ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 797
December 10, 2014
Harvesting the clouds: how to make water out of fog
Image credit: Michele Lamberti
By Sandeep Ravindran
Generally, when scientists look to nature for inspiration, they look to environments that mimic what they’re trying to build. In the case of collecting water from air, that meant desert plants and animals — seeing what special structures they might have to harvest fog water. So it was surprising when a fog collecting discovery came from a far wetter source: the beaks of shorebirds. And it could inspire a pretty radical redesign of fog collection devices.
Right now, most fog collection is done using mesh fabric. The Standard Fog Collector, used all over the world since Robert Schemenauer’s first paper on it in 1994, consists of a fabric mesh one square meter in size and faces the wind like little perforated sail. As the wind blows fog through the device, water droplets accumulate on the mesh and drop down into a trough, from which they flow down a tube into a container.
Daniel Fernandez, a fog researcher at California State University, Monterey Bay, has set up 20 standard fog collectors along the California coast. While most such fog collectors gather just a few liters a day, where they’re placed can make all the difference; Fernandez says he has collected almost 40 liters, or about 10 gallons, per square meter in a day from some parts of Big Sur.
“Fog has a really big impact on the world we live in, particularly in the coastal areas in California,” Fernandez says. On a summer day along the winding Northern California coast, the cool waters of the Pacific can cause the moisture in the air above to condense, forming low-lying clouds. As the breeze brings these clouds onto the shore and close to the ground, they form fog. It’s the same kind of fog that spreads into San Francisco, giving the city its iconic fog cover — and keeps temperatures along the California coast cool.
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December 7, 2014
Richard Dawkins at Kennesaw State- Nov 21, 2014
Richard Dawkins in conversation with Dr. Michael L. Sanseviro, Dean of Student Success at Kennesaw State University in Georgia on November 21, 2014 at the Bailey Performance Center.
Event organizer and Producer: Brian Neal Clyne
Executively Produced and Owed by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science
December 6, 2014
How Dogs Really Listen to Us, and How Pufferfish Puff
This week on SciShow News: Animals! New research has found how dogs actually listen to us in more complex ways than you probably thought, and also figured out how a kind of pufferfish gets its puff up.
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http://discovermagazine.com/1997/sep/howthepufferfish1226
December 5, 2014
See it, touch it, feel it
Bristol Interaction and Graphics group, University of Bristol, copyright © 2014
By University of Bristol
The research paper, published in the current issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics and which will be presented at this week’s SIGGRAPH Asia 2014 conference [3-6 December], demonstrates how a method has been created to produce 3D shapes that can be felt in mid-air.
The research, led by Dr Ben Long and colleagues Professor Sriram Subramanian, Sue Ann Seah and Tom Carter from the University of Bristol’s Department of Computer Science, could change the way 3D shapes are used. The new technology could enable surgeons to explore a CT scan by enabling them to feel a disease, such as a tumour, using haptic feedback.
The method uses ultrasound, which is focussed onto hands above the device and that can be felt. By focussing complex patterns of ultrasound, the air disturbances can be seen as floating 3D shapes. Visually, the researchers have demonstrated the ultrasound patterns by directing the device at a thin layer of oil so that the depressions in the surface can be seen as spots when lit by a lamp.
The system generates a virtual 3D shape that can be added to 3D displays to create something that can be seen and felt. The research team have also shown that users can match a picture of a 3D shape to the shape created by the system.
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Flubbing the Appeal in Scopes, Part 1
H. L. Mencken
Over at PopMatters (September 18, 2014), Iain Ellis, who teaches English at the University of Kansas, devoted a column to the Scopes trial, emphasizing the role of the journalist and critic H. L. Mencken—indeed, the column is entitled, “Mr. Mencken Went to Dayton and the Culture Wars Began.” Ellis is generally reliable, although he may be paying too much heed to Mencken’s own, sometimes self-aggrandizing, tales of his involvement in the case. For example, Ellis credits Mencken with recruiting Darrow for the defense, probably on Mencken’s authority. But as Terry Teachout notes in his The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2003), Mencken offered no such claim in the definitive account of the Scopes trial that he included in his posthumously published Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, instead crediting Joseph Hergesheimer. Darrow, for his part, wrote in The Story of My Life (1932) that he volunteered for the defense when he heard that Bryan would join the prosecution—although there’s no reason to suppose that Darrow was immune from the temptation to overstate his alacrity to involve himself in the case, for all that.
