September 8, 2009 • 9:00 am
Herd behavior is a principled used to explain crowd movement. It was first discuss in W.D. Hamilton’s paper, Geometry For the Selfish Herd. The evolutionary biologist explained that an individual reduces danger or risk to his/herself by being as close as possible to the group that’s fleeing a particular event, person or place. Because of this, what seems like a unit acting in unison is actually unorganized behavior of individuals trying to protect themselves. This principle of biology is now commonly used to analyze a market crash by explaining investor sentiment.
Seed magazine has an interesting article that addresses how scientists look outside their science to understand relationships within.
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Filed under: Art, Information, Science , Business and Science, Correlation, Herd Behavior, Interdisciplinary, Theoretical Inferrence, W.D. Hamilton
August 29, 2009 • 8:45 am
A recent study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on more than 50 years of research with 162 studies containing 3,558 comparisons of food items nutritional value reveals that the difference, in terms of which is healthier, between organic and non-organic foods are negligible.
Marion Nestle, who blogs at Food Politics says that the American public does not believe in the claims made by the benefits of organic food. If that’s the case, we wonder where all the long lines at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s come from?
Filed under: Information, Science , Food Politics, Food Research, Health and Nutrition, Non-organic Food, Nutrition, Organic Food
August 12, 2009 • 6:50 pm
An organism that contributes to global warming, can also be used to make carbon-neutral fuels. This is why large companies like Exxon Mobil have invested $600 million over the next six years, on the development of algae-based biofuels. Algae is the main source of fossil fuels used in the industrial world today.
Algal biofuel companies are closing multi-million dollar contracts with the US government, who are committing almost $800 million in funding for advanced research on biofuels. Although each company has its own process of extracting biofuels from algae, issues on the efficiency and earth friendliness remains.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Climate Change Solutions, Energy Alternatives, Innovation, Science, Sustainability
Think Major League Baseball’s stats and live video iPhone app is cool? Imagine what Apple could do with technology it was granted a patent for this week: a network of sensors that deliver real-time velocity, impact, rotation and other data from sporting event participants to the web. Imagine your iPhone’s accelerometer placed inside a boxer’s glove, a snowboarder’s snow suit or a NASCAR driver’s car – with the information captured delivered to your iPhone or Apple TV while you watch the competition either in person or remotely.
Would you pay a premium for an event ticket that includes real time stats like that delivered to your iPhone? I would. Of course Apple is granted all kinds of patents all the time and only some of them amount to anything – but this one is very cool.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Future, Gadgets, ideas, Innovation, iphone, Mobile, Technology
A new way of printing organic electronics is more reliable and yields higher performance.
It’s possible to print large, flexible arrays of cheap, plastic transistors to drive displays. But the performance of these organic electronics is still not consistent enough for commercial devices.
A new method for printing a wide variety of semiconducting organic compounds such as polymers is much more reliable–and on top of that, it improves the performance of a wide variety of these materials by a few orders of magnitude.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Gadgets, Innovation, Science, Technology
First Sharp announced the development of the world’s first waterproof solar-powered cell phone, and now the company has done the world one better by developing the thinnest solar module for mobile devices ever. The LROCGO2 Solar Module measures just 0.8 mm thick–the width of eight human hairs.
The Solar Module’s polycrystalline solar cells only provides 300 mW of power, so the device won’t replace traditional batteries any time soon. But it can act as a supplement for emergency situations or any time when a traditional cell phone charger is MIA. And since the module is fitted onto cell phones in the manufacturing process,it eliminates the need to carry around extra emergency solar chargers.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Design, Energy, Innovation, iphone, Research, Science, Technology
From Scienceblogs:
…. he’d have had it watch apples fall and let it figure out what that meant. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm developed by Cornell researchers that can derive natural laws from observed data.
The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that represent natural laws — without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use electronic data collection.
The research is described in the April 3 issue of the journal Science (Vol. 323, No. 5924) by Hod Lipson, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and graduate student Michael Schmidt, a specialist in computational biology.
Filed under: Innovation, Science , Innovation, Robots, Science, Technology
From Popsci:
No matter whether you felt that Earth Hour was a terrific conservation tactic or an overhyped PR stunt, energy on our planet is in peril. Our daily juice (be it electric, gasoline combustion, atomic, or carbon-based), has become a precious commodity with at least one guaranteed effect: to elicit an instantaneous hot-button opinion from just about everybody.
What can you do about it? Well, one great proactive demonstration would be to stop your regular consumption of dry-cell batteries. Yes, there are numerous substitutes, ranging from rechargeable varieties to alternative energy replacements, but each of these substitutions has a debit that few of us are willing to pay. You know, “costs” like always hunting for an outlet to power a battery recharging station, or getting rid of a clean, slim-line AA battery for a gargantuan solar-driven bat-winged monstrosity.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Energy, Innovation, Science, Technology
From Sciencemag.org
In recent decades, robots have replaced millions of manual laborers; now they’re moving in on scientists, too. A fully automated robotic laboratory can design its own molecular biology experiments and has even made its first discoveries, a multidisciplinary team reports this week. Meanwhile, a team of computer scientists has developed a robot that can independently come up with the laws of motion for a dynamical system such as interconnected pendulums.
Robots are doing ever more of the physical labor in laboratories–from analyzing DNA samples to handling data tapes from massive particle-physics experiments. And scientists increasingly rely on computers to analyze their data. But the highest-level thinking–the formulation of hypotheses and designing of experiments to test them–has remained the preserve of humans.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Innovation, Robots, Science
From scienceblogs.com
In a laboratory at Aberystwyth University, Wales, a scientist called Adam is doing some experiments. He is trying to find the genes responsible for producing some important enzymes in yeast, and he is going about it in a very familiar way.
Based on existing knowledge, Adam is coming up with new hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. He carries them out, records and evaluates the results, and comes up with new questions. All of this is part and parcel of a typical scientist’s life but there is one important difference that sets Adam apart – he’s a robot.
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Filed under: Innovation, Science , Innovation, Robots, Science
