Science

15 Feb, 2016 - On the search for life:

Just watched "The Search for Life: The Drake Equation" on Netflix. It was made by BBC, presented by Dallas Campbell. Fascinating material - it started with an interview with Drake where he explained each part of the equation and the guesses they used for the variables based on what they knew at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation
Then the presenter (Campbell) began interviews to tie it into the question of how life develops - the last variables of the equation (how much life is there out there that may be emitting signals) concern how often life arises, whether it achieves intelligence, and how long it survives at that state. The amazing thing about the thinking behind the equation is that it also delineates the stepping stones of life in a systematic way. So the equation isn't only about finding other life in the galaxy, it's also about understanding ourselves.
He interviewed a few researchers to ask about what their research has exposed on each variable. For instance, he interviewed professor Gerry Joyce at the Scripps Institute in San Diego - Joyce is studying artificial RNA sequences that self replicate. So they're trying to find how the first self replication (the first building block of life in general - biogenesis) works and different ways it can start.
He interviewed a biologist, Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon, from San Francisco who was studying microbes in Mono lake in California, a highly arsenic body of water. The thinking there is that since the water is arsenic, it means that other life cannot freely interact with that life (because the other life would die) - so it may have developed separately (life may arise many times). See below in comments for Wikipedia article on Dr Wolfe-Simmons, there's still controversy on whether the microbe's biogenesis was indeed separate.
He interviewed another scientist, Dr Chris McKay of NASA Ames, who was studying cyanobacteria in the Mohave desert. The point of this was trying to figure out how likely and how life goes from single cellular to multi cellular. They went to the most dry place in the Mohave and turned over some rocks - in bubbles inside the quartz, colonies of cyonobacteria had little "greenhouses" and were carrying on photosynthesis (so you could see a green smudge once you turned the rock over). McKay said that once you have all these going on, you get a bunch of oxygen in the atmosphere, which leads to the ability of larger organisms to function. The statement there is that once single celled organisms are doing photosynthesis, it leads to multi-celled organisms quickly (because the oxygen energy pathway supercharges metabolism of an organism, meaning it's a lot faster).
The last variable of the equation concerns how common intelligence is. This is a complete guess. They looked at biologists studying crows, and mentioned dolphins and elephants as well.
Finally, he went to interview scientists at SETI. They think that they would have to ultimately listen to a broad spectrum of channels while focusing on a total of 10 million planets in order to increase the likelihood of discovering another intelligence out there to 1.

Notes: Drake Equation: N stands for number of intelligent civilizations out there (scope - our galaxy - the Milky Way). It is assumed to be equal to the following variables all multiplied together: Rate of star formation in our galaxy per year (10) * Fp (average fraction of formed stars which have planets - was assumed to be half, or .5) * ne (average number of those planets which could support life - Drake set this at 2 to mirror our solar system with the assumption that Mars could possibly support it) * Fl (the fraction of those planets that eventually develop life - Drake assumed this to be 1, if a planet can support life it WILL eventually develop) * Fi (fraction of that life which develops into intelligence) * Fc (fraction of the intelligent life which develops communications, which as it concerns SETI would be electromagnetic comm) * L (length of time that communication continues).

So all in all, very interesting show.

-- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0132352/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm
-- http://www.scripps.edu/research/faculty/joyce
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felisa_Wolfe-Simon
-- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99132608 - "In Lab, Clues to How Life Began"
-- I read more on Joyce and RNA, and it seems like once life has moved on past that phase, it would be very hard for that step to occur again because of how fragile RNA is - any other activity going on would destroy it. http://www.nature.com/.../1998/030505/full/news030505-8.html

My comments on the content: I think that the reasons they aren't finding anything have to do with: A. Completely arbitrary guess of searched portion of spectrum (hydrogen wavelength, really?) B. Searching in a fashion that assumes an intelligent signal occurs on one frequency alone, when in fact we've already moved beyond that in order to boost bandwidth. This means that the Fc assumption is way too simplistic and L subject to our current search pattern is tiny - in the first 40 years of developing EM communications, we have already started using multiple frequencies for transmissions. That means that L may be much shorter than the overall time that the civilization is transmitting (it may be only 40-50 years, until no one is transmitting on a single frequency).
What this means is that we're going to have to use our AI techniques and GPUs on SETI.
Chris Miller's comments: The Drake equation reminds me of the Fermi Paradox.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fQkVqno-uI


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4 Feb, 2016: On GMO/non-GMO co-existance:
http://www.fooddemocracynow.org/blog/2016/jan/24

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Field genetic testing kit (24 hour turn-around time):
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/feb/03/from-ebola-to-zika-tiny-mobile-lab-gives-real-time-dna-data-on-outbreaks?CMP=fb_a-science_b-gdnscience

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10 January, 2016:
I have no expertise on cancer. The following movie seems to cast doubt on our cancer treatments. I do know that the survival rate once patients are treated with chemotherapy is so low that it makes me wonder whether we should even be using it.
http://www.amazon.com/Burzynski-Movie-Eric-Merola/product-reviews/B003X3CF68
http://fabweb.org/2015/12/11/burzunsky-cancer-cure-finally-released-by-the-feds/


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2 Jan, 2016:
Job market is hot for ag science majors.
http://harvestpublicmedia.org/article/good-news-ag-science-majors-job-market-hot

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30 Dec, 2015:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/12/liver-hormone-may-be-the-off-switch-for-sweet-tooth-cocktail-cravings/ I bet there are activation networks like this for drug addiction as well. If we got rid of the war on drugs and simply made it a medical research issue, we'd save on prisons and drastically lower violence rate.

