The smallest of electronics could one day have the ability to turn on and off at an atomic
The post Carbon research may boost nanoelectronics has been published on Technology Org.
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Saturday 26 September 2015
Carbon research may boost nanoelectronics
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Space Walk 1 Poster
Here's a great poster featuring a beautiful image from deep space
tagged with: space, walk, earth, station, astronaut, skylab, astronomy
Space Walk 1
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How to beat a polygraph
Science Focus
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Judging by Doug Williams' business website, it doesn't look like he thought he had anything to hide. On Polygraph.com, Williams, a former officer with the Oklahoma City Police Department turned anti-polygraph activist, promises to teach you how to prepare for (read: beat) a polygraph test — through his how-to manual, DVD, and personal training sessions. He frames his pitch as selling to a very nervous truth-teller, rather than to a liar, writing on his site: "Remember, just telling the truth only works about 50 percent of the time — so to protect yourself from being falsely accused of lying, you must learn how to pass!"
Nevertheless, a grand jury in Oklahoma decided that there is enough evidence that Williams is doing more harm than helping innocent people calm their nerves. In November, Williams was charged with multiple counts of mail fraud and witness tampering, for allegedly showing people how to lie and hide crimes in order to get security-clearance-level jobs with the federal government. Williams calls the charges against him an "attack on his First Amendment rights," and says that he's only being targeted because he is a vocal critic of a method that is "no more accurate than the toss of a coin in determining whether a person is telling the truth or lying."
On the accuracy aspect at least, he's got a point. In United States v. Scheffer, in 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that a judge could reject polygraph results in criminal cases, citing a general lack of scientific consensus as to their reliability. Many state and federal courts now consider them inadmissible as evidence. But it's a decision that's still up to individual judges. And even in places where polygraph tests may not be admissible in court, some branches of law enforcement still believe that they have other, non-prosecutorial value.
For instance, studies have shown that a polygraph can have a kind of placebo effect — that it can elicit new information from people who hadn't been fully cooperating before, who now feel that they have no choice but to come clean. In a majority of jurisdictions, cops and parole officers also use regular polygraph tests to keep post-conviction sex offenders accountable for their actions; researchers have suggested that the process alone discourages recidivism, whether or not the results are 100 percent accurate. (Other researchers disagree.)
But aside from those legal uses, it was the job-screening use of the polygraph that likely sparked federal prosecutors' interest in Williams' case. Last year, McClatchy reported on an unprecedented secret federal investigation of other polygraph instructors like Williams; Chad Dixon was sentenced to eight months in prison after pleading guilty to similar charges. Marisa Taylor and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. wrote, "The criminal inquiry, which hasn't been acknowledged publicly, is aimed at discouraging criminals and spies from infiltrating the U.S. government by using the polygraph-beating techniques."
It's probably worth remembering that news of the investigation came out in September 2013, after the "Summer of Snowden," a series of revelations that set the entire government reeling. A former National Security Agency employee, Russell Tice, told U.S. News & World Report that the agency regularly subjects its agents to polygraph tests, but that he and his colleagues had figured out how to pass every time. (Tips include biting your tongue to spike the sensors' output, and then visualizing cool beers on warm summer nights to reduce them.)
In their article for McClatchy, Taylor and Wootson also described the polygraph-prep instructors' methods, "which are said to include controlled breathing, muscle tensing, tongue biting, and mental arithmetic." The overall goal of the preparation process is to teach people to control the otherwise involuntary physical stress responses that the polygraph's sensors pick up on during the interview. Or, as Williams himself summed up quite simply in a recent tweet: "The polygraph operator monitors your respiration, GSR, & cardio. Get nervous on the wrong question & he calls you a liar!"
Many criminologists now believe that "getting nervous" shouldn't indicate a guilty conscience, and that consistent story-telling is a much better indicator of the truth. Psychologists are currently testing new techniques that "induce cognitive load" as potentially more accurate ways to weed out the lies. It takes more brainpower to keep an invented story consistent than it does to tell the truth, the theory goes. So interrogators can try to overwhelm their subjects with information, questions, and tasks, and see how flustered they get.
One review of the research explores methods like having the person draw the scene being described, tell the story in reverse-chronological order, describe the scene in detail from the perspective of a different physical vantage point, and even complete math problems in the middle of the interview. Even being made to maintain constant eye contact occupies the mind, so that can also make it more difficult for a liar to stay on message.