Anyhow, I don’t propose to check every little fact in Ellis’s column. Rather, I want to draw attention to a lacuna in it. Ellis concludes, “Therefore, though Scopes was convicted for his misdemeanor, the country and the world—not only Dayton and Tennessee—were in the process exposed to a case where ‘sense’, according to the reporter [Mencken], ‘achieved a great victory.’” Well, yes, Scopes was convicted, after the jury deliberated for all of nine minutes, and the court fixed the fine at $100. Invited by the judge to comment, Scopes spoke for the first time during the trial, saying, “Your honor, I feel that I have been convicted of violating an unjust statute. I will continue in the future, as I have in the past, to oppose this law in any way I can. Any other action would be in violation of my ideal of academic freedom—that is, to teach the truth as guaranteed in our constitution, of personal and religious freedom. I think the fine is unjust.” Both the ACLU and William Jennings Bryan, the star of the prosecution team, offered to pay the fine for Scopes. But (and here’s the lacuna) the conviction was overturned on appeal!
All along, the defense team expected to lose the case in the small-town court. The plan was to appeal the verdict and to win a victory at the appellate level. But it was not to be. Although the conviction was overturned, it was not the victory that the defense team sought. Why? Recall that Clarence Darrow, in a legally unusual but highly mediagenic stunt, called Bryan to the stand to testify about the Bible. Darrow’s harsh treatment of Bryan on the stand attracted a lot of criticism, especially after Bryan died five days after the close of the trial. As a result, Forrest Bailey of the ACLU told John Randolph Neal Jr. (1876–1959) that he should take the lead in appealing the verdict. A Tennessee lawyer, Neal was involved with the case from the get-go, having offered to defend Scopes when he was indicted. But he was notoriously disheveled and erratic. When he taught at the University of Tennessee’s law school, he was often late or absent from class. When he arrived, he would often rant about current affairs rather than discuss the law. Fortunately for his students, he tended to give them good grades without even reading their examinations.
Entrusted with the appeal, Neal was no less erratic. True, he prepared a list of reasons that the case should be retried. These were, in summary, (1) that the evidence showed that Scopes was not guilty; and that the court erred (2) in overruling Scopes’s motion to quash the indictment on account of the vagueness of the Butler Act, (3) in overruling Scopes’s motion to quash the indictment on account of the unconstitutionality of the Butler Act, (4) in excluding the testimony of the defense’s expert witnesses, (5) in overruling the defense’s objection to opening the court sessions with prayer, (6) in refusing to grant the defense’s motion for dismissal when the testimony for the state closed, (7) in overruling the defense’s objection to the use of the King James Version of the Bible, and (8) in excluding and expunging Bryan’s testimony. Everything but the kitchen sink, really. But Neal was not otherwise so conscientious. In Summer for the Gods (2007), Edward J. Larson writes, “Neal seemed incapable of doing the job…Although Neal proudly boasted of his status of chief counsel, he persistently failed to communicate with co-counsel.”
Larson also observes that Neal “missed the deadline for filing the bill of exceptions with the state supreme court,” thus precluding “the defense for appealing any issues relating to the conduct of the trial—including the ruling on expert testimony.” According to the state’s motion to strike out the “so-called bill of exceptions,” Neal would have had to file the bill within thirty days of the trial, i.e., by August 20, 1925, but it wasn’t filed until September 16, 1925. Neal’s submission included a document from the court, signed by Judge Raulston, granting “thirty (30) days from July 21st, 1925, in which to prepare, perfect, and file his bill of exceptions”; the state’s motion observes that the typewritten “thirty (30) days” was marked out and “sixty (60) days” was substituted in pen and ink. As far as I can tell, nobody knew then or knows now who amended the document, but the state argued, in effect, that the deadline was the deadline regardless, and the Tennessee Supreme Court agreed. Undiscouraged, Neal submitted the scientific expert testimony unheard in the trial court to the appellate court anyhow. Part 2 will discuss what happened next.
