Sea lice mob devours pig from the inside out

Finding a dead body in the ocean may be gruesome, but for forensic scientists it can also be perplexing. Although the way a body decomposes on land is well understood, little is known about how human remains fare underwater.

Now a pioneering experiment lead by forensic scientist Gail Anderson from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, is using dead pigs as a model for humans to gain insight. In this video, a pig carcass is tracked as it turns to bones in the ocean, capturing the scavengers that visit the body. Sharks are unable to tuck in since it's enclosed, giving sea lice exclusive access to the remains. They enter orifices in droves to feast on the animal from the inside out and congregate on the cage bars to prevent other arthropods, like shrimp, from getting a bite. "By the end of the fourth day, the sea lice had left and the pigs were reduced to bones," says Anderson.

Shrimp arrive to pick at the skeleton, eventually removing all the cartilage. The team then recovered the bones which, strangely, were jet black for a period of 48 hours. "This is something that has never been seen before," says Lynne Bell, a member of the team. "Colleagues are working to identify the micro-organisms collected close to the bone, which may help to identify the unique chemistry of the change."

Stick around till the end for a surprise visitor. :)

Interested in the science behind decay? Check this out;
After Life: The Science of Decay

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/nstv/2012/10/sea-lice-mob-devours-pig-from-the-inside-out.html

Let's crack open a bottle

"A popular party trick is to fill a glass bottle with water and hit the top of the bottle with an open hand, causing the bottom of the bottle to break open. We investigate the source of the catastrophic cracking through the use of high-speed video and an accelerometer attached to the bottom of a glass bottle.

Upon closer inspection, it is obvious that the acceleration caused by hitting the top of the bottle is followed by the formation of bubbles near the bottom. The nearly instantaneous acceleration creates an area of low pressure on the bottom of the bottle where cavitation bubbles form. Moments later, the cavitation bubbles collapse at roughly 10 times the speed of formation, causing the bottle to break. The accelerometer data shows that the bottle is broken after the bubbles collapse and that the magnitude of the bubble collapse is greater than the initial impact. The fluid dynamics video highlights that this trick will not work if the bottle is empty nor if it is filled with a carbonated fluid because the vapor bubbles fill with the CO2 dissolved in the liquid, preventing the bubbles from collapsing.

A modified cavitation number, including the acceleration of the fluid (a), vapor pressure (Pv), and depth of the fluid column (h), is derived to determine when cavity inception occurs such that Ca =(Patm − Pv)/(ρh(a − g)). Through experimentation, visible cavitation bubbles form when Ca ≤ 0.5. The experiments, based on the modified cavitation number, reveal that the easiest way to break a glass bottle with your bare hands is to fill it with a non-carbonated, high vapor pressure fluid, and strike it hard."

We are the borrowers

For two months in summer 2011, a glass box containing a typical kitchen and garden was left to rot in full public view within Edinburgh Zoo. In this resulting documentary, presenter Dr George McGavin and his team use time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old.

Lots of jaw dropping footage! They even track individual nitrogen atoms as they get passed along between organisms!

"When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. And so we are all connnected in the great Circle of Life." -Mufasa, The Lion King

Saving the Orange

Citrus greening is a bacterial disease that is devastating orange groves world-wide. The only hope is to engineer a resistant plant by genetic modification. But will the consumer accept this?

"Before humans were involved, corn was a wild grass, tomatoes were tiny, carrots were only rarely orange and dairy cows produced little milk." Did you know that "the vast majority of oranges in commercial groves are the product of a type of genetic merging that predates the Romans, in which a slender shoot of a favored fruit variety is grafted onto the sturdier roots of other species: lemon, for instance, or sour orange. And a seedless midseason orange recently adopted by Florida growers emerged after breeders bombarded a seedy variety with radiation to disrupt its DNA.."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/28/science/a-race-to-save-the-orange-by-altering-its-dna.html

Popular science; the best of the best

After having devoured truckloads of books, I am now finding it increasingly difficult to score new reading material. Not that there's a shortage of books out there, it's just that I've primarily been reading the well known stuff and only now have to start looking at the more obscure work. I am hoping you guys (and girls) can help me out here by pointing me towards some new books and writers who might not be well known but should be.

I've done my homework, I've scoured the internet for bestsellers, poll winners, and suggestions from famous scientists and in doing so I've managed to uncover a few more guaranteed good ones but not nearly enough to keep me busy for the many decades I plan to spend on this lovely planet of ours. Because I've been reading the well known stuff, my digital excavation work has uncovered a list that looks insanely similar to my bookshelf which isn't really all that useful to me. Maybe it is to you? I've compiled this list from my favorites and my digging around so you can rest assured, I as well as the entire internet vouch for the awesomeness of every single book on this list.

The list is somewhat skewed towards physics but that's not my doing as there really are way more popular science books being written on physics than on just about anything else. High energy physics and cosmology seem to be especially popular while condensed matter physics gets almost no love at all.

