The Official Science Thread

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Ok, what the fvck. That problem is pissing me off. I need to get some actual work done but I'm going to revisit it in an hour or two.

Same thing here...wtf...

EXPLANATION BELOW:

The number to the right is simply the number of enclosed circles or "O's" in the preceding four digits.

Anyway, that's my point. As we get older, we think in a more structured way and rely on shortcuts and our experiences to get to the correct answer quicker. It hurts us in instances like this where our experiences interfere with an otherwise simple concept. That's why I'm wondering if that drug that would make the brain more "elastic" would maybe make some other parts of our lives a bit more difficult.

Cliffs: We over complicate ****, lol

Anyway, Oppenheimer?

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

Ok, what the fvck. That problem is pissing me off. I need to get some actual work done but I'm going to revisit it in an hour or two.

Just so you know... that bit about programmers solving it in an hour isn't true.
Most programmers have higher education.
I think they put it there to throw us off.
Just ignore it.

BTW, the ability to solve that particular problem has nothing to do with the ability to learn faster.
One only needs to look at the problem from an unconventional angle. Doesn't mean learning always require unconventional angles.
A lot of learning involves understanding a concept and using that to formulate a model that can explain observed data samples.
If you always look at data from unconventional angles, your models will be unconventional. Learning is the ability to formulate those models, unconventional or not doesn't matter.

Originally Posted by 'busa

Anyway, that's my point. As we get older, we think in a more structured way and rely on shortcuts and our experiences to get to the correct answer quicker. It hurts us in instances like this where our experiences interfere with an otherwise simple concept. That's why I'm wondering if that drug that would make the brain more "elastic" would maybe make some other parts of our lives a bit more difficult.

The article talks about two kinds of pathways that get "carved" out, for lack of a better word. What they're investigating is breaking down the functional pathways, which is weaker of the two. They are fully aware of the repercussions of screwing with our neural pathways and even say that we probably shouldn't be fvcking with the structural paths because our brain put a lot of energy into creating them.

Originally Posted by 'busa

Anyway, Oppenheimer?

To answer your question, no I haven't read the book but I have read about him and he was absolutely brilliant. And I love that letter about Feynman. I've seen that before and the part about "another Dirac, but this one is human" is hilariously awesome.



Back to that problem though and what you were saying about elasticity, or the lack thereof, hurting us. There's a great TED talk by a neuroscientist that has a stroke and she recounts the entire experience. Her left and right hemispheres take turns controlling the body and she phases in and out of understanding what she is looking at and experiencing "oneness with the universe" as she calls it. She says at one point when her right hemisphere was in control she had no idea what numbers were; they were only shapes. I've read about people on higher doses of psilocybin and LSD experiencing the same thing. Logic shuts down and the brain isn't able to connect patterns to concrete ideas. IMO a good balance between the two is what we're shooting for with elasticity drugs/therapy. Too much of anything will turn out bad in the end.

Space-time crystal anyone?
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-physics...e-crystal.html

Wilczek thought that it should be possible to construct a space-time crystal because crystals naturally align themselves at low temperatures and because superconductors also operate at very low temperatures; it seemed reasonable to assume that the atoms in such a crystal could conceivably move or rotate and then return to their natural state naturally, continually, as crystals are wont to do as they seek a lowest energy state. He envisioned a rotation with a ring of ions that flowed separately rather than as a stream, likening it to a mouse running around inside of a snake laying as a circle. The bulge would flow, rather than the snake itself spinning and would just keep on going, potentially forever. The problem was, he couldn't figure out how such a crystal structure could be created in the real world.

Taking Wilczek's original idea, but not his method for creating a real world example, Li et al, suggest that to create a space-time crystal all that's needed is a better ion trap. They believe that if ions could be forced using such a trap, into a ring at very low temperatures, as a superconductor, all that would be needed would be a little nudge from a tiny bit of a magnetic field to cause the ions to begin rotating as a single ring. Because there would be no resistance, and because of their natural mutual repulsion, the ring should then continue rotating indefinitely with no additional injection of energy, resulting in the space-time crystal that Wilczek imagined.

The team is quick to point out, for those that might be making the jump, that the result would not be the mythical perpetual motion machine because no energy could be extracted from the space-time crystal. They do believe that building an actual space-time crystal should be possible though, in the near term if a future team has the funds necessary to overcome the difficulty of creating a better ion trap.

I wonder if I can buy these precursors and and make my own version, or is there a certain ratio of each for them to be effective?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-0...nts-early.html

A clinical trial of an Alzheimer's disease treatment developed at MIT has found that the nutrient cocktail can improve memory in patients with early Alzheimer's. The results confirm and expand the findings of an earlier trial of the nutritional supplement, which is designed to promote new connections between brain cells.

Alzheimer's patients gradually lose those connections, known as synapses, leading to memory loss and other cognitive impairments. The supplement mixture, known as Souvenaid, appears to stimulate growth of new synapses, says Richard Wurtman, a professor emeritus of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT who invented the nutrient mixture.

"You want to improve the numbers of synapses, not by slowing their degradation - though of course you'd love to do that too - but rather by increasing the formation of the synapses," Wurtman says.