It's hard to say which interrogation method is harder for a liar to beat — manipulating subtle physiological blips, or keeping a complicated story straight while looking the examiner right in the eye and doing long division at the same time. But maybe it's also worth trying the simple, natural, low-tech option that's always been a recourse for liars everywhere: mock surprise. According to Doug Williams' indictment, one undercover agent apparently asked him what to do during the polygraph if he was asked about whether he had had any polygraph training. As in, should he lie about that? Williams apparently responded, "Look at them with an astounded look on your face…reverse it on him."
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» see original post http://theweek.com/articles/441711/how-beat-polygraph
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5 great scientists who never won a Nobel Prize
Science Focus
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The Nobel Prizes can be as controversial as they are prestigious. It's very uncommon for a scientist to make a discovery entirely on his or her own: Researchers collaborate, compete, and construct new theories based on the work of others. Inevitably, choosing just up to three living scientists to take credit for a pivotal find means some researchers are, arguably, unfairly left out of the spotlight.
Some Nobel snubs were the product of personal grudges or general biases, particularly against women scientists. Others were matters of bad timing; Rosalind Franklin, whose work was essential to the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, died four years before James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared a Nobel in 1962 — and the Nobels are almost never awarded posthumously. Here are the stories of a few scientists who contributed significantly to our understanding of the world, but who unfortunately never won top honors in Sweden.
Annie Jump Cannon
Accomplishment: Classifying the stars
Cannon was an American astronomer hired by Edward Pickering, along with other women (collectively referred to as "Pickering's Harem"), to work at the Harvard Observatory mapping and classifying every star in the sky. Without these women, whom he called "computers," Pickering could not have catalogued all those stars.
(More from World Science Festival: The women who shaped the computer age)
Cannon was arguably the most accomplished of Pickering's computers. During her career she observed and classified over 200,000 stars. But more importantly, she devised a star classification system to categorize stars based on spectral absorption lines. Though her contributions were not recognized during her forty-year astronomy career, her work lives on in the mnemonic device "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me!" which helps astronomy students remember star types in order of decreasing temperature.
Gilbert Newton Lewis
Accomplishment: Understanding how chemical bonding works
If you've ever studied chemistry, you know the work of Gilbert Newton Lewis, an American chemist. Lewis' contributions to chemistry in the 1900s include discovering the covalent bond (where atoms share electron pairs), and explaining the nature of acids and bases as substances that accept or give away a pair of electrons, respectively. He also introduced the "Lewis dot structure," a way of representing chemical bonds and unbonded electrons in atoms and molecules.
Much of Lewis's research laid the groundwork for our understanding of chemical bonding, and he went on to make significant contributions in thermodynamics as well. But though he was nominated 35 times, Lewis's criticism of his colleagues and hostile relationships with his contemporaries kept him from winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. That's not just idle gossip: There's historical evidence that William Palmaer, a Swedish chemist who served as a voting member of the chemistry committee from 1926 to 1942, had an agenda against Lewis. (Palmaer was close friends with Walther Nernst, a chemist that Lewis nursed a grudge against and frequently criticized).
Dimitri Mendeleev
Accomplishment: The periodic table of elements
Mendeleev was a Russian chemist and inventor, well known for his periodic law stating that the chemical properties of the elements reoccur periodically as their atomic masses increase. The famous Periodic Table he created based on this law accurately described elements yet to be discovered along with their physical and chemical properties, and was the first such table that could make these predictions. Mendeleev was nominated for the 1906 Nobel Prize in chemistry, but died in 1907 without that honor.
(More from World Science Festival: The biochemistry of autumn colors)
Carl Richard Woese
Accomplishment: Reshaping the tree of life
Woese was a molecular biologist who studied microbiology and evolution. In 1977, he published a paper that described how to use RNA from the ribosome, a cellular organelle, to identify and classify microbes. This technique, called molecular phylogeny, eventually revolutionized the study of both microbiology and evolution.
Woese's first analysis using molecular phylogeny led to the discovery of the Archaea, a previously-unheard of third domain of life on Earth. Before Woese's discovery, life was classified into Five Kingdoms stemming from two major branches: prokaryotes, containing bacteria, and eukaryotes, comprising animals, plants, fungi and protists. The only difference between these branches was the presence (eukaryotes) or absence (prokaryotes) of a membrane-bound cell nucleus. Microorganisms in Archaea do not have a nucleus, but have their own characteristic membranes, enzymes, and ribosomes. Most Archaea are extremophiles, residing in environments that most organisms would find intolerable: hot springs, volcanic vents, or extremely salty places. Yet despite the fact that Woese literally reshaped the tree of life, he never received a Nobel for his pivotal work.