I call upon my fellow geeks to help out a reader in need. I would love to hear about your suggestions and particular personal favorites. Personally I hope to pick up some new books that deal with non physics related fields, books that unravel the history of specific fields of science, biographies of famous scientist that focus in detail on how they arrived at their finds, ... anything really. If it's good, I want to know about it! :)

[PHYSICS & COSMOLOGY]
Alan Guth - The Inflationary Universe
Alan Holden - The Nature of Solids
Albert Einstein - Relativity
Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw - The Quantum Universe
Brian Greene - The Elegant Universe
Brian Greene - The Fabric of the Cosmos
Charles Seife - Alpha & Omega
Charles Seife - Sun in a Bottle
Dave Goldberg - The Universe in the Rearview Mirror
David Bodanis - E=mc²
George Gamow - One Two Three... Infinity
John Gribbin - In Search of Schrödinger's Cat
John Gribbin - Schrödinger's Kittens
Kip Thorne - Black Holes & Time Warps
Leonard Susskind - The Black Hole War
Leonard Susskind - Quantum Mechanics
Lee Smolin - Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Lee Smolin - The Trouble with Physics
Marcus Chown - The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead
Marcus Chown - We Need to Talk about Kelvin
Marcus Chown - Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You
Michio Kaku - Hyperspace
Manjit Kumar - Quantum
Martin Rees - Just Six Numbers
Richard Feynman - QED
Richard Feynman - Six Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - Six Not So Easy Pieces
Richard Feynman - The Character of Physical Law
Richard Panek - The 4% Universe
Roger Penrose - Road to Reality (pop science... lol :p)
Simong Singh - Big Bang
Stephen Hawking - A Brief History of Time
Stephen Hawking - The Universe in a Nutshell
Walter Lewin - For the Love of Physics

[CHEMISTRY]
John Emsley - Nature's Building Blocks
Sam Kean - The Disappearing Spoon
Theodore Gray - The Elements

[BIOLOGY]
Anthony Serafini - The Epic History of Biology
Armand Marie Leroi - Mutants
Aubrey de Grey - Ending Aging
Carl Zimmer - A Planet of Viruses
Carl Zimmer - Microcosm
Carl Zimmer - Parasite Rex
Craig Venter - Life at the Speed of Light
George Church - Regenesis
Jerry Coyne - Why Evolution is True
Mary Roach - Gulp
Matt Ridley - Genome
Matt Ridley - Nature via Nurture
Matt Ridley - The Red Queen
Neil Shubin - Your Inner Fish
Nessa Carey - The Epigenetics Revolution
Paul De Kruif - Microbehunters
Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
Rebecca Skloot - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Stephen Jay Gould - Structure of Evolutionary Theory
Stephen Jay Gould - Wonderful Life
Siddhartha Mukherjee - The Emperor of all Maladies

[GEOLOGY]
Ted Nield - Supercontinent
Marcia Bjornerud - Reading the Rocks

[INFORMATION & COMPUTATION]
Charles Seife - Decoding the Universe
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee - Race Against Machine
James Barrat - Our Final Invention
James Gleick - The Information
Roger Penrose - The Emperor's New Mind

[MATH]
Benoît Mandelbrot - The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Charles Seife - Zero
Eli Maor - e: the story of a number
James Gleick - Chaos
Marcus Du Sautoy - The Music of the Primes
Petr Beckmann - A History of Pi
Paul J. Nahin - An Imaginary Tale
Simon Singh - Fermat's Enigma
William Dunham - Journey Through Genius

[NEUROSCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY]
Cordelia Fine - Delusions of Gender
Cordelia Fine - A Mind of its Own
Daniel Dennett - Consciousness Explained
Daniel Dennett - Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Daniel Dennett - Freedom Evolves
Daniel Dennett & Douglas Hofstadter - The Mind's I
Daniel Kahneman - Thinking, Fast and Slow
David Eagleman - Incognito
Douglas Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach
Douglas Hofstadter - I Am a Strange Loop
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Guy Deutscher - Through the Language Glass
Oliver Sacks - An Anthropologist on Mars
Oliver Sacks - The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat
Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate
Steven Pinker - The Stuff of Thought
Steven Pinker - The Language Instinct
V.S. Ramachandran - The Tell-Tale Brain
V.S. Ramachandran - Phantoms in the Brain

[BIOGRAPHIES]
Andrew Robinson - The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Young)
Barbara Goldsmith - Obsessive Genius (Curie)
Basil Mahon - The Man Who Changed Everything (Maxwell)
Graham Farmelo - The Strangest Man (Dirac)
John Derbyshire - Prime Obsession (Riemann)
Paul Hoffman - The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Erdos)

[MIXED]
Alvin Toffler - Future Shock
Alvin Toffler - The Third Wave
Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything
Carl Sagan - Cosmos
Carl Sagan - Demon-Haunted World
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
David Deutsch - The Beginning of Infinity
David Deutsch - The Fabric of Reality
Daniel Boorstin - The Discoverers
Eric Drexler - Engines of Creation
Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life?
Edge - This Will Change Everything
Edge - This Explains Everything
Edge - This Will Make You Smarter
Edge - What Is Your Dangerous Idea?
Edge - What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
Edge - What Should We Be Worried About?
Edge - What We Believe but Cannot Prove
Jared Diamond - Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jon Gertner - The Idea Factory (Bell Labs)
John Horner - Digging Dinosaurs
Martin Ford - The Lights in the Tunnel
Michael Hiltzik - Dealers of Lightning (Xerox Parc)
Mary Roach - Packing for Mars
Mary Roach - Stiff
Nigel Calder - Magic Universe
Ray Kurzweil - The Singularity is Near
Richard Feynman - Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard Holmes - The Age of Wonder
Robert Bakker - The Great Dinosaur Debate
Richard Rhodes - The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Stephen Jay Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
Timothy Ferris - Coming of Age in the Milky Way
Thomas Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions

NASA's Huge Nuclear Powered Mars Rover and its bag of tricks

The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) mission with the aim to land and operate a rover named Curiosity on the surface of Mars. The MSL is scheduled to launch between November 25 and December 18, 2011 and to land on Mars at Gale Crater between August 6 and August 20, 2012.

