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Get ready to re-think your ideas of reality. Join UCSD physicist Kim Griest as he takes you on a fascinating excursion, addressing some of the massive efforts and tantalizing bits of evidence which suggest that what goes on in empty space determines the properties of the three-dimensional existence we know and love, and discusses how that reality may be but the wiggling of strings from other dimensions.
Related: Higgs – Looking for Signs of Dark Matter Over Antarctica – Feynman “is a second Dirac, only this time human”
Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest – and most immature – in their kindergarten class, according to new research by , Todd Elder, a Michigan State University economist.
These children are significantly more likely than their older classmates to be prescribed behavior-modifying stimulants such as Ritalin, said Todd Elder, whose study will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Health Economics (closed science, unfortunately). Michigan State should stop funding closed journals with free content – other schools have decided to put science first, before supporting a few outdated business models of select journals.
Such inappropriate treatment is particularly worrisome because of the unknown impacts of long-term stimulant use on children’s health, Elder said. It also wastes an estimated $320 million-$500 million a year on unnecessary medication – some $80 million-$90 million of it paid by Medicaid, he said.
ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder for kids in the United States, with at least 4.5 million diagnoses among children under age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The youngest kindergartners were 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest children in the same grade. Similarly, when that group of classmates reached the fifth and eighth grades, the youngest were more than twice as likely to be prescribed stimulants.
Overall, the study found that about 20 percent – or 900,000 – of the 4.5 million children currently identified as having ADHD likely have been misdiagnosed.
Related: Lifestyle Drugs and Risk – Long Term ADHD Drug Benefits Questioned – Merck and Elsevier Publish Phony Peer-Review Journal
On July 23, 2010, a severe thunderstorm struck Vivian, South Dakota, USA, a quiet rural community of less than 200. While there was nothing unusual about a violent summer storm, the softball (and larger)-sized hail that accompanied it was extraordinary. In fact, it led to the discovery of the largest hailstone ever recorded in the United States.
Once the thunderstorm passed, Vivian resident Les Scott ventured outside to see if there was any damage as a result of the storm. He was surprised to see a tremendous number of large hailstones on the ground, including one about the size of a volleyball. Scott gathered up that stone, along with a few smaller ones, and placed them in his freezer.
How does hail form?
According to NOAA, the Kansas City hail storm on April 10, 2001 was the costliest hail storm in the U.S. which caused damages of an estimated $2 billion.
Related: 500 Year Floods – Clouds Alive With Bacteria – Rare “Rainbow” Over Idaho – Why is it Colder at Higher Elevations?
Ants really are amazing. The internet makes it easy to learn about these creatures. My Dad found them fascinating and I picked up that view. I had a flying one, flying around my house yesterday.
“Ants: The Invisible Majority” including Dr. Brian Fisher, chairman of the Department of Entomology at the Cal Academy of Sciences looking for ants in San Francisco. He created AntWeb, an online resource. The video discusses the Argentine Ant super colonies.
Related: Ants Counting Their Steps – E.O. Wilson: Lord of the Ants – Symbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria
Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?
And this is the optimistic view – based on the assumption that drug companies can and will get moving on discovering new antibiotics to throw at the bacterial enemy. Since the 1990s, when pharma found itself twisting and turning down blind alleys, it has not shown a great deal of enthusiasm for difficult antibiotic research. And besides, because, unlike with heart medicines, people take the drugs for a week rather than life, and because resistance means the drugs become useless after a while, there is just not much money in it.
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“The emergence of antibiotic resistance is the most eloquent example of Darwin’s principle of evolution that there ever was,” says Livermore. “It is a war of attrition. It is naive to think we can win.”
I have been writing about the huge risks we are talking with our future for years. The careless misuse of antibiotics is very costly (in human lives, in the future). Bacteria pose great risks to us. We need to take antibiotics to fight serious threats. The misuse of antibiotics by doctors, patients, agri-business… is the problem. And we are all living a much riskier future because far to little is being done to reduce the misuse of antibiotics.