Chien-Shiung Wu
Accomplishment: Proving the "handedness" of nature
In 1956 Wu conducted a nuclear physics experiment that disproved a widely accepted law of physics: the "Parity Law," which says that physical systems or objects that are mirror images of each other should behave in an identical way — essentially, that fundamental laws of physics do not distinguish between left and right.
While the law of parity does apply to the forces of electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong nuclear force, two other physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang thought that this would not be true for the weak nuclear force. To prove this, Wu — enlisted by Lee, a colleague at Columbia University, where she was an associate professor at the time — studied the decay of supercooled atoms of the radioactive isotope cobalt-60 exposed to a strong magnetic field. If the law of parity held true for the weak nuclear force that governs beta decay, the cobalt isotopes should have emitted equal numbers of electrons in both directions. But Wu saw that as the cobalt-60 decayed, electrons tended to fly off in a direction opposite from the spin of the cobalt nuclei; the law did not hold.
(More from World Science Festival: There'd be no Steve Jobs without Grace Hopper)
Wu's work was later replicated, and became proof positive of parity violation. The 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Lee and Yang for disproving parity violation, but Wu was overlooked. Still, she is often remembered as "The First Lady of Physics."
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» see original post http://theweek.com/articles/442926/5-great-scientists-who-never-won-nobel-prize
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The iPad and your kid—digital daycare, empowering educator, or something bad?
Science Focus
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(credit: Getty Images)
It was love at first sight—the infatuated gaze, the flirtatious giggles. He just couldn't keep his eyes or hands off her. I can still hear the cry of agony when I, his mom, mercilessly tore her away from his small chubby hands…
"He" is my two-year-old son. "She" is the iPad. It's a love story familiar to almost every parent who has both a toddler and an iPad (or presumably other tablets) in the house. And as this unnatural bit of natural attraction surfaced, it made me and many other parents wonder: "What on earth is the iPad doing to my child?"
Dr. Heather Kirkorian, an assistant professor in the Human Development and Family Studies Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of the few scientists trying to answer this very question. And for the past few years, she has been studying how touchscreen devices affect early childhood learning.
Read 34 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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» see original post http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/09/the-ipad-and-your-kid-digital-daycare-empowering-educator-or-something-bad/
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Crab Nebula in Taurus - Our Awesome Universe Star Sticker
Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space
tagged with: crbneb, astronomy, messier 1, neutron stars, star ejecta, pulsars, supernovae explosions, heavens, european southern observatory, supernova, eso, vista
Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A great outer space picture featuring a three colour composite of the well-known Crab Nebula (also known as Messier 1), as observed with the FORS2 instrument in imaging mode in the morning of November 10, 1999.
It's the remnant of a supernova explosion at a distance of about 6,000 light-years, observed almost 1,000 years ago, in the year 1054. It contains a neutron star near its center that spins 30 times per second around its axis (see below).
In this picture, the green light is predominantly produced by hydrogen emission from material ejected by the star that exploded. The blue light is predominantly emitted by very high-energy ("relativistic") electrons that spiral in a large-scale magnetic field (so-called synchrotron emission). It's believed that these electrons are continuously accelerated and ejected by the rapidly spinning neutron star at the centre of the nebula and which is the remnant core of the exploded star.
This pulsar has been identified with the lower/right of the two close stars near the geometric center of the nebula, immediately left of the small arc-like feature, best seen in ESO Press Photo eso9948.
Technical information: ESO Press Photo eso9948 is based on a composite of three images taken through three different optical filters: B (429 nm; FWHM 88 nm; 5 min; here rendered as blue), R (657 nm; FWHM 150 nm; 1 min; green) and S II (673 nm; FWHM 6 nm; 5 min; red) during periods of 0.65 arcsec (R, S II) and 0.80 (B) seeing, respectively. The field shown measures 6.8 x 6.8 arcminutes and the images were recorded in frames of 2048 x 2048 pixels, each measuring 0.2 arcseconds. North is up; East is left.
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M31 versus M33
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Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons) in planet Earth's sky, spiral galaxies M31 at left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group, along with our own Milky Way galaxy. This narrow- and wide-angle, multi-camera composite finds details of spiral structure in both, while the massive neighboring galaxies seem to be balanced in starry fields either side of bright Mirach, beta star in the constellation Andromeda. Mirach is just 200 light-years from the Sun. But M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is really 2.5 million light-years distant and M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, is also about 3 million light years away. Although they look far apart, M31 and M33 are engaged in a gravitational struggle. In fact, radio astronomers have found indications of a bridge of neutral hydrogen gas that could connect the two, evidence of a closer encounter in the past. Based on measurements, gravitational simulations currently predict that the Milky Way, M31, and M33 will all undergo mutual close encounters and potentially mergers, billions of years in the future.