MastCam: HD video (This is going to be a real treat!)
Hand Lens Imager: Color pictures of features as tiny as 12.5 microns
SAM: A mass spectrometer, a gas chromatograph and a laser spectrometer.
MARDI: Camera located on Curiosity's main body, will record video of the rover's descent.
CheMin: Identifies different types of minerals.
ChemCam: Fires a laser at Martian rocks and analyze the composition of the vaporized bits.
APX: Shoots out X-rays and helium nuclei to identify elements.
DAN: Fires beams of neutrons at the ground in search of ice and water-logged minerals.
RAD: Helps prepare for future human exploration of Mars. The instrument will measure and identify high-energy radiation of all types on the Red Planet, from fast-moving protons to gamma rays.
REMS: Measures atmospheric pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, air temperature, ground temperature and ultraviolet radiation.
MEDLI: Measures the temperatures and pressures the heat shield experiences as the MSL spacecraft streaks through the Martian sky. (installed on the shield and not on the rover)

http://www.space.com/13689-nasa-amazing-mars-rover-curiosity-science.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Science_Laboratory

Is quantum thinking blocking roads to superdeterminism?

Gerard 't Hooft wants to make things simpler by thinking harder. He thinks Einstein might still have been right when he said that God does not throw dice. 'T Hooft dares to entertain the rather eccentric thought that the uncertainty inherent to quantum mechanics might actually not be a fundamental part of reality but could instead be an artifact that's only currently unpredictable because the theory is incomplete. He posits that the current formulation of quantum mechanics is statistical because it only offers a glimpse of something even deeper.

For many this claim will make their eyes roll because conventional wisdom is clear on the fact that the uncertainty principle is a key cornerstone on which quantum mechanics is built. You might rightfully ask whether we didn't already resolve this debate 80 years ago or if the seminal theorem developed by John Bell in the 60s and subsequent experiments didn't already close the door on local realism and hidden variables. After all, most Physicists are of the opinion that it has been conclusively demonstrated that entanglement can't be explained by any deeper level of physics. Still, even though the vast majority would respond with a definitive yes to being asked whether uncertainty is fundamental, there are some oddballs who will respond with "sort of" or worse, they might slap you in the face with "maybe", perhaps even "maybe not".

You might think the people who aren't certain about uncertainty would be crackpots with no degree whatsoever but actually... Although 't Hooft certainly is a crackpot ;), he also happens to have won a nobel prize in physics for his contribution in assembling the Standard Model of particle physics and he questions the conventional approach. In the past decade he has become more verbal in his opposition and continues to throw his weight behind the side that errs on cautions and prefers to go with "maybe".

Some excerpts from this brain wrecking interview;

"When I first chatted with ’t Hooft for an article eight years ago, he told me he wasn’t sure how to evade Bell’s reasoning. Since then, he has sought to jump through a loophole known as superdeterminism. It’s a weird and downright disturbing idea.

The sober way to put it is that physicists are never able to conduct a fully controlled experiment, since the experimental setup they choose is not strictly independent of the processes that created the particles. Even if the experimentalists live on Earth and the particles come from quasars billions of light-years away, they share a common past in the very early universe. Their subtle interdependence creates a selection bias, misleading physicists into thinking that no deeper level of physics could explain the particle coordination, when in fact it could.

The dramatic version is that free will is an illusion. I think you have to assume that Bob has made a decision not out of free will, but by some predetermined correlation. You can do the exercise. You can ask about a source emitting photons and the ancestors of Alice and Bob. While the source emits photons, Alice and Bob have not yet been born. They are many, many light-years away from each other. Those ancestors —the atoms in them— eventually cause Alice and Bob to make their decisions. Those atoms are correlated with the atoms of the source. Everything is correlated with everything else—not a little bit, but very, very strongly.

In quantum physics, there’s a notion of counterfactual measurement. You measure what happens if I put the polarizer this way, and then you ask, what if I had it that way? In my opinion, that is basically illegal. There’s only one thing you can measure.

Quantum mechanics is just a tool—and an extremely useful tool. That’s the way I think quantum mechanics has to be looked at. The theory is that you have something classical underlying quantum mechanics, obeying totally classical laws of nature except that ordinary classical theories are based on the real numbers. I’m not excluding real numbers as a good basis for a classical theory, but I’m also considering other options, such as the integers or, even better, numbers that form a finite set. I think I need finiteness at all levels of an ultimate theory.

This is motivated by Planckian discreteness. At the Planck scale, it’s likely that you only deal with Boolean variables and integers, because that’s what the holographic principle of black holes seems to be telling us—that the amount of information on the black hole horizon is actually finite."


http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2013/10/07/does-some-deeper-level-of-physics-underlie-quantum-mechanics-an-interview-with-nobelist-gerard-t-hooft/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell's_theorem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604008
http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.4926

Fantastic Voyage: Way out there, what's inside matter(s).

Last night I was casually strolling around the internet, wasting time as usual, until suddenly I stumbled upon this rather excellent Sci-Fi Science game. In Zoom you take on the role of an agent sent out on a mission into deep space for a large corporation that operates under the name Xenofusion. A few days ago one of their mining vessels, the Polaris, sent out a distress signal but shortly after it went dead... It does not respond to any calls so now it's up to you to find out what happened.

It's not very long, it can be finished in about half an hour. It does take about 5 minutes or so to get going but once you receive the NanoZoom™, an insanely powerful microscope and manipulator that allows you to see and work with individual atoms, things really pick up. If you've got kids, I think they are likely to love it, but I dare say that, as you will be busy repairing all sorts of mechanical and even biological damage at the atomic, molecular and cellular level, even most adults might just learn a thing or two as well!