More and more antibiotic treatments are losing effectiveness as bacteria evolve resistance. The evolution is accelerated by misuse. This costs lives today, but is likely to costs many thousands and hundreds of thousands and possible more in the next 50 years.
The NDM-1-producing bacteria were highly resistant to all antibiotics except tigecycline and colistin. In some cases, isolates were resistant to all antibiotics. The emergence of NDM-1 positive bacteria is potentially a serious global public health problem as there are few new anti-Gram-negative antibiotics in development and none that are effective against NDM-1.
Related: Antibiotics Breed Superbugs Faster Than Expected – Antibiotics Too Often Prescribed for Sinus Woes – Bacteria Race Ahead of Drugs – FDA May Make Decision That Will Speed Antibiotic Drug Resistance – Raised Without Antibiotics – Waste Treatment Plants Result in Super Bacteria – How Bleach Kills Bacteria – CDC Urges Increased Effort to Reduce Drug-Resistant Infections
Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover
3 bobcat kittens we rescued by Big Cat rescue.
Introductions like these can be very scary because the mother cat can be overly protective of her own kittens and fatally strike out at the new comers. President, Jamie Veronica, has had a considerable amount of experience in this area though and had taken every precaution to make sure it went as well as it possibly could. Bobbi turned out to be a dream come true for three little orphaned bobcats though. She immediately pulled them in close to nurse and began to bathe them. The little bobcat babies were so startled that they hissed at her!
She ignored their resistance and just kept on loving on them. Once they figured out that this strange smelling “bobcat” mom had the real deal to offer at her breasts, they were in love too.
Related: Friday Cat Fun #12: Cat and Puppies – Treadmill Cats – Mother Cat with Bunny and Kittens
Watch this fun webcast on how to make a rocket.
Related: Home Engineering: Bird Feeder That Automatically Takes Photos When Birds Feed – Lego Autopilot Project Update – Young Engineers Build Bridges with Spaghetti – Home Engineering: Building a Hovercraft
Summer engineering program fosters genuine interest for some students
Related: Infinity Project: Engineering Education for Today’s Classroom – Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning – Hands-on Engineering Education – Lego Learning
A new the theory does away with the big bang and dark energy by having space, time and energy and no beginning and no ending.
Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe
Shu’s idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant.
So as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts. This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction. In fact, Shu shows that singularities cannot exist in this cosmos.
It’s easy to dismiss this idea as just another amusing and unrealistic model dreamed up by those whacky comsologists.
That is until you look at the predictions it makes. During a period of expansion, an observer in this universe would see an odd kind of change in the red-shift of bright objects such as Type-I supernovas, as they accelerate away. It turns out, says Shu, that his data exactly matches the observations that astronomers have made on Earth.
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That’s not to say Shu’s theory is perfect. Far from it. One of the biggest problems he faces is explaining the existence and structure of the cosmic microwave background, something that many astrophysicists believe to be the the strongest evidence that the Big Bang really did happen. The CMB, they say, is the echo of the Big bang.
How it might arise in Shu’s cosmology isn’t yet clear but I imagine he’s working on it.
Science is useful in letting us understand the world better. But it also is an evolving understanding as we learn more and search for answers to more questions. Many attempts to put forth new ideas and have them gain acceptance are made. Most fail to gain traction. But even many of the ideas that are not accepted are interesting.
Read Cosmological Models with No Big Bang by Wun-Yi Shu (on the wonderful open access arXiv).
Related: Why Wasn’t the Earth Covered in Ice 4 Billion Years Ago, When the Sun was Dimmer – Why do we Need Dark Energy to Explain the Observable Universe? – The State of Physics
With a little help from your friends you can live longer
Being lonely and isolated was as bad for a person’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic. It was as harmful as not exercising and twice as bad for the health as being obese.