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2 Dec, 2015:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/infinitypv/heli-on?utm_medium=email&utm_source=other&utm_campaign=notifications.auto.WaARtpjQEeWE7RK-AWCOaQ
Organic solar cells are finally coming out - here's a first project with them on Kickstarter. This came out from the people that gave a class on organic solar cells on Coursera (that's how I got the message - I had subscribed to the class).

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28 November, 2015:
On time and its flow:
Just read a story on Wikipedia about an engineer from the early days of powered flight, John William Dunne. In addition to developing aircraft, he tried to make a theory about time based on precognitive dreams. He wrote a book (among others), An Experiment with Time (Studies in Consciousness), which has been given very high reviews on Amazon (along with several interesting comments).


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24 Oct, 2015:
So there's been a bunch of quantum physics articles out lately - here's an interesting one:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/24/1343248/zeno-effect-verified-atoms-wont-move-while-you-watch
Then there was another I saw recently in which a university did an experiment linking electrons inside two diamonds at a distance of 1.3km from one another. When one is affected, the other is as well - with information traveling instantaneously instead of at light speed.
Here's another link from a different posting (6 Oct, 2015):
https://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/06/1757228/team-constructs-silicon-2-qubit-gate-enabling-construction-of-quantum-computers

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23 Sep, 2015: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/639996/?sc=dwhn

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20 Sep, 2015: Things are never as simple as they are made out to be. http://www.livescience.com/51682-vaccines-evolve-deadlier-viruses.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=more-from-livescience

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12 Sep, 2015: http://qz.com/500409/doctors-have-implanted-a-3d-printed-ribcage-in-an-actual-human-being/

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21 Jul, 2015:
So Tyler's interested in world building simulations. Tectonic plate interaction, weather systems, river flow evolution, etc. I'm interested in learning about/coding in OpenCL - so it might be nice to have something to simulate for fun.

On my first look out on the net for tectonic plate simulations, I didn't find much in the way of source code. Probably because people at the world building sub-reddit are not really that serious (or not coders). I did find a bachelor degree thesis paper written about a simulator, but no source code for it. Maybe I'll find more later. http://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/40422/Viitanen_Lauri_2012_03_30.pdf?sequence=1

Weather systems: now this one - so much more available that it actually becomes a very confusing matter that you'd have to spend a lifetime on in order to be fluent on any percentage of the models. Here's the term for what we'd need: Global Climate Models (GCMs):
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#GCM_code

There are a lot of comments on forums from various people about how they are frustrated by how complex it is with all the different models and no way for the general public / interested people to easily get in and play with one (no easy to understand simulators).

Comments:
(me) This is interesting - the closest real world analogy to The Core. Talks about the Soviet project to reach the Mohorovičić discontinuity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohorovi%C4%8Di%C4%87_discontinuity

Found some tectonic plate simulation software:
http://www.earthbyte.org/category/resources/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vohv-kVfFAs


And this looks to be the Global Climate Model I'd be interested in using:
http://mitgcm.org/public/r2_manual/latest/online_documents/node3.html#fig:finite-volumes

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28 June, 2015: Might the universe be a 3D hologram or simulation in a computer? Let's find out!
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Spectrometer-Explore-the-Unknown-/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Desktop-Michelson-Morely-Interferometer/
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/meet-the-government-researcher-trying-to-prove-the-universe-is-a-hologram?trk_source=recommended I'm not sure this guy will be able to find anything significant and provable using only one of these. If he had a bunch of them in a grid, I bet you could see ripples in the grid.

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-weight-of-quantum-entanglement?trk_source=recommended
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wave-particle-duality-when-quantum-behavior-bleeds-into-our-classical-world-2?trk_source=recommended

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30 Apr, 2015: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/post2468343_b_2468343.html

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8 Feb, 2015:
Interesting - your weight may have more to do with the DNA code of your gut bacteria than anything in your diet:
-- http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-to-weight-loss-might-be-poop-transplants-fro-1265888152
-- It may also be worth looking into further whether gut bacteria are involved in depression / mood swings. I saw an article earlier about how some bacteria release toxins into the bloodstream in return for increased food supply (the toxins make the host depressed, leading to them binging on food).