+ScienceSunday curator +Rajini Rao, whose lab focuses on intracellular ion transport, will be glad to hear that this game includes the operation of a Sodium-potassium pump where you have to move around ions to build up the transmembrane potential! You'll also find out how a laser works when you have to manually excite gas atoms using photons to build up a beam and you'll even be tasked with arranging various types of electromagnetic radiation from high to low frequency during which you'll get to see Messier 74, a spiral galaxy, in all its glory. And that's not even half of it!

The game does a pretty good job at explaining what's going on during various interesting processes but you should probably check out the dedicated companion site that takes a deeper look at the science on display in the game. http://splash.abc.net.au/web/zoom/science
As a bonus, the explanations come in a delicious Aussie accent. :p

Play the game here:
http://splash.abc.net.au/res/zoom/game/main.html

Note that you can even use this game in the classroom!
http://splash.abc.net.au/web/zoom/learning

Picture; Damián Ortega - Controller of the Universe

New Horizons to expand yours

Last year I shared a list featuring the best documentaries of all time; http://wondreal.blogspot.be/2016/02/in-memory-of-merrin-education-in-p2p.html . If you take a look you might notice that Horizon episodes are very well represented. Just what exactly is Horizon? Oh, only one of the longest running shows ever. The first episode, "The World of Buckminster Fuller", was aired in 1964 and now, 50 years later, they are still going strong! If you ever have 50 minutes to kill, just type BBC horizon into youtube and before you know it you'll be wading knee deep through delicious investigative science reporting.

"The aim of Horizon is to provide a platform from which some of the world's greatest scientists and philosophers can communicate their curiosity, observations and reflections, and infuse into our common knowledge their changing views of the universe."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Horizon_episodes

As machines get smarter, evidence grows that they learn like us

It's a long read (5 pages) but if you are interested in the history and future of neural networks and machine intelligence it's most definitely worth your time. https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20130723-as-machines-get-smarter-evidence-they-learn-like-us/ - You can find a collection of interesting bits from the article below but you might want to check it out in full.

Studies suggest that computer models called neural networks may learn to recognize patterns in data using the same algorithms as the human brain.

One of the most promising of these algorithms, the Boltzmann machine, bears the name of 19th century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who developed the branch of physics dealing with large numbers of particles, known as statistical mechanics. Boltzmann discovered an equation giving the probability of a gas of molecules having a particular energy when it reaches equilibrium. Replace molecules with neurons, and the Boltzmann machine, as it fires, converges on exactly the same equation.

Each virtual synapse tracks both sets of statistics. If the neurons it connects fire in close sequence more frequently when driven by data than when they are firing randomly, the weight of the synapse is increased by an amount proportional to the difference. But if two neurons more often fire together during random firing than data-driven firing, the synapse connecting them is too thick and consequently is weakened.

Neural networks have recently hit their stride thanks to Hinton’s layer-by-layer training regimen, the use of high-speed computer chips called graphical processing units, and an explosive rise in the number of images and recorded speech available to be used for training. The networks can now correctly recognize about 88 percent of the words spoken in normal, human, English-language conversations, compared with about 96 percent for an average human listener. They can identify cars and thousands of other objects in images with similar accuracy and in the past three years have come to dominate machine learning competitions.

Adult brains are less malleable than juvenile ones, much as a Boltzmann machine trained with 100,000 car images won’t change much upon seeing another: Its synapses already have the correct weights to categorize a car. And yet, learning never ends. New information can still be integrated into the structure of both brains and Boltzmann machines.

studies of brain activity during sleep have provided some of the first direct evidence that the brain employs a Boltzmann-like learning algorithm in order to integrate new information and memories into its structure. Neuroscientists have long known that sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation, helping to integrate newly learned information. In 1995, Hinton and colleagues proposed that sleep serves the same function as the baseline component of the algorithm, the rate of neural activity in the absence of input.

The easiest way for the brain to run the Boltzmann algorithm, he said, is to switch from beefing synapses up during the day to whittling them down during the night. Giulio Tononi, head of the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has found that gene expression inside synapses changes in a way that supports this hypothesis: Genes involved in synaptic growth are more active during the day, and those involved in synaptic pruning are more active during sleep.

A Boltzmann-like algorithm may be only one of many that the brain employs to tweak its synapses. In the 1990s, several independent groups developed a theoretical model of how the visual system efficiently encodes the flood of information striking the retina. The theory held that a process similar to image compression called “sparse coding” took place in the lowest layers of the visual cortex, making later stages of the visual system more efficient.

The model’s predictions are gradually passing more and more stringent experimental tests. In a paper published in PLOS Computational Biology in May, computational neuroscientists in the United Kingdom and Australia found that when neural networks using an algorithm for sparse coding called Products of Experts, invented by Hinton in 2002, are exposed to the same abnormal visual data as live cats (for example, the cats and neural networks both see only striped images), their neurons develop almost exactly the same abnormalities.

The human brain, of course, remains much more complicated than any of the models; it is larger, denser, more efficient, more interconnected, has more complex neurons — and juggles several algorithms simultaneously. Olshausen has estimated that we understand only 15 percent of the activity in the visual cortex. Although the models are making progress, neuroscience is still “a bit like physics before Newton,” he said. Still, he is confident that the process of building on these algorithms may one day explain the ultimate riddle of the brain — how sensory data gets transformed into a subjective awareness of reality.

Compartmentalized granular gases

Devaraj van der Meer has been studying granular matter and fluid physics for over a decade and in the process, he's exposing their beauty for all to see. You can find a ton of aesthetically pleasing clips on his website; http://stilton.tnw.utwente.nl/people/devaraj/research.html

Excited granular matter is a rich pattern-forming system. The un-mixing or segregation of unlike grains under vibration and flow is a good example and one you might know from the so-called Brazil nut effect where Brazil nuts rise to the top of a packet of mixed nuts when shaken.The cause of this effect is that when shaken, granular (and some other) materials move in a circular pattern. some larger materials (Brazil nuts) get stuck while going down the circle and therefore stay on the top.

