The 'show why science is awesome' thread:

I tend to forget the differences between the UK model and the US version. Over here, PBS is a free-to-everyone, transmitted over the air network. You don’t need to be a license holder. We don’t have anything equivalent to the BBC.

Over here, PBS is a free-to-everyone, transmitted over the air network.

Well, so is the BBC. You have to pay the licence fee if you own a TV at all - it’s basically a tax - but the BBC channels are “free” after that. And the iPlayer is free to anyone in the UK. Technically you don’t even need a TV licence for that if you only watch old stuff.

That explanation only serves to highlight that the US and UK models are even more different than I thought :)

Yeah PBS is completely free. Of course it’s also mostly shit compared to the BBC and constantly forced to beg people for money, which is just annoying. But politics, blah, blah, blah. God forbid our nation’s children be corrupted by Mister Rogers or Big Bird.

Oldest and largest ancestor of modern crocs found.

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/42510/title/-Carolina-Butcher--Prowled-Triassic-North-America/

A nine-foot-long monster stalked the Carolinas more than 230 million years ago. Carnufex carolinensis, which translates to “Carolina butcher,” walked on its hind legs and had a fearsome jaw packed with teeth, according to researchers who described fossils pulled from a North Carolina quarry in a Scientific Reports paper published yesterday (March 19). The late-Triassic bones were unearthed a decade ago and sat at the North Carolina Museum of Natural History ever since. “When we got the bones out and prepared them, we found out that it was actually a really cool species,” Lindsay Zanno, North Carolina State University researcher and lead author of the paper, told The Washington Post. “It was one of the oldest and largest members of crocodylomorph—the same group that crocodiles belong to—that we’ve ever seen. And that size was really surprising.”

The find rewrites the history of animals that are ancestral to modern crocodiles. “It pushes back the date of crocodylomorphs in the fossil record,” Daniel Mulcahy, a researcher at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, told Smithsonian. “And because of its size, presumed diet, and body shape, [Carnufex] changes our thinking on what these early crocodiles looked like and what they did.”

Along with a host of other predators, C. carolinensis likely went extinct at the end of the Triassic, about 200 million years ago.

Surely they mean it waded on it’s hindlegs in shallow water, because the illustrated form really didn’t look terrestrially bipedal.

OK, now I see it.

So I did a little digging (virtual digging, that is). The actual paper about Carnufex doesn’t say anything about locomotion or bipedalism. They have a reasonable number of skull bones and a humerus - they extrapolated that to get the femur length based on the humerus/femur ratio in relatives (nothing wrong with doing that). There were a number of early croc-relatives that used bipedal locomotion, but as best I can find they are reconstructed as being quite slender and keeping their limbs straight underneath.

My best guess is either - the artist (one Jorge A. Gonzalez http://files.naturalsciences.org/news/carnufex.jpg) just applied modern croc bulk to what should have been a slender animal, or he decided it looked way more cool standing up. Then whoever wrote the press release at the North Carolina Museum just ran with it.

Thanks ron. The internet is amazing, provided you are driven enough to use it fully.

‘Mammoth genome sequence completed’:

An international team of scientists has sequenced the complete genome of the woolly mammoth.

A US team is already attempting to study the animals’ characteristics by inserting mammoth genes into elephant stem cells.

They want to find out what made the mammoths different from their modern relatives and how their adaptations helped them survive the ice ages.

The new genome study has been published in the journal Current Biology.

Dr Love Dalén, at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, told BBC News that the first ever publication of the full DNA sequence of the mammoth could help those trying to bring the creature back to life.

“It would be a lot of fun (in principle) to see a living mammoth, to see how it behaves and how it moves,” he said.

But he would rather his research was not used to this end.

“It seems to me that trying this out might lead to suffering for female elephants and that would not be ethically justifiable.”

Dr Dalén and the international group of researchers he is collaborating with are not attempting to resurrect the mammoth. But the Long Now Foundation, an organisation based in San Francisco, claims that it is.

Now, with the publication of the complete mammoth genome, it could be a step closer to achieving its aim.

Obvious, but for our ‘modern’ ‘convenience’ generation good to mention as much as possible.

‘Choosing water instead of sugary drinks could cut diabetes 2 risk by a quarter’:

Forgoing a sugary drink a day and drinking water or unsweetened tea or coffee instead could cut the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by up to a quarter, say researchers.

The research was based on a study of a week’s food diary compiled by 25,000 men and women aged 40 to 79 in Norfolk, England, more than a decade ago.

During 11 years of follow-up, 847 of those who completed the diaries were diagnosed with new-onset type 2 diabetes, a condition seen as an increasing risk to the public health of an ageing population, increasing the likelihood of heart disease, stroke and nerve damage. More than 3 million people in the UK are thought to have diabetes which is linked to obesity, lack of exercise and poor diet.

The study published in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, looked at whether people drank fizzy drinks and squashes, sweetened-milk drinks such as milkshakes, flavoured milks and hot chocolate, sweetened tea or coffee, or artificially sweetened drinks and fruit juice, and found that nearly all participants consumed at least one.