You can’t detox your body. It’s a myth. So how do you get healthy?
Photograph: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty Images
By Dara Mohammadi
Whether it’s cucumbers splashing into water or models sitting smugly next to a pile of vegetables, it’s tough not to be sucked in by the detox industry. The idea that you can wash away your calorific sins is the perfect antidote to our fast-food lifestyles and alcohol-lubricated social lives. But before you dust off that juicer or take the first tentative steps towards a colonic irrigation clinic, there’s something you should know: detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.
“Let’s be clear,” says Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, “there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t.” The respectable one, he says, is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions. “The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.”
If toxins did build up in a way your body couldn’t excrete, he says, you’d likely be dead or in need of serious medical intervention. “The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak,” he says. “There is no known way – certainly not through detox treatments – to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better.”
Much of the sales patter revolves around “toxins”: poisonous substances that you ingest or inhale. But it’s not clear exactly what these toxins are. If they were named they could be measured before and after treatment to test effectiveness. Yet, much like floaters in your eye, try to focus on these toxins and they scamper from view. In 2009, a network of scientists assembled by the UK charity Sense about Science contacted the manufacturers of 15 products sold in pharmacies and supermarkets that claimed to detoxify. The products ranged from dietary supplements to smoothies and shampoos. When the scientists asked for evidence behind the claims, not one of the manufacturers could define what they meant by detoxification, let alone name the toxins.
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.
World’s fastest 2-D camera may enable new scientific discoveries
By Tony Fitzpatrick
A team of biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Lihong Wang, PhD, the Gene K. Beare Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, has developed the world’s fastest receive-only 2-D camera, a device that can capture events up to 100 billion frames per second.
That’s orders of magnitude faster than any current receive-only ultrafast imaging techniques, which are limited by on-chip storage and electronic readout speed to operations of about 10 million frames per second.
Using a technique developed at the School of Engineering & Applied Science called compressed ultrafast photography (CUP), Wang and his colleagues have made movies of the images they took with single laser shots of four physical phenomena: laser pulse reflection, refraction, faster-than light propagation of what is called non-information, and photon racing in two media. While it’s no day at the races, the images are entertaining, awe-inspiring and represent the opening of new vistas of scientific exploration.
The research appears in the Dec. 4, 2014, issue of Nature.
“For the first time, humans can see light pulses on the fly,” Wang said. “Because this technique advances the imaging frame rate by orders of magnitude, we now enter a new regime to open up new visions. Each new technique, especially one of a quantum leap forward, is always followed a number of new discoveries. It’s our hope that CUP will enable new discoveries in science — ones that we can’t even anticipate yet.”
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What’s the Weirdest Thing You’ve Brought Through Airport Security?
Not long after the winners of this year’s Nobel Prizes were announced, my colleague Clara Moskowitz wrote about astrophysicist Brian Schmidt’s experience carrying his own Nobel—a half-pound gold medallion—through airport security. Schmidt’s story might be impossible to top, but we would like you to try.
So tell us, what is the weirdest thing you have ever taken through airport security? Strange instruments of science or samples from the field earn bonus points. Send us photos and descriptions, and we’ll publish the best responses on ScientificAmerican.com in time for the holiday travel season. Last day for submissions is Wednesday, December 10.
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Fossil Friday!
This week’s fossil should be quite easy to identify because you’ve seen it once before—recently! Well, not this particular fossil, but one from the same species. So my question to you is...what little prance could this tooth have come from? Where was it found? And from what time period did it hail?
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