Clip below; What started out as a high-school demonstration of the equipartition of gases turned into a prime example of symmetry breaking: When a container, separated int two by a wall, is filled with glass beads and shaken mildly, the beads spontaneously cluster into one of the two compartments. This can be explained from the inelastic collisions between the particles: If one of the compartments, by chance, contains more particles, more energy is lost, particles become slower and jump less easily over the wall. Due to this snowball effect the dense compartment becomes even denser and the dilute one more dilute, until a dynamical equilibrium sets in.

Granular eruptions- Void collapse & Jet Formations - Youtube

Collapse of non-axisymmetric cavities - Youtube

Faraday, Jets, and Sand - Youtube

Leaping shampoo and the stable Kaye effect - Youtube

In memory of Merrin*: An education in P2P

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVGroup
MVGroup is a BitTorrent tracker and file sharing community that specializes in the distribution of educational media, especially documentaries. MVGroup was established in 2002 by "Merrin" and "DarkRain" (Vittorio in those days, hence MVGroup) as a DVD-ripping-and-distributing group for the eDonkey file-sharing network, and the group continues to distribute DVD rips and TV rips on both eDonkey and BitTorrent. It has continued functioning since its establishment except for a short-lived April 2008 outage caused by an error from an anti-piracy group.

On May 5, 2008, "Merrin", the co-founder of the tracker died of undisclosed long-term health problems at the age of 31. By the time of his death, MVGroup had gained over 150,000 members, and has continued to set itself apart from larger trackers, such as The Pirate Bay, by focusing on documentaries and educational material only.

In my humble opinion these are some of the best documentaries out there. If you are looking for more information on any of these you can find it at http://www.docuwiki.net. Read carefully the linked page and you'll find nirvana. ;)

Exact Science
[Physics]
Absolute Zero - BBC (series, 2 episodes)
Light Fantastic - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
Atom - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Time - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
Shock and Awe - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Everything and Nothing - BBC (series, 2 episodes)
Order and Disorder - BBC (series, 2 episodes)
Invisible Worlds - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
The Fabric of the Cosmos - PBS (series, 4 episodes)
Elegant Universe - PBS NOVA (series, 3 episodes)
Hunting the Elements - PBS NOVA
The Secret Life of Chaos - BBC
The Big Bang Machine - BBC
Feynman: Fun to Imagine - BBC
Do You Know What Time it is? - BBC Horizon
How Long is a Piece of String? - BBC Horizon
What is Reality? - BBC Horizon
What is One Degree? - BBC Horizon
To Infinity and Beyond - BBC Horizon
What Happened Before the Big Bang - BBC Horizon
What on Earth is wrong with Gravity - BBC Horizon
Is Everything we Know about the Universe Wrong? - BBC Horizon
The End of God - BBC Horizon
Parallel Universes - BBC Horizon
Can We Make a Star on Earth? - BBC Horizon
Molecules with Sunglasses - BBC Horizon
Nanotopia - BBC Horizon

[Biology]
The Shape of Life - PBS NOVA (series, 8 episodes)
Evolution - PBS NOVA (series, 7 episodes)
How to Grow a Planet - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Becoming Human - PBS NOVA (series, 3 episodes)
The Origins of Us - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Inside the Human Body (series, 4 episodes)
Into the Mind - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Superhuman - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Brain Story - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
The Brain: A Secret History - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Human Sensens - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
How to Build a Human - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
First Life - BBC (series, 2 episodes)
Wonders of Life - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
Secret Universe: The Hidden Life of the Cell - BBC (docu-film)
The Secrets of the Mind - PBS NOVA
Is Seeing Believing? - BBC Horizon
The Ghost in Your Genes - BBC Horizon
Fix Me - BBC Horizon
How Does Your Memory Work - BBC Horizon
Mad but Glad - BBC Horizon
Don't Grow Old - BBC Horizon
Are We Still Evolving? - BBC Horizon
The Secret You - BBC Horizon
The Secret Life of your Body Clock - BBC Horizon
Living Forever - BBC Horizon
The Nine Months That Made You - BBC Horizon
Why Do Viruses Kill? - BBC Horizon
Designer Babies - BBC Horizon
What Makes Us Clever? A Horizon Guide to Intelligence - BBC
Do You See What I See? - BBC Horizon
Playing God - BBC Horizon

[Geology]
Time Machine - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Earth, the Power of the Planet - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
Journeys from the Center of the Earth - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Earth Story - BBC (series, 8 episodes)
Journeys into the Ring of Fire (series, 4 episodes)
The Beauty of Maps - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
How the Earth Was Made - History Channel (series, 2 seasons)
Cloudspotting - BBC
Snowball Earth - BBC Horizon
The Core - BBC Horizon
IMAX - Journey to Amazing Caves (docu-film)

[Astronomy]
The Planets - BBC (series, 8 episodes)
Stephen Hawking's Universe - Discovery (series, 6 episodes)
Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking - Discovery (series, 3 episodes)
How the Universe Works - Discovery (series, 8 episodes)
The Universe - History Channel (series, 5 seasons)
Known Universe - NGC (series, 6 episodes)
Wonders of the Solar System - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
Wonders of the Universe - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
Space - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
The Search For Life: The Drake Equation - BBC
Titan A Place Like Home - BBC Horizon
Bye Bye Planet Pluto - BBC Horizon
The Death Star - BBC Horizon
The Hawking Paradox - BBC Horizon
Titan, A Place Like Home? - BBC Horizon
Supermassive Black Holes - BBC Horizon
Lost Horizons: The Big Bang - BBC Horizon
Most of Our Universe Is Missing - BBC Horizon
Seeing Stars - BBC Horizon
Are We Alone in the Universe? - BBC Horizon
Death Of The Universe - NGC
Origins - PBS Nova (series, 4 episodes)
Welcome To Mars - PBS Nova
Voyage To The Mystery Moon - PBS Nova
Journey to the Edge of the Universe - NGC (docu-film)
IMAX - Space Station (docu-film)
IMAX - Hubble (docu-film)