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Separated by about 14 degrees (28 Full Moons) in planet Earth's sky, spiral galaxies M31 at left, and M33 are both large members of the Local Group, along with our own Milky Way galaxy. This narrow- and wide-angle, multi-camera composite finds details of spiral structure in both, while the massive neighboring galaxies seem to be balanced in starry fields either side of bright Mirach, beta star in the constellation Andromeda. Mirach is just 200 light-years from the Sun. But M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is really 2.5 million light-years distant and M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, is also about 3 million light years away. Although they look far apart, M31 and M33 are engaged in a gravitational struggle. In fact, radio astronomers have found indications of a bridge of neutral hydrogen gas that could connect the two, evidence of a closer encounter in the past. Based on measurements, gravitational simulations currently predict that the Milky Way, M31, and M33 will all undergo mutual close encounters and potentially mergers, billions of years in the future.Zazzle Space Gifts for young and old
Christmas Tree Cluster and Cone Nebula, NGC 2264 Room Graphic
Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space
tagged with: xmastrclst, star clusters, cone nebula, stars, starfields, nebulae, european southern observatory, christmas tree cluster, galaxies, amazing astronomy images, eso, vista
Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous outer space photograph featuring a colour image of the region known as NGC 2264 - an area of sky that includes the sparkling blue baubles of the Christmas Tree star cluster and the Cone Nebula.
It was created from data taken through four different filters (B, V, R and H-alpha) with the Wide Field Imager at ESO's La Silla Observatory, 2400 m high in the Atacama Desert of Chile in the foothills of the Andes.
The image shows a region of space about 30 light-years across.
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Astronaut Repairing Hubble Cover For The iPad Mini
Here's a great iPad case from Zazzle featuring a Hubble-related design. Maybe you'd like to see your name on it? Click to personalize and see what it's like!
tagged with: astronaut reparing hubble, astronaut, repairing hubble, hubble, hubble telescope, space, launch, spacecraft, space shuttle, space exploration, rocket ship, nasa, astronauts, ascending, universe, galaxy, stars, science, astronomy
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Inexpensive new catalysts can be fine-tuned
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Material could replace precious metals and produce precisely controlled electrochemical reactivity. Researchers at MIT and Lawrence Berkeley National
The post Inexpensive new catalysts can be fine-tuned has been published on Technology Org.
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Earth at Night Poster
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tagged with: earth, night, astronomy, space
Earth at Night
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Carina Nebula - Breathtaking Universe Rectangular Sticker
Here's a great sheet of stickers featuring a beautiful image from deep space
tagged with: stlrnrsry, star clusters, galaxies, starfields, awesome astronomy pictures, constellation puppis, the stern, star nurseries, exploring outer space, universe pictures, european southern observatory, nebulae, eso, vista
Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series
A gorgeous set of oval stickers showing the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the southern constellation of Puppis ("The Stern"). With an age of a few million years at most, it is a very active stellar nursery, where new stars are born continuously from large clouds of dust and gas.The image, looking like a colourful cosmic ghost or a gigantic celestial Mandrill, contains the open clusters Haffner 18 (centre) and Haffner 19 (middle right: it is located inside the smaller pink region - the lower eye of the Mandrill), as well as vast areas of ionised gas.
The bright star at the centre of the largest pink region on the bottom of the image is HD 64315, a massive young star that is helping shaping the structure of the whole nebular region.
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Constellation Puppis, NGC 2467 - Table Ornament Wall Skin
Here's a great wall decal featuring a beautiful image from deep space
tagged with: stlrnrsry, star clusters, stars, starfields, nebulae, awesome astronomy pictures, constellation puppis, the stern, star nurseries, galaxies, european southern observatory, eso, vista
Galaxies, Stars and Nebulae series A gorgeous outer space picture showing the area surrounding the stellar cluster NGC 2467, located in the southern constellation of Puppis ("The Stern"). With an age of a few million years at most, it is a very active stellar nursery, where new stars are born continuously from large clouds of dust and gas.
The image, looking like a colourful cosmic ghost or a gigantic celestial Mandrill, contains the open clusters Haffner 18 19, as well as vast areas of ionised gas.
The bright star at the centre of the largest pink region on the bottom of the image is HD 64315, a massive young star that is helping shaping the structure of the whole nebular region.
more items with this image
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image code: stlrnrsry
ESO/J. Emerson/VISTA www.eso.org
Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
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