Science – Page 2 – rgbFilter

Saturday Morning Science 010

May 7, 2011May 15, 2011 Pete Chapman relativity, Saturday Morning Science, Science, space1 Comment

Saturday Morning Science is back!!! I wish I could say that something ground breaking, phase changing or paradigm shifting had happened since the last instalment. Something that had eluded detection by the entire world and could just now be revealed to rgbFilter readers as an exclusive article. But no, science doesn’t work that way and beware of anyone that claims it does. The biggest story this week involves an experiment that took a year to run, decades to implement and proved a theory that is nearing its centenary. Gravity Probe…

Science

Saturday Morning Science 009.5

April 9, 2011May 15, 2011 Pete Chapman Saturday Morning Science0 comment

Saturday Morning Science is going on a brief hiatus until May 7 (yours truly must deal with moving and taxes). In the meantime, I will be working on the background research for some of the following articles. Two or Three Things We Know About It- A revised hitch-hiker’s guide to the Galaxy. What is our current map of the second biggest thing that we can’t see? Neanderthals- What is the current state of knowledge about our distant cousins? Is it time to retire the Turing Test? – Likewise, if you…

Featured Science

Saturday Morning Science 009

April 2, 2011April 4, 2011 Pete Chapman future shock, grey goo, nanotech, paranoia, Saturday Morning Science, velociraptors5 Comments

Is Grey Goo the New Yellow Peril or Just Another Red Dawn?– Future, how I fear thee, let me count the ways. Long before one succumbs to future shock there is future anxiety. To the best of our knowledge we are the only species on the planet that builds fallout shelters, frets about asteroid collisions and establishes religions that posit an end to the world. If you are waiting for some ethologist to post “Apocalyptic Cultism Among Ring Tailed Lemurs” you are going to wait a long time and either…

Computing Featured Science

Saturday Morning Science 008

March 26, 2011March 28, 2011 Pete Chapman Darwin, Miller-Urey Experiments, Saturday Morning Science0 comment

“…a warm little pond” That simple image of a lukewarm puddle comes from a letter that Charles Darwin wrote to botanist Joseph Hooker in 1871, wherein he speculated on the possible, purely chemical origins of life. It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that…

Saturday Morning Science 007

March 19, 2011March 24, 2011 Pete Chapman Saturday Morning Science0 comment

When the god Kashima is distracted, the cowardly Namazu sees a opportunity for mischief. This giant catfish, a monster, a yo-kai, was imprisoned underground and his subterranean thrashing about is the source of earthquakes. How this is interpreted is a matter of history. At first Namasu was a replacement for the more traditional, Chinese inspired dragons. He was a resentful godling, peeved at the low regard that humans held for him (catfish is an unpopular food choice with the Japanese ) and only too willing exert himself to remind humanity…

Computing Science

Saturday Morning Science 006

March 12, 2011March 16, 2011 Pete Chapman Anthony Atala, cultured meat, growing organs, Saturday Morning Science, Vladimir Mionov0 comment

Life is What You Make It-2.0 Usually this column gets constructed out of items which are “trending” and usually they cluster around a given discipline or problem that makes for interesting connections. This week we’re looking at current items about biology. There is no overarching “big theme” or theory. Biology is much like its subject matter; diffusive and continually coming up with novelty and variety. 3D Organ Printing– The “Gee Wiz” knob on this one is hard cranked to eleven. Is it any surprise that I’m going to link you…

Saturday Morning Science 005

March 5, 2011April 4, 2011 Pete Chapman Saturday Morning Science, string theory2 Comments

This installment has nothing to do with Charlie Sheen. Popular science writing doesn’t need him, it’s got String Theory. This week it’s all about gravity; the weak yet pervasive force that holds everything together and either kick starts grand theories or brings them to a grinding halt. Every toddler becomes a gravity theorist when they first get it into their head to can the crawl and get with this walking thing. I’ve noticed two distinct styles to this process. Some kids are devout Newtonians. They stand and then tilt themselves in…

Microsoft Research demos smart interactive displays

February 28, 2011September 26, 2012 Doug Groves auto-st, glasses free 3D, Kinect, Microsoft Research, OLED1 Comment

Microsoft Research has put out no shortage of impressive tech demos, some which evolve into consumer products like the Kinect, and others either geared towards institutional use such as the Surface, which in some cases trickles down to consumer tech. In a recent video, Director of Microsoft Applied Sciences Steven Bathiche demonstrates some of their latest research into smart interactive displays, from “capturing light from the user to sending light to the users eyes”. Consider it a sort of mashup of Kinect and Surface, with the ability to display different…

Computing Science

Saturday Morning Science 004

February 26, 2011March 5, 2011 Pete Chapman ADHD, Saturday Morning Science, Science0 comment

The problem is a simple one, despite being the storehouse for the knowledge of an entire planet sometimes the Internet can be a bore. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter present us with a world of ideas, tiny ideas, iterations of personal data, statements, hopes, curses and bleats amounting to a wall of cozy noise; full of sound and fury. Here are five sites on the web, five oasis in the sometime wasteland, five challenging places that reward the time spent with them. Feynman’s Robb Lectures– Anyone with an internet connection can…

Computing Science

Saturday Morning Science 003

February 19, 2011March 5, 2011 Pete Chapman Casimir Effect, graphene, Saturday Morning Science1 Comment

Graphene Novelties– This week’s edition started off with a simple article from Science Daily: Graphene and ‘Spintronics’ Combo Looks Promising. A group of researchers from the City University of Hong Kong and the University of Science and Technology of China presented their work on using graphene as a platform for creating “spintronic” devices. In their scheme, the electromagnetic spin of particles, their “up” or “down” orientation, could be used to encode the ones and zeroes of binary data at incredibly high density (seeing as graphene is one atom thick) and…

Computing Science

Saturday Morning Science 002

February 12, 2011February 19, 2011 Pete Chapman quantum mechanics, quarks, S. Jay Olson, Science, Stardust-NEXT, Vikings0 comment

The quantum world got weirder, a respected scientist got weirder, the Vikings may have used polarized light to navigate and there’s a comet flyby for Valentine’s Day. Spooky Action in Time– “The greatest significance of our result is almost certainly in some application that is yet to be imagined.” In an interview with PhysOrg, S. Jay Olson of the University of Queensland summed up the implications of his paper with fellow physicist Timothy C. Ralph, “Extraction of Timelike Entanglement from the Quantum Vacuum“. Just as some of us are trying…

Science

Saturday Morning Science 001

February 5, 2011February 10, 2011 Pete Chapman Cassini, Heinlein, manned space flight, NASA, Obama, Saturday Morning Science, solar sail, space shuttle4 Comments

Welcome to the first installment of a new rgbFilter feature: Saturday Morning Science. Its title comes from a piece of short hand that our editor, Doug Groves would use to describe some of our previous science articles: as in, “This one is a kind of read-it-over-Saturday-morning-coffee kind of piece.” The idea of a weekly science review was our response to the general “Twitterization” of science reporting that a regular website/blog can easily fall into. How many times can a new Earth be discovered, a silly thing be done to some…