[Nature]
Private Life of Plants - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Life in the Undergrowth - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
Nature's Great Events - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Frozen Planet - BBC (series, 7 episodes)
The Blue Planet - BBC (series, 8 episodes)
Planet Earth - BBC (series, 11 episodes)
Human Planet - BBC (series, 8 episodes)
EarthFlight - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Great Barrier Reef - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Madagascar - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Galápagos - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Yellowstone - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Wild China - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Wild Pacific - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
Ganges - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Africa - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Life - BBC (series, 10 episodes)
Life on Earth - BBC (series, 13 episodes)
The Living Planet - BBC (series, 12 episodes)
The Trials of Life - BBC (series, 12 episodes)
Life in the Freezer - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
The Life of Birds - BBC (series, 10 episodes)
The Life of Mammals - BBC (series, 10 episodes)
Life in Cold Blood - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
Wild Sex - NGC (series, 6 episodes)
March of the Penguins (docu-film)
Microcosmos (docu-film)

[Mixed]
The Ascent of Man - BBC (series, 10 episodes)
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage - PBS (series, 14 episodes)
The Day the Universe Changed - BBC (series, 10 episodes)
The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
The Human Animal - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
The Incredible Human Journey - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
How Earth Made Us - BBC (series, 5 episodes)
Chemistry, a Volatile History - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
The Story of Maths - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
The Code - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Visions of the Future - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Connections - BBC (series, 3 seasons)
Swarm - BBC (series, 2 episodes)
Dara Ó Briain's Science Club - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Brave New World - Channel 4 (series, 5 episodes)
Through the Wormhole - Discovery (series, 4 seasons)
NatureTech (series, 3 episodes)
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Richard Feynman)
How to Build a Bionic Man - Channel 4
Explosions, How we Shook the World - BBC
Afterlife: The Strange Science of Decay - BBC
The Voice - BBC
The Satellite Story - BBC
The Story of One - BBC
Stuff: A Horizon Guide to Materials - BBC
The Hunt for AI - BBC Horizon
Diamond Labs - BBC Horizon
Fermat's Last Theorem - BBC Horizon
Who's Afraid of Designer Babies? - BBC Horizon
The Lost World of Lake Vostok - BBC Horizon
Human v2.0 - BBC Horizon
Moon for Sale - BBC Horizon
The Boy Who Was Turned into a Girl - BBC Horizon
Alien Planet - Discovery (docu-film)
Home (docu-film)

Humanities
[War]
The World at War - (series, 26 episodes)
Weird Weapons - History Channel (series, 2 episodes)
Atlantic convoys - War at Sea (series, 4 episodes)
Apocalypse: The Second World War (series, 6 episodes)
Last Voices of WWI - History Channel (series, 6 episodes)
Fog of War (docu-film)
Nuit et brouillard - Night and Fog (docu-short)
Hearts and Minds (docu-film)
Restrepo (docu-film)
Armadillo (docu-film)
Trinity and Beyond (docu-film)

[Prehistory & earlier]
Walking with Sea Monsters - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Walking with Monsters - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Walking with Dinosaurs - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Walking with Beasts - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Walking with Cavemen - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
The Mystery Of The Jurassic - BBC Horizon
Stone Age Columbus - BBC Horizon
The Day The Earth Almost Died - BBC Horizon

[Politics & Economics]
Commanding Heights - PBS NOVA (series, 3 episodes)
The Ascent of Money - (series, 6 episodes)
How Britain Made the Modern World - (series, 6 episodes)
In Europe (series, 30 episodes)
Frontline - PBS (series, 30 seasons)
The Love of Money - BBC
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky (docu-film)
Rebel with a Pause - Noam Chomsky (docu-film)
Inside Job (docu-film)
Nostalgia for the Light (docu-film)
Chavez: Inside the Coup (docu-film)
Taxi to the dark side (docu-film)
Taking liberties (docu-film)
Crude (docu-film)
Globalization is Good (docu-film)
The Corporation (docu-film)
Wal-mart: the High Cost of Low Price (docu-film)
Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room (docu-film)

[Mixed subject]
Civilization - BBC (series, 13 episodes)
The Virtual Revolution - BBC (series, 4 episodes)
Science and Islam - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
Fry's Planet Word - BBC (series, 6 episodes)
Human, All Too Human - BBC (series, 3 episodes)
The NASA Missions : When We Left Earth - Discovery (series, 6 episodes)
Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends - (series, 3 seasons)
When Louis Met... - (series, 2 seasons)
Up - (series, 7 docu-films)
The Boy With the Incredible Brain
N is a Number
The Century of the Self (series, 4 episodes)
Guns, Germs and Steel - PBS (series, 3 episodes)
Transcendent Man (docu-film)
We Live in Public (docu-film)
Lake of Fire (docu-film)
Into Eternity (docu-film)
Titicut Follies (docu-film)
Rise of the Drones - PBS NOVA
Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple - PBS
The Machine That Made Us - BBC
A War On Science: Intelligent Design - BBC Horizon
Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires - (docu-film)
All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace - BBC (series, 3 episodes)

[Special cases]
Koyaanisqatsi (docu-film)
Powaqqatsi (docu-film)
Naqoyqatsi (docu-film)
Chronos (docu-film)
Baraka (docu-film)
Samsara (docu-film)
51 Birch Street (docu-film)
Our Daily Bread (docu-film)
Rivers and Tides (docu-film)
Encounters at the End of the World (docu-film)
Dark Side of the Moon (docu-film, don't research it (spoilers!) just watch!)

