Posts Tagged ‘science’

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TED talks in his sleep

December 7, 2012

You may have heard of TED talks. They are a really good platform for scientists and other specialists to put over their research, especially if it’s groundbreaking. It proved so popular that TED branched out to regional talks, put on around the world and hosted by local institutions, who were given the ability to book the best and brightest in their fields from their local area, under the banner of TEDx. This is where things started falling apart.
Once the vetting was out of the primary organizer’s hands, pseudoscience started creeping in, and it became so bad that people started complaining. I would love to give examples, but unfortunately, I live in the UK and our libel laws tend to beggar people, even if they’re proved right. The majority of the talks were still massively informative, such as Sir Roger Penrose’s cosmology talk (and this talk by my old boss) at TEDxWarwick, but the situation became so bad, that the people at TED have had to produce some new guidelines.
“Excellent!” I hear you cry, and I agreed until I got to this line, about things to watch out for: “The neuroscience of [fill in the blank]”, at which point I became filled with righteous indignation, being a neuroscience bod myself(albeit a mathematical one). Then I typed “The neuroscience of” into Google. By a few pages in, I found myself in complete agreement with the new guidelines. Neuroscience explains a lot of things about physiological responses, but the level of extrapolation required for some of those results, along with a truckload of cognitive dissonance, did wonders for worsening my migraine.
Hopefully this will bring a new era for TEDx talks that echoes the joy of discovery that came with the original launch of TED.

Thanks to Ben Goldacre’s Twitter feed for this news.

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Curiouser and curiouser

December 3, 2012

So, we finally had the Curiosity rover talk at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, where they outlined what had been found, as I talked about here, and the update here. There were some interesting insights, not least that Martian soil contains water with a very high percentage of deuterium(“heavy” hydrogen, which with oxygen makes “heavy water”), which is hydrogen with a neutron as well a proton in its nucleus (normal hydrogen just has a proton).

Are those some rocks I see before me?

Curiosity Rover having a look at some rocks.(Artist’s impression – Credit: NASA)

Deuterium is quite useful as a neutron moderator in nuclear fission reactors, but if we can get nuclear fusion off the ground, it would become far more useful, as it can be used as fuel for both deuterium-tritium fusion and deuterium-deuterium fusion (you can make tritium from heavy water too).
The other news from that talk was that some carbon-chlorine compounds(the slide at 21 mins 17 secs in the talk linked above) were found, which are, strictly speaking organic molecules. The reason NASA are not confirming whether the organic molecules are from Mars is because they’re not quite sure where the carbon came from – was it native to Martian soil, did it come from meteorites or some other form of contamination? This is why they were being rather cagey about their find.
As I’ve said before, this is just the beginning of Curiosity’s mission, so hopefully we’ll get a clearer picture in the days to come.

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It’s life, pretty much as we know it

November 28, 2012

The results have come in, and life has been found under Lake Vida in Antarctica. Carbon isotope measurements of the surrounding ice show that the life has been separated from the atmosphere and light for around 2,800 years.
Whilst other extremeophiles have been found in places like geothermal vents, at least their means of sustenance is pretty well understood. Lake Vida is very salty and cold, so it’s not clear how they have survived, although they could have gone into a form of suspended animation over the last three millenia. They do look quite chipper for having a snooze, though.
This discovery does, however, expand our understanding of under what conditions life can survive. This comes on the heels of the widening of the Goldilocks Zone – the distance from the sun which would support the kind of life found on Earth. Hopefully, this means that life throughout the universe is more common than once thought, which in turn could bring back a sense of adventure in our exploration of our little bit of space.
The paper is here.

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