The ThunderDragon: Science

Showing posts with label Science. Show all posts

03 April 2008

Possible impossibilities?

Teleportation and forcefields could become scientific realities within decades, and time travel will also be possible in the future, according to one of the world's leading physicists.
Professor Michio Kaku of City University in New York has studied a range of scientific "impossibilities" and concluded that most will almost certainly be achieved as our knowledge expands...
Teleportation, telepathy, forcefields and invisibility are Class 1 impossibilities, meaning they are likely to be realisable within a few decades or at most a century. (The Telegraph)

Beam me up Scotty!

28 January 2008

Satellites are falling, yet British astronomers aren't going to be able to see if it was going fall on the UK.

Bloody hell.

16 November 2007

The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything isn't 42.

No, it's E8. Well, maybe.

16 October 2007

Cutting Cadavers

A change in the law is to transform the way surgeons are trained, allowing them to practise on bodies left to medical science. Under the Anatomy Act, cadavers could be used for tuition in anatomy but not in technique.
The move has enabled the Royal College of Surgeons to set up a centre in its London headquarters where surgeons will be able to operate on cadavers... Bernard Ribeiro, president of the college, said that the centre would “train the whole surgical team, not just the surgeon”. (The Times)

Why wasn't this possible before? It seems absurd that surgeons weren't allowed to practise on cadavers. These people have left their bodies to medical science. They obviously wanted their body to be used in order to save lives, however it may be done. After all, far better that than having surgeons practice whilst operating on live people!

Under what basis was it illegal for surgeons to practise chopping up dead bodies? It really doesn't make any sense to me - but at least it's fixed now.

Source: The Times

15 October 2007

The universe, the universe is lopsided!

A legion of amateur stargazers has posed a profound challenge to cosmological theories: our universe appears to be lopsided...
The survey has revealed that the collections of millions of stars, dust, gas and planets in galaxies prefer to rotate anticlockwise from the viewpoint of an observer on Earth.
Traditionally astronomers have believed that galaxies would spin either clockwise or anti-clockwise in equal proportion. But these observations would seem to suggest that either a mysterious force is acting on them or that the universe is in some way lopsided. (The Telegraph)

And this has been discovered with a lot of help from the public. Quite remarkable.

12 October 2007

ET Phone Earth - By 2025?

The skies are to be swept for signs of alien life in the most far reaching scan of its kind.
A total of 42 radio dishes have started collecting scientific data from the furthest reaches of the universe, part of the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Hat Creek, around 270 miles north of San Francisco.
"We don't know how many needles are in the galactic haystack of 400 billion stars, but I think we will find (signals from intelligent civilizations) by 2025." (The Telegraph)

Will it? Really? Bollocks will it. The future never is what we think or hope it will be. It hasn't happened yet, so could be anything. We could have alien contact tomorrow. Or the human race might never meet another sentient species.

To start with, it is quite possible that any life that exists in the rest of the universe is not recognisable by us as life. Let alone give off any signals that we could interpret.

In many ways I just have subscribe to the Calvin and Hobbes saying: "Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."

Source: The Telegraph

25 August 2007

There's a hole in my Universe, dear Liza, dear Liza...

The universe has a huge hole in it that dwarfs anything else of its kind. The discovery caught astronomers by surprise.
The hole is nearly a billion light-years across. It is not a black hole, which is a small sphere of densely packed matter. Rather, this one is mostly devoid of stars, gas and other normal matter, and it's also strangely empty of the mysterious "dark matter" that permeates the cosmos. Other space voids have been found before, but nothing on this scale.
Astronomers don't know why the hole is there. (Space.com)

Well, let's just not go and fall through it!

via The Two Wolves

11 June 2007

Science-fiction writers are to save the world from terrorism? The US Department of Homeland Security has set aside $10 million to see if they can...

"Anti-terror chiefs in the United States have hired a team of America's most original sci-fi authors to dream up techniques to help them combat al-Qaeda.
Ideas so far include mobile phones with chemical weapons detectors and brain scanners fitted to airport sniffer dogs, so that security staff can read their minds.
The writers have also put government scientists in touch with Hollywood special-effects experts, to work on better facial-recognition software to pick out terrorists at airports." (The Telegraph)

It sounds more ridiculous than it actually is - but it is still quite ridiculous. Sci-fi writers tend to have scientific knowledge and have to make their world technologically likely, or at least internally consistent, or they get torn apart by fans who spend a lot of time reading through the books looking for errors. But I'm certainly not convinced that they're the world's best hope at designing defence systems...

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