Something to brighten your day.
[Discovery Channel: I Love the World – YouTube]
It’s a shame the program planners don’t put more science based shows on the Discovery Channel (TLC). I mean, the house renovation/tattoo parlour/chop shop shows might get high ratings, but they don’t come close to making me sing.
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The Stroop Effect, named after J. Ridley Stroop who published the effect in 1935, is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. For example, when a word signifying a colour such as “red” is printed in blue a reader’s reaction time processing the word’s colour, leads to slower test reaction times and an increase in mistakes.
Try out one of my favourite demonstrations of this effect by saying the colours of the words below:
(For example if the word “blue” is printed in green, you would say the word green)
If naming the first group of colours is easier and quicker than the second, then your performance exhibits the Stroop effect.
The Stroop effect illustrates important principles about how the brain works, particularly for mental tasks involving attention, automatic processing, and response selection. It also can be used to examine the subtle effects of adverse conditions on the brain, such as lack of sleep, fatigue, or the effects of high altitudes.
The coloured word test above is only one kind kind of automatic processing that can be studied.
Check out Harvard University’s site in which they continually collects data with their Implicit Association Tests, many of which have fascinating social and political implications.
How many passes does the team in white make? An experiment in awareness.
[Test your awareness – YouTube]
From http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/:
“The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.”
[Moon 2.0 – YouTube]
Cheesy video? Yes. Feeling inspired anyway? How could you not?
Last fall Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk interviewed Marc Levoy, Stanford University Professor of both computer science and electrical engineering.
Levoy shows them leading edge research about automatically stitching images together, digitizing real world three dimensial objects like statues, and among others, camera technology that allows you to refocus the image AFTER you shoot it!
You can view the interview here.
See also: CNet’s article about the multi-dimensional focusing technology.
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So here’s the question of the day:
“A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyor). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyor moves in the opposite direction. This conveyor has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyor to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”
Personally, my first thought was that the plane would not take off because it wouldn’t have enough lift without moving up to speed relative to the ground. But after thinking about what it is that actually causes a plane to lift off, the wind going around the wings, I wasn’t so sure.
The wheels in planes aren’t generally what cause the plane to move forward, it’s the suction of wind through the propeller or engines. Presumably the plane would pull the same amount of wind whether or not it was riding the conveyor belt, therefore, I think it would take off.
While you’re taking a moment to think about this problem, let me tell you that tonight the Mythbuster’s are putting this question to rest once and for all. Will a plane on a conveyor belt take-off? (We’ll see tonight, but I think yes).
Update: here is the clip:
[Mythbusters – Plane on a Conveyor Belt – YouTube]
The Mythbusters official channel has uploaded the full episode:
This remarkable video from the documentary Ants! Nature’s Secret Power shows a glimpse into the fascinating world of the ant. The narrator describes the intricate ant nest as an accomplishment equivalent to the building of the great wall of China.
The structure covers 538 square feet and travels 26 feet into the earth. In it’s construction, the colony moved 40 tons of soil. Billions of ant loads of soil were brought to the surface. Each load weighed four times as much as the worker ant, and in human terms, was carried over 1/2 mile to the surface.
I also recommend the TED talk by Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?
I just finished reading the wonderful New Yorker article Darwin’s Surprise by Michael Specter. This is some of the most interesting reading around (at least in my opinion).
I should have been a biologist.
Nothing provides more convincing evidence for the “theory” of evolution than the viruses contained within our DNA. Until recently, the earliest available information about the history and the course of human diseases, like smallpox and typhus, came from mummies no more than four thousand years old. Evolution cannot be measured in a time span that short. Endogenous retroviruses provide a trail of molecular bread crumbs leading millions of years into the past.
And that trail appears to lead to the very roots of human existence and possibly to a cure for HIV/AIDS.
The latest iteration of the world’s biggest physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, will be switched on in May 2008 (though the BBC documentary below says November, the time line has been updated).
It’s big, REALLY big, and expensive—costing over 6 billion dollars and crossing between the borders of France and Switzerland at four points. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries, universities and laboratories.
As a side note, CERN has had some impressive byproducts, including the web itself.
The BBC created a great documentary about it called The Six Billion Dollar Experiment, the full running time is 49 minutes, but you can enjoy the BBC’s preview:
[The Six Billion Dollar Experiment – YouTube]
Billions and billions of dollars have been spent in the pursuit of new drugs but vanishingly few useful drugs are actually being developed. Dr. Safi Bahcall, the president and C.E.O. of the biotechnology company Synta Pharmaceuticals, and Malcolm Gladwell talk about how mistakes lead to great scientific discoveries and how big drug companies hamper innovation.
Check out their talk, Surrendipity: 2012 from the 2007 New Yorker Conference.