Open access paper: Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review.
Related: How to build and maintain essential relationships – CDC Urges Reduction in Salt Intake to Save Hundreds of Thousands of Lives – Why People Often Get Sicker When They’re Stressed
Monarch butterflies – renowned for their lengthy annual migration to and from Mexico – complete an even more spectacular journey home than previously thought.
New research from the University of Guelph reveals that some North American monarchs born in the Midwest and Great Lakes fly directly east over the Appalachians and settle along the eastern seaboard. Previously, scientists believed the majority of monarchs migrated north directly from the Gulf Coast.
Unfortunately the press release doesn’t provide a link to the study – maybe it is not open science. Often organization focused on closed science don’t do well providing web links (though even open science organizations fall down on this more than they should).
“It solves the long-standing mystery of why monarchs always show up later on the east coast compared to the interior,” he said. “Importantly, it means that the viability of east coast populations is highly dependent upon productivity on the other side of the mountains.”
Monarchs travel thousands of kilometres each year from wintering sites in central Mexico back to North America’s eastern coast, a journey that requires multiple generations (in the same year) produced at various breeding regions.
Biologists had suspected that monarchs fly back from Mexico west-to-east over the Appalachians, but no evidence existed to support the theory. “Ours is the first proof of longitudinal migration,” Miller said.
For the study, the researchers collected 90 monarch samples from 17 sites between Maine and Virginia in June and July of 2009. They also collected 180 samples of milkweed (the only plant monarch larvae can eat) from 36 sites along the eastern coast between May and July of that year.
They then used hydrogen and carbon isotope measurements to determine when and where the monarchs were born. Isotope values in milkweed vary longitudinally and can be measured in monarch wings, Miller said. The researchers discovered that 88 per cent of the monarchs sampled originated in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions.
“This means that the recolonization of the east coast is by second-generation monarchs that hatched around the Great Lakes and then migrated eastward over the Appalachians,” Miller said. “We must target the Great Lakes region to conserve the east coast monarch populations.”
Full press release
Related: Monarch Butterfly Migration – Monarch Travels – Backyard Scientists Aid Research – Two Butterfly Species Evolved Into Third
Google Faculty Research Awards, support full-time faculty pursuing research. The most recent quarterly funding totals over $4 million in 75 awards across 18 different areas. The areas that received the highest level of funding for this round were systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, multimedia and security. In this round, 26 percent of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.
Some examples
Smart companies realize great research is done in universities that should be adlopted by companies. Many companies listen to fools that talk of academic research as not “real world.” Companies like Google do well for many reasons but one is they pay more attention to scientific research than wall street research. More companies would benefit from adopting this leadership style from Google. Google also continues to fund and support research.
Related: posts on science and engineering funding – Energy Secretary Steve Chu Speaks On Funding Science Research (with Google CEO) – Google.org Invests $10 million in Geothermal Energy – Larry Page and Sergey Brin Interview
Robocup 2010 took place in Singapore and 2 German team faced each other in the finals. Robocup is an international research and education initiative. RoboCupRescue is a related effort to develop rescue robots for hostile environments.
Related: RoboCup 2008: Robot Football (Soccer) – Robot Playing Table Tennis – Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair
The hole in the wall experiments are exactly the kind of thing I love to lean about. I wrote about them in 2006, what kids can learn.
Research finding from the Hole in the Wall foundation:
I believe traditional education is helpful. I believe people are “wired” to learn. They want to learn. We need to create environments that let them learn. We need to avoid crushing the desire to learn (stop de-motivating people).
If you want to get right to talking about the hole in the wall experiments, skip to the 8 minute mark.
Related: Providing Computer to Remote Students in Nepal – Teaching Through Tinkering – Kids Need Adventurous Play – Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids
Listen to Bug Highway In The Sky
Related: Monarch Butterfly Migration – Guadalupe Mountains National Park: Ladybug City – Leaf-footed Bug
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