The researchers found there was a higher risk of diabetes associated with drinking soft drinks and sweetened milk drinks but not with those that have artificial sweeteners, fruit juice or sweetened tea or coffee.

That last is quite an interesting thing. Sugar is sugar right? So why is sugar in a cup of tea or coffee not the same as that in a soft drink? Is it about the amount maybe?

Nope, there are different types of sugar, and the body treats them differently, or at least some are harder to break down and/or are stored differently.

Soft drinks do also have a metric shit ton of sugar in them, compared to your coffee, just try dissolving this in your regular cappuccino!

That’s regualr Coke right? I thought most Coke was of the artificial sweetened type these days, so has less sugar? (that pic is freakish if true btw!) You got Fructose also that i guess gets used alot in place of actual cane sugar?

Anyway Judge Dredd was not wrong, Sugar IS a drug and you should probably serve time in the Cube for owning/selling/producing it ;)

It’s possible that they sell more Diet Coke than regular nowadays, but regular Coke is chock full of fructose and doesn’t use any artificial sweeteners that I’m aware of.

Coke is bottled in various regions of the world, and what those bottlers use as a fructose source tends to vary with the local costs – most North American sites use fructose derived from corn; most South American sites get it from sugarcane; I’m not sure what European or Asian sites tend to use. Chemically, there doesn’t appear to be any real difference between the fructose you get from sugarcane, sugar beets, or corn - the only difference are the impurities that are left in the mix after the refining steps.

So… maybe just thrust without actual reaction mass, or maybe a warp bubble itself: the EM Drive being experimented on by both NASA and the Chinese.

In brief, an organization out of JSC called NASA Eagleworks (a play on the old “Skunkworks”, I presume) has been doing some work with using electromagnetic “cavities” in the microwave spectrum that might be able to generate thrust directly from electrical impulses without actually expelling any reaction mass (matter, photons, etc.). The work was promising, but the results were a little flaky and it wasn’t clear if the results were from actually pushing against the molecules in the air thermally or not.

However, the other day Eagleworks announced on a forum that they had confirmed their results in a hard vacuum and in a Faraday cage, which eliminates the possibility of the thrust being generated by thermal convection.

It’s early days and they apparently don’t even have enough to publish a paper on, but the possibilities are beyond gargantuan - if you have power, you can accelerate. This would mean that station-keeping in orbit would be a trivial exercise within a couple years and manned missions to other planets in our solar system would be order of magnitudes easier.

But as interesting as this is, there are some experiments that show that the lasers being fired into the resonance chamber may actually move faster than light speed… which of course just throws a good hunk of known science out the window. Now, obviously there have been similar claims made before and all of them have been discounted with more experimentation, so a vast amount of skepticism is necessary. Luckily the NASA guys are coming from that same position:

We KNOW that this experiment is producing results that contradict hundreds of years of other data, although that data was collected under different circumstances with different characteristics.

We KNOW that thrust is being measured, and that it is beyond the range of “noise”, and that it is directional according to the device, but we do not know if the cause is thrust actually being generated, or some other factor which makes it appear that way.

We KNOW that Fetta’s explanation for the Cannae Drive did not pass the “null test”, making it extremely unlikely that his explanation is correct. We also KNOW that Shawyer’s explanation for the EmDrive involve physics that won’t actually be directly tested with this device, and so even a positive result doesn’t necessarily vindicate his explanation.

We KNOW that it’s very likely that the results are spurious, and that is why we are dedicating so few resources to the tests that the team didn’t even have vacuum rated capacitors for over six months. But we also KNOW that a positive result, however unlikely, would be a world changing discovery, and so the possible reward is great, while the extremely limited resources we are committing to the project give us little risk.

And finally, we KNOW that the teams involved at the moment are well educated, well trained, experienced researchers dedicated to figuring out what is true, not what people wish was true, and so we should have little reason to criticize the researchers personally for their involvement in such a project.

All of the stuff we know has come out without any results being published, because all the researchers involved, in the US and in China, are committed to doing a thorough job before drawing final conclusions. When you get a peek behind the curtain, science looks incredibly messy, but the result is a better understanding of our Universe, and that’s always worth it no matter how these tests pan out.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: Google Workspace Updates: New community features for Google Chat and an update on Currents

Which brings me back to my original statement that the work hasn’t been submitted to peer review. Much of it is hearsay based on discussion groups. While I’ve tried to present an even-handed summary, all of this should be read with an extremely skeptical eye. Both the EM drive and Cannae drive fans are claiming a violation of basic physics. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the threshold of evidence hasn’t remotely been reached yet. Is it interesting? Sure. Is it valid? We have no idea (but lots of reasons to doubt), and until formal evidence is submitted to peer review there is no reason to assume it’s real.

Wendelius

All very interesting indeed, thanks guys (and thanks scientists!).

We will know it is real when the Vulcans contact us.

Yeah, sure, “Vulcans”.

‘Memory alloy bounces back into shape 10 million times’: