medium-Rare Earths

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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.

"Geocaching has Kept Me Safer"

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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.

Read This, Even Though My Data are Faked

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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.

Trapped Like Anti-Rats

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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.

Scientists: More Kirk than Spock

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The Model Scientist?

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.