To do that, Wurtman came up with a mixture of three naturally occurring dietary compounds: choline, uridine and the omega-3 fatty acid DHA. Choline can be found in meats, nuts and eggs, and omega-3 fatty acids are found in a variety of sources, including fish, eggs, flaxseed and meat from grass-fed animals. Uridine is produced by the liver and kidney, and is present in some foods as a component of RNA.

These nutrients are precursors to the lipid molecules that, along with specific proteins, make up brain-cell membranes, which form synapses. To be effective, all three precursors must be administered together.

Results of the clinical trial, conducted in Europe, appear in the July 10 online edition of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. The new findings are encouraging because very few clinical trials have produced consistent improvement in Alzheimer's patients, says Jeffrey Cummings, director of the Cleveland Clinic's Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.

"Memory loss is the central characteristic of Alzheimer's, so something that improves memory would be of great interest," says Cummings, who was not part of the research team.

Plans for commercial release of the supplement are not finalized, according to Nutricia, the company testing and marketing Souvenaid, but it will likely be available in Europe first. Nutricia is the specialized health care division of the food company Danone, known as Dannon in the United States.

Making connections

Wurtman first came up with the idea of targeting synapse loss to combat Alzheimer's about 10 years ago. In animal studies, he showed that his dietary cocktail boosted the number of dendritic spines, or small outcroppings of neural membranes, found in brain cells. These spines are necessary to form new synapses between neurons.

Following the successful animal studies, Philip Scheltens, director of the Alzheimer Center at VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, led a clinical trial in Europe involving 225 patients with mild Alzheimer's. The patients drank Souvenaid or a control beverage daily for three months.

That study, first reported in 2008, found that 40 percent of patients who consumed the drink improved in a test of verbal memory, while 24 percent of patients who received the control drink improved their performance.

The new study, performed in several European countries and overseen by Scheltens as principal investigator, followed 259 patients for six months. Patients, whether taking Souvenaid or a placebo, improved their verbal-memory performance for the first three months, but the placebo patients deteriorated during the following three months, while the Souvenaid patients continued to improve. For this trial, the researchers used more comprehensive memory tests taken from the neuropsychological test battery, often used to assess Alzheimer's patients in clinical research.

Patients showed a very high compliance rate: About 97 percent of the patients followed the regimen throughout the study, and no serious side effects were seen.

Both clinical trials were sponsored by Nutricia. MIT has patented the mixture of nutrients used in the study, and Nutricia holds the exclusive license on the patent.

Brain patterns

In the new study, the researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure how patients' brain-activity patterns changed throughout the study. They found that as the trial went on, the brains of patients receiving the supplements started to shift from patterns typical of dementia to more normal patterns. Because EEG patterns reflect synaptic activity, this suggests that synaptic function increased following treatment, the researchers say.

Patients entering this study were in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, averaging around 25 on a scale of dementia that ranges from 1 to 30, with 30 being normal. A previous trial found that the supplement cocktail does not work in patients with Alzheimer's at a more advanced stage. This makes sense, Wurtman says, because patients with more advanced dementia have probably already lost many neurons, so they can't form new synapses.

A two-year trial involving patients who don't have Alzheimer's, but who are starting to show mild cognitive impairment, is now underway. If the drink seems to help, it could be used in people who test positive for very early signs of Alzheimer's, before symptoms appear, Wurtman says. Such tests, which include PET scanning of the hippocampus, are now rarely done because there are no good Alzheimer's treatments available.

So, I know what I'm doing in the next couple weeks...

This sounds like a fun experiment, if you don't mind making a mess of your microwave oven. Please get permission before set fire to anything inside your house (this whole experiment sounds dangerous and we don't want anyone or anything to get hurt), and please be extra extra careful when experimenting with the microwave oven.

There is a safer version of this experiment that can be done with a grape sliced appropriately. Please see our answer here about grapes making plasma in the microwave.

When something burns with a flame, electrons are torn from their atoms as the atoms rearrange to form new molecules. Usually they get re-captured by the molecules, and this is one of the reasons why flames glow -- the electrons emit light as they lose energy spiralling in from their paths free through the air to being caught in orbits in the new molecules.

A microwave's job is to set up a standing wave of electric and magnetic fields within a metal box. The electric fields alternately push and pull electrons left and right, or up and down. In a partially conducting material, the current that sloshes back and forth can heat up an object resistively. Even if the material does not conduct dc electricity at all, if it contains water molecules, their electric polarization directions flip back and forth with the field, making them jiggle and get hot.

If electrons are floating around freely, even for a very short amount of time, they can be shoved far away from their point of origin by the electric field. And then shoved back. And then forwards again. As they move back and forth, they crash into air molecules in the oven, and can knock electrons in them to higher-energy orbits. Then these electrons fall back, emitting light. That's why you have a glowing blob of plasma over your flame. This plasma is hotter than the rest of the air, and so it tends to rise up to the top of your bowl.

I think they arrange the strength of the microwaves in ovens so that the back-and-forth motion of the electrons in a plasma that gets formed is not sufficient to knock other electrons free from the air molecules. If this were the case, even a small spark somewhere on a piece of food would eventually cause the whole oven to fill with plasma.