I'd also like to stress that BBC Horizon, now into its 49th season is prolly the best docu seriess of all time. I could just as well have included every single episode.

The Girl Who Turned to Bone

An excellent article from the atlantic on Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, written by Carl Zimmer.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/the-mystery-of-the-second-skeleton/309305/

When Jeannie Peeper was born in 1958, there was only one thing amiss: her big toes were short and crooked. Doctors fitted her with toe braces and sent her home. Two months later, a bulbous swelling appeared on the back of Peeper’s head. Her parents didn’t know why: she hadn’t hit her head on the side of her crib; she didn’t have an infected scratch. After a few days, the swelling vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

When Peeper’s mother noticed that the baby couldn’t open her mouth as wide as her sisters and brothers, she took her to the first of various doctors, seeking an explanation for her seemingly random assortment of symptoms. Peeper was 4 when the Mayo Clinic confirmed a diagnosis: she had a disorder known as fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva (FOP).

Her diagnosis meant that, over her lifetime, she would essentially develop a second skeleton. Within a few years, she would begin to grow new bones that would stretch across her body, some fusing to her original skeleton. Bone by bone, the disease would lock her into stillness.

Peeper’s condition is extremely rare—but in that respect, she actually has a lot of company. A rare disease is defined as any condition affecting fewer than 200,000 patients in the United States. More than 7,000 such diseases exist, afflicting a total of 25 million to 30 million Americans.

Starting in the 1980s, Peeper built a network of people with FOP. She is now connected to more than 500 people with her condition—a sizable fraction of all the people on Earth who suffer from it. Together, members of this community did what the medical establishment could not: they bankrolled a laboratory dedicated solely to FOP and have kept its doors open for more than two decades. They have donated their blood, their DNA, and even their teeth for study.

“I’ve seen 700 patients with FOP around the world, and it’s clear that there’s a lot of different ways to divide patients,” Kaplan said. One identical twin might be only mildly affected, while the other would be trapped in a wheelchair. Some patients developed a frenzy of bones as children, and then inexplicably stopped. “I’ve seen it go quiet for years and years.”

In 1992, Kaplan hired a full-time geneticist named Eileen Shore to help establish a lab for the disorder. Shore had worked on fruit-fly larvae as a graduate student, and as a post-doctoral researcher, she had studied the molecules that allow mammal cells to stick together as they develop into embryos. Kaplan didn’t mind that Shore knew almost nothing about FOP. What he wanted in a geneticist was an expertise in development: the mystery of how the body takes shape. IFOPA’s money—as well as gifts from other private donors and an endowment accompanying Kaplan’s professorship at Penn—made it possible for him to work single-mindedly on FOP for more than two decades.

First, they set out to understand how the disease worked. Based on their conversations with patients, they learned that bone growth could be caused by even slight trauma to muscles. A tumble out of bed or even a quick brake at a stoplight might cause a flare-up—a swelling that may or may not lead to new bone growth. A visit to the dentist could do the trick, if the jaw was stretched too far. Even a flu shot to the biceps was enough. Some flare-ups subsided without any lasting effect, while others became nurseries for new bone.

Most people with the condition develop their first extra bone by the age of 5. Their second skeletons usually start around the spine and spread outward, traveling from the neck down. By 15, most patients have lost much of the mobility in their upper bodies.

Kaplan, Shore, and their students worked out the microscopic path of FOP: At the start of a flare-up, immune cells invade bruised muscles. Instead of healing the damaged area, they annihilate it. A few progenitor cells then crawl into the empty space, and in some cases give rise to new bone.

“Your muscle isn’t turning to bone,” says Shore. “It’s being replaced by bone.”

In 1996, they reported in The New England Journal of Medicine that the blood cells of people with the condition contain an abundance of a particular protein called BMP4. For the first time, scientists had found a molecular signature of the second skeleton.

To treat rare diseases, scientists first look for the broken gene. Kaplan and Shore suspected that FOP was caused by a genetic mutation that led the body to make too much BMP4. In the early 1990s, they didn’t have access to today’s sophisticated genome-sequencing tools, so they began sorting slowly through the human genome’s 20,000 genes.

The first candidate was, of course, the gene that produces BMP4. Shore and Kaplan sliced this gene out of cells from people with FOP, sequenced it, and compared it with a version taken from people without the condition. Unfortunately, the two versions were a perfect match. Kaplan kept searching. If the culprit wasn’t that particular protein, he reasoned, it might be one of its known associates. Kaplan and Shore inspected gene after gene, year after year. But they failed to find a mutation unique to people with FOP.

Studying families is one of the best ways to pinpoint a mutated gene. By comparing the DNA of parents and children, geneticists can identify certain segments that consistently accompany a disorder. Because most people with FOP never have children, Kaplan and Shore had assumed they couldn’t use this method. But then the online patient network began surfacing exceptions: a family in Bavaria, one in South Korea, one in the Amazon. All told, seven families emerged; Kaplan traveled to meet a few of them and draw their blood.

Back in Philadelphia, Shore and her colleagues examined the DNA from these samples and narrowed down the possible places where the FOP gene could be hiding. By 2005, they had tracked the gene to somewhere within a small chunk of Chromosome 2. “It was a huge step,” says Shore. “But there were still several hundred genes in that region.”

