I know where I can find some...

It's about time they find something useful for pyrite to do. Lemme see, can we open a mine near Cape St Francis?

clipped from metamodern.com A new paper in the journal Environmental Science & Technology assesses the requirements for scaling solar photovoltaic systems to the terawatt levels needed to supply electric power on a global scale. The authors identify iron pyrite, FeS2, as an attractive but unconventional alternative: The raw materials for pyrite aren’t scarce, and both the energy and monetary costs of production could be low. Pyrite (natural mineral crystal)

Engineering the post-humans

The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering - Michael J. Sandel - Books - Review - New York Times Annotated

This is the real problem with self-engineering. It seizes control of humanity so radically that humanity can no longer judge it. We can’t be certain it’s diminishing us. But we can’t be certain it’s perfecting us, either. Sandel got it half right, which ain’t bad. Nobody’s perfect.

I like this comment. I think what he's saying is that the effect of bioengineering will be so far beyond what we now understand that we, as humans (as opposed to what we'll become), won't be able to judge. This clinging on to 'humanity' is a fear of the unknown. And besides that, and along with that, it has the smell of religion to it. Even, thinking about it now as I write, Saletan doesn't escape it since he uses the word 'perfect'. Remove all that shit from it (it being bioengineering) and you're left with breathtaking possibilities. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be careful. - post by spoedniek

T.rex vision

Sight for 'Saur Eyes: T. rex vision was among nature's best: Science News Online, July 1, 2006:

T. rex had a binocular range of 55�, which is wider than that of modern hawks, Stevens reports in the summer Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Moreover, over the millennia, T. rex evolved features that improved its vision: Its snout grew lower and narrower, cheek grooves cleared its sight lines, and its eyeballs enlarged.

These scientists, hey? I remember (vaguely, mind you) thesis titles in the geology department (somewhere at Rhodes University) describing measurements on some obscure fossil jaw bone or some such seemingly esoteric topic. But it is a forensic type study, a Dashiel Hammett/Rebus/Kojak and even Magnum, P.I., effort to uncover (oh dear!) the secrets of all those millenia ago. I'll have another sip of beer on that one...cheers.

He found that T. rex might have had visual acuity as much as 13 times that of people. By comparison, an eagle's acuity is 3.6 times that of a person.

Technorati tags: dinosaurs, palaeontology

The Political Brain

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: The Political Brain -- A recent brain-imaging study shows that our political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias:

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," Westen is quoted as saying in an Emory University press release. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts." Interestingly, neural circuits engaged in rewarding selective behaviors were activated. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones," Westen said

This certainly confirms my bias...

Michael Shermer, the author of the article, goes further, and discusses what can be done about it in the political system (I would've stopped the article there, since it has confirmed my bias and any further discussion risks confusing the matter and would probably be ignored):

n science we have built-in self-correcting machinery. Strict double-blind controls are required in experiments, in which neither the subjects nor the experimenters know the experimental conditions during the data-collection phase. Results are vetted at professional conferences and in peer-reviewed journals. Research must be replicated in other laboratories unaffiliated with the original researcher. Disconfirmatory evidence, as well as contradictory interpretations of the data, must be included in the paper. Colleagues are rewarded for being skeptical. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Politicians need a stronger peer-review system that goes beyond the churlish opprobrium of the campaign trail, and I would love to see a political debate in which the candidates were required to make the opposite case.

A bit American-centric, but you get the idea...

Technorati tags: science, neurology, psychology, politics

Quantum Ontology: Minds, Brains & Catalysis

Quantum Ontology: Minds, Brains & Catalysis:

Actually just a link to more info on the muscle contraction and quantum tunneling (also known as Rooney's foot) topic referred to in the previous blog.

An early application of solitons in biology was proposed by Davydov (1982). He suggested that they may play a role in the process of muscle contraction and relaxation (Also Pang, 2001, dealing with the criticism that solitons may not be very robust at body temperature). This model also serves to introduce the concept that in living processes there exists a unique relationship between energy and structure.

Technorati tags: quantum physics, biology

Johnjoe McFadden: The power in Rooney's foot

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Johnjoe McFadden: The power in Rooney's foot:

Enzymes capture light's energy from the sun, power our cells, break down our food and synthesise all the proteins, DNA, fats and other biomolecules of living cells. They do all these jobs by speeding up chemical reactions, so that they occur on biological, rather than geological timescales. But the source of this ability to speed up reactions has eluded modern scientists. Billion-fold rate enhancements are routine: many enzymes can accelerate a chemical reaction a trillion-fold. Some of the tricks enzymes employ are pretty well understood, but not the process as a whole.

Yes, it was the headline that caught me (there aren't enough pre-World Cup games to keep me busy at the moment...). But, read the article, it's fascinating. Okay, very little World Cup info, but it'll keep me going till Friday.

Enzymes live in the strange realm of fundamental particles, where conventional rules break down and quantum mechanics takes over. Remember Schrödinger's cat, that could exist as a weird superposition of a live and dead feline if it lived in the quantum world? Quantum mechanical particles don't have regular positions in space or time, but exist as a kind of fog of all possible positions and states. Sometimes this fog allows particles to go places or do things that would normally be prohibited, in a process called "quantum tunnelling", which is used in modern electronic devices such as tunnel diodes and is likely to be the basis of 21st-century technologies such as quantum computing.

God, I exist in a fog most of the time, and I seldom feel fundamental (and I certainly don't go places). Go figure...

...claims that an enzyme called aromatic amine dehydrogenase (AADH) accelerates its chemical reaction by bringing the substrate particles so close to the enzyme that the fog of particle positions overlaps, allowing a proton to "quantum tunnel" from substrate to enzyme.

So far so good. We're into the biology now...but where's Rooney's foot? And how the hell are they going to get it fixed before England goes out. Manchester United can afford a new quantum computer to fix his foot (in any fog of handwaving and abracadabra). Surely?

If Da Vinci were alive today, he'd have tossed away any book selling dubious mysteries - instead, he'd be reading about quantum tunnelling and praying for Rooney's foot.

Yes, but since Da Vinci was Italian (he was, wasn't he?), I wonder what he'd have been praying...

Technorati tags: science, biology, microbiology, quantum tunnelling

Spinosaurus as the biggest carnivorous dinosaur

The Biggest Carnivore: Dinosaur History Rewritten:

Now Cristiano Dal Sasso of the Civil Natural History Museum in Milan says Giganotosaurus has been dethroned based on estimates from a new Spinosaurus skull.

I think Thomas will be upset about this. Tyrannosaurus isn't Rex anymore, it would seem. Still, these measurements were made on fragments of a Spinosaurus skull, so, T, there's hope.

Technorati tags: dinosaurs, paleontology

Email Et(h)iquette

The Secret Cause of Flame Wars:

The reason for this is egocentrism, or the difficulty some people have detaching themselves from their own perspective, says Epley. In other words, people aren't that good at imagining how a message might be understood from another person's perspective.

Every mailinglist, forum and newsgroup should post a link to the article.

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

Technorati tags: psychology, sociology