The reason the thing oscillates at 120 Hz has to do with how the microwaves are generated and shaped in the oven. Microwaves have a resonant cavity called a magnetron which resonates at a few billion Hz. Left to itself, the microwaves quickly dissipate (the energy goes into your food or gets dissipated in the resistance of the walls). The magnetron is constantly fed more energy from the electrical supply which plugs into the wall. Every cycle of power from the wall puts energy into the microwave cavity twice (a typical nonlinear circuit like a rectifier will make high-frequency noise twice per wall-power cycle -- the actual circuit of a microwave is probably more optimized to generate energy in the GHz range but to do it only on two places in the wall power cycle). Then the strength of the microwaves in the oven varies at 120 Hz.

The other reason it could oscillate at 120 Hz is that some microwaves have a metal "fan" on top which spins around on a shaft attached to a motor which runs off the wall current. Rather than cool anything off, this "fan" changes the shape of the metal side of the box by having irregularly shaped fan blades which constantly move. The microwaves make a standing wave pattern inside the oven, but the actual locations of the peaks and troughs of the standing wave depend on the shape of the box. By putting this "fan" in there, the peaks and troughs can be moved around -- so as not to burn spots of your food while leaving other spots frozen solid, a common problem with microwaves. If the fields change at about 120 Hz (not surprising given that the motor spins at a multiple of the line frequency), it can make your plasma oscillate like that.

Virgin Galactic recently had their second full test of their space vehicle, and Branson decided he's taking his kids on the inaugural flight.
http://www.gizmag.com/virgin-galacti...her-one/23276/

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0711123038.htm

ScienceDaily (July 11, 2012) - A team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is reporting the discovery of another moon orbiting the icy dwarf planet Pluto.
See Also:
Space & Time
Pluto
NASA
Solar System
Space Exploration
Kuiper Belt
Space Telescopes
Reference
Neptune's natural satellites
Dysnomia (moon of Eris)
Uranus' natural satellites
Charon (moon)
The moon is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. It is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to be co-planar with the other satellites in the system.
"The moons form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls," said team lead Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif.
The discovery increases the number of known moons orbiting Pluto to five.
The Pluto team is intrigued that such a small planet can have such a complex collection of satellites. The new discovery provides additional clues for unraveling how the Pluto system formed and evolved. The favored theory is that all the moons are relics of a collision between Pluto and another large Kuiper belt object billions of years ago.
The new detection will help scientists navigate NASA's New Horizons spacecraft through the Pluto system in 2015, when it makes an historic and long-awaited high-speed flyby of the distant world.
The team is using Hubble's powerful vision to scour the Pluto system to uncover potential hazards to the New Horizons spacecraft. Moving past the dwarf planet at a speed of 30,000 miles per hour, New Horizons could be destroyed in a collision with even a BB-shot-size piece of orbital debris.
"The discovery of so many small moons indirectly tells us that there must be lots of small particles lurking unseen in the Pluto system," said Harold Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.
"The inventory of the Pluto system we're taking now with Hubble will help the New Horizons team design a safer trajectory for the spacecraft," added Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., the mission's principal investigator.
Pluto's largest moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978 in observations made at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Hubble observations in 2006 uncovered two additional small moons, Nix and Hydra. In 2011 another moon, P4, was found in Hubble data.
Provisionally designated S/2012 (134340) 1, the latest moon was detected in nine separate sets of images taken by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on June 26, 27, 29, and July 7 and 9.
In the years following the New Horizons Pluto flyby, astronomers plan to use the infrared vision of Hubble's planned successor, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, for follow-up observations. The Webb telescope will be able to measure the surface chemistry of Pluto, its moons, and many other bodies that lie in the distant Kuiper Belt along with Pluto.
The Pluto Team members are M. Showalter (SETI Institute), H.A. Weaver (Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University), and S.A. Stern, A.J. Steffl, and M.W. Buie (Southwest Research Institute).
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

Originally Posted by cowmoo32

So, I know what I'm doing in the next couple weeks...

I tried that about 1.5 months ago. It works!

Which one, the grapes or the one with the flame?

http://galaxy.phy.cmich.edu/~axel/mwpan2/
http://media.skysurvey.org/openzoom.html

Originally Posted by dreamdrivedrift

I tried that about 1.5 months ago. It works!

I tried that a while back too! We spent hours putting things inside an old microwave in my backyard.

- Light bulbs and CDs were a lot of fun.
- Some people say that eggs and icepacks explode, but we couldn't get either of them to do so.
- The grapes sparked a lot and threw buzzy plasma balls, but they dissipated pretty quickly.
- The best plasma ball we got was by putting a match in some clay, sitting it inside a lid full of water, and suspending a glass over it. It made about a 2 inch buzzing plasma ball that spun around the top of the glass for a few seconds before it shattered.

That was quite fcuking cool.

From /r/astronomy, this kid's father built this in their back yard; I would love to see the rest of the property. Apparently the scope alone cost upwards of $100k. The guy posting is only 19.

More pictures here http://imgur.com/a/GIMKB

Click for massive resolution