By a fortunate coincidence, scientists at the University of Rochester had just studied one of those several hundred genes. They had discovered that the gene, called ACVR1, made a receptor. The receptor grabbed BMP proteins and relayed their signal to cells. In the margin of the paper in which the scientists described ACVR1, Kaplan wrote, “This is it.”

A rare disease is a natural experiment in human biology. A tiny alteration to a single gene can produce a radically different outcome—which, in turn, can shed light on how the body works in normal conditions. As William Harvey, the British doctor who discovered the circulation of blood in the 17th century, observed more than 350 years ago, “Nature is nowhere accustomed more openly to display her secret mysteries than in cases where she shows tracings of her workings apart from the beaten paths.”

Finding the FOP mutation was a coup, but Kaplan and Shore still had no idea how it worked. They set about studying baby teeth from young patients, as well as mice they genetically altered, to observe the mutation in action. Seven years later, they had pieced together an understanding of the far-reaching effects. The ACVR1 receptor normally grabs onto BMP proteins and relays their signal into cells. But in people with FOP, the receptors become hyperactive. The signal they send is too strong, and it lasts too long. In embryonic skeletons, the effects are subtle—for example, deformed big toes. Only later, after birth, does the mutation start to really make its presence known. One way it does this, Shore and Kaplan learned, is by hijacking the body’s normal healing process.

Say you bruise your elbow, killing off a few of your muscle cells. Your immune cells would swarm to the site to clear away the debris, followed by stem cells to regenerate the tissue. As they got to work, the two kinds of cells would converse via molecular signals. Shore and Kaplan suspect that BMP4 is an essential part of that exchange. But in someone with FOP, the conversation is more of a screaming match. The stem cells kick into overdrive, causing the immune cells not just to clear the damage but to start killing healthy muscle cells. The immune cells, in turn, create a bizarre environment for the stem cells. Instead of behaving as if they’re in a bruise, these cells act as if they’re in an embryo. And instead of becoming muscle cells, they become bone.

In the context of FOP, new bone is a catastrophe. But in other situations, it could be a blessing. Some people are born missing a bone, for example, while others fail to regenerate new bone after a fracture. And as people get older, their skeletons become fragile; old bone disappears, while bone-generating stem cells struggle to replace what’s gone.

FOP may be an exquisitely rare bone condition, but low bone density is not: 61 percent of women and 38 percent of men older than 50 suffer from it. The more bone matter people lose, the more likely they are to end up with osteoporosis, which currently afflicts nearly one in 10 older adults in the United States alone. For decades, doctors have searched for a way to bring back some of that bone. Some methods have helped a little, and others, such as estrogen-replacement therapy, have turned out to have disastrous side effects in many women.

Giving someone a second skeleton is not a cure for osteoporosis. But if Kaplan and his colleagues can finish untangling the network of genes that ACVR1 is a part of, they could figure out how to use a highly controlled variation on FOP to regrow bones in certain scenarios. “It’s like trying to harness a chain reaction at the heart of an atom bomb,” he told me, “and turning it into something safe and controllable, like a nuclear reactor.”

The search for a cure is accelerating, thanks in part to new programs designed to incentivize the study of rare diseases. A different drug option, currently being investigated by a team of scientists at Harvard Medical School, has benefited from these programs. In a broader experiment in 2007, the scientists tested more than 7,000 FDA-approved compounds on zebra-fish embryos, watching for whether any of them affected the animals’ development. One molecule caused the zebra fish to lose the bottom of its tail fin. When the scientists looked more closely at this compound, they discovered that it latched onto a few receptors, including ACVR1—the receptor that Shore and Kaplan had recently discovered was overactive in FOP patients.

The Harvard researchers wondered whether the drug could work as a treatment for FOP. They tinkered with the compound, creating a version that had a stronger preference for ACVR1 than other types of receptors. When they tested it on mice with an FOP-like condition, it quieted the signals from ACVR1 receptors, thereby stopping new bones from forming.

Thanks to Kaplan’s enduring fascination with her disease, Jeannie Peeper can now realistically imagine a time—perhaps even a few years from now—when people like her will take a pill that subdues their overactive bones. They might take it only after a flare-up, or they might take a daily preventative dose. In a best-case scenario, the medication could allow surgeons to work backwards, removing extra bones without the risk of triggering new ones.

At 54, with an advanced case of FOP, Peeper does not imagine that she’ll benefit from these breakthroughs. But she is optimistic that her younger friends will, and that one day, far in the future, second skeletons will exist only as medical curiosities on display. All that will remain of her reality will be Harry Eastlack, still keeping watch in Philadelphia, reminding us of the grotesque possibility stored away in our genomes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_progressiva

Something so hot it's cool to touch

Light up your day with this video demonstration of a space shuttle thermal protection tile! These tiles dissipate heat so quickly, it can be safely picked up immediately after being removed from a 2200°F (1204°C | 1478K ) oven, despite still being red-hot.

The Thermal Protection System covered essentially the entire shuttle surface and consisted of seven different materials in varying locations. Each type of TPS had specific heat protection, impact resistance, and weight characteristics. Ceck out this pdf for a very detailed look at the space shuttle's TPS. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/584728main_Wings-ch4b-pgs182-199.pdf

How can something this hot be cold enough to touch?
Misconceptions About Temperature - Veritasium Youtube
spoiler; When you touch something you are actually feeling the heat flux: how fast that thing is heating you up, not the temperature itself. Because the material used for these tiles conducts heat extremely poorly it won't burn your fingers.


Space Shuttle Thermal Tile Demonstration

The Aliens of Sesame Street

Bert and Ernie's brