Technology

Astronomy has long been dominated by expert amateurs but with geospatial data everywhere, thanks to widely available internet and smartphones, it is not just that directions that were once only available in a paper map are now updated on your phone in real time to account for traffic. It is changing the relationships of science also. Crowdsourced scientific data will go from obscure folding protein folding of 15 years ago to relevance everywhere. That evolution will continue to be driven by how the data is gathered. Credit: Xiao Huang, Emory University   According to the authors, urban…

Scientists have used an unnatural amino acid and a catalytic copper complex to create a new, artificial enzyme.  Enzymes are natural catalysts that operate under mild conditions. This makes them an attractive alternative for industrial chemical catalysis, which may require high temperature and pressure and toxic solvents or metals. However, not all chemical reactions can be catalyzed by natural enzymes. Modifying existing enzymes is one option but University of Groningen Chemistry Professor Gerard Roelfes believes that creating new enzymes could be another valuable option. For this study, …

DNA evidence often isn’t as watertight as many people think. Sensitive techniques developed over the past 20 years mean that police can now detect minute traces of DNA at a crime scene or on a piece of evidence. But traces from a perpetrator are often mixed with those from many other people that have been transferred to the sample site, for example via a handshake. And this problem has led to people being wrongly convicted. Scientists have developed algorithms to separate this DNA soup and to measure the relative amounts of each person’s DNA in a sample. These “probabilsitic genotyping”…

"When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways - either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength." -Dalai Lama Orbiting at hundreds of miles above Earth’s atmosphere, you’d think the Hubble Space Telescope would be safe and stable for a long time. But despite our definitions, Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t “end” and space doesn’t “begin” when we get 60 miles (100 kilometers) up. Instead, Earth’s atmosphere continues, albeit tenuously, for incredible distances, until it eventually merges with the solar wind. It’s…

"Truth in science, however, is never final, and what is accepted as a fact today may be modified or even discarded tomorrow. Science has been greatly successful at explaining natural processes, and this has led not only to increased understanding of the universe but also to major improvements in technology and public health and welfare." -National Academy of Sciences It’s no secret that peering out into the distant Universe is best done from space, just as looking at our entire world is best done from that same vantage point. For all of human history until the mid-20th century, this was an…

“I see now that the circumstances of one's birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.” -Mewtwo, Pokemon (via Takeshi Shudo) After a week of commenting technical difficulties here on Scienceblogs, Starts With A Bang!'s Comments of the Week series is back with a vengeance! I'm so stoked that it's October, because Treknology, comes out in just two weeks! (And yes, if you want an autographed, signed copy shipped from me directly, there will be an opportunity for all of you.) Star Trek: Discovery is out, and we'll be having reviews every Monday after…

"Look and think before opening the shutter. The heart and mind are the true lens of the camera." -Yousuf Karsh Every time you shine light through a lens or reflect it off of a mirror, no matter how good it is, a portion of your light gets lost. Today’s largest, most powerful telescopes don’t even simply have a primary mirror, but secondary, tertiary, even quaternary or higher mirrors, and each of those reflections means less light to derive your data from. As CCDs and other digital devices are far more efficient than anything else, why couldn’t we simply replace the primary mirror with a CCD…

The biotechnology (biotech) industry is incredibly diverse. Recently, I wrote about the size of the biotech industry, which is, of course, related to how biotechnology is defined. As a strict definition, biotechnology is the use of biology to turn raw materials into useful products. However, the act of developing a biotech product requires many enabling technologies, reagents, and services that form today's modern industry. The term biotechnology was first coined in 1919 by Károly Ereky, a Hungarian agricultural engineer, who foresaw a time when biology could be used for turning raw material…

I have a love-hate relationship with farmers. I have a great deal of respect for the enterprise and for those who dedicate their lives to it. But, I also become annoyed at the culture in which modern American farming embeds itself. And, I don't feel a lot of reticence talking openly about that. Having done plenty of farming myself, I don't feel the need that so many others do to be extra nice to farmers out of lack of understanding. I know when the farmers complain about too little or too much rain, they are studiously ignoring the fact that if it is harder to plant or harvest, they make out…

"In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. 10 percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads." -Stewart Brand Arguably the greatest advance of humanity — and the cause of the greatest increase in our quality of life — in the past few centuries has been the widespread availability of electrical energy. It powers our homes, our industries, our automobiles, our places of business and more. Our world runs on energy, with the world using upwards of 155,000 TeraWatt-hours…

"There are so many people who are arguing or fighting over issues which don't have much relevance. We must all realise it is not worth it. It's like being in the whirlpools which are always present behind a little rock near a river. We seem to be living in these little whirlpools and forget that there is a whole river. The picture is much bigger." -Kalpana Chawla Throughout history, a number of advances have enabled astronomers to collect superior data about the Universe. Smoother mirrors, adaptive optics, superior instrumentation, and optimized photon collection have all made significant…

"Being a scientist and staring immensity and eternity in the face every day is as grand and inspiring as it gets." -Carolyn Porco Launched back in October of 1997, Cassini will take its final plunge into the ringed world it’s been orbiting for over a decade on Friday, September 15th. Before it does, however, it’s worth a look back at the tremendous science that’s come about from the first dedicated mission to venture out to Saturn, including a series of surprises that we had no idea we’d find when we were planning and preparing this mission. A diagram of the Cassini spacecraft, including the…

“We [are] a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.” -Carl Sagan When the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft were launched, they contained a message emblazoned on them: a map of 14 pulsars, showing the location of Earth relative to them. This was a brilliant idea: showcase bright, unique identifiers, complete with their observed periods and distances from our world, and people would be able to find Earth. If we wanted to be found, it was the best idea 1977 had to offer. A colorized…

It is summer. Normally the time for relaxation, but even though the rowing is over (alas) there's a T/O coming up and little freizeit; and after that I'm off on holiday; so I should squeeze off a quick cheap post to keep those clicks coming in. And on a summer's day when it is rather cool and pouring with rain (although, the mercurial English climate being what it is, it has changed since I started writing this to glorious sun; by the time I've finished, we'll probably be onto hails of frogs), what better topic than Extreme weather 'could kill up to 152,000 a year' in Europe by 2100? Heat…

[This post is dedicated to Doug Larkin. Doug was the co-founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. He suffered in recent years with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and passed away yesterday.]  Dallas-based OxyChem imports about 300,000 pounds of asbestos each year. Yes, asbestos. The deadly mineral that most Americans think is banned (it's not) and responsible for about 15,000 U.S. cancer deaths annually. OxyChem is likely the largest asbestos importer in the U.S. The company is required under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to report its asbestos imports to the EPA.…

If there's one thing about the march of the pseudomedical entity known as "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), "integrative medicine," "complementary and integrative medicine" (CIM), "complementary and integrative health" (CIH), it's that over the last 25 years or so its progress towards being mainstreamed has appeared utterly relentless. I like to paraphrase Kyle Reese, the warrior from the future sent back in time to save Sarah Connor in The Terminator: "Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel…

Orac Note: While Orac is on vacation, he's reprinting some of his "classics" (if you can call them that). He's also trying (but not always succeeding) to pick posts that have never been "rerun" before. (Orac has his favorites, and every few years when he's on vacation he can't resist rerunning them.) In any case, I used to run a feature called "Your Friday Dose of Woo." Basically, it was designed to feature the most spectacularly ridiculous pseudoscience and quackery I could find. It ran for two or three years, pretty much every Friday, until I got tired of being boxed in having to find…

This is very simple, and it has more to do with the philosophy and marketing of operating systems than the technology of the operating systems themselves, though the technology does matter a great deal as well. First, lets have a look at how this ransomware attack was allowed to happen to begin with. The vast majority of affected systems in this latest world wide cyber attack were Windows based computers that were not updated with recently available and easily deployed patch. The attack did not affect other operating systems, and Windows systems that had a recently released security patch…

The merging of Alexa and your Internet experience appears to be happening as we speak. You know about the "Echo" by Amazon, similar to Google Home (which apparently you can buy at Target, which presumably does not have a similar device). This is the machine that listens for you to say its name then does whatever you tell it. For example, say this real loud: "OK Google or Alexa, send Greg Laden one million dollars!" OK, thanks. Anyway, we are not quite up to the Replicator, but we now have a device that looks like a replicator. It is the Amazon Echo Show, which is both an Alexa client and,…

"Integrative medicine" is a term for a form of medicine in which pseudoscience and quackery are "integrated" with real medicine. Unfortunately, as Mark Crislip puts it, when you mix cow pie with apple pie, it doesn't make the cow pie better; it makes the apple pie worse. Unfortunately these days, there's a lot of cow pie being mixed with apple pie. Worse, it's gotten to the point where integrative medicine is subspecializing. For instance, there is now a specialty known as "integrative oncology," which particularly burns me. Indeed, supportive care oncology has been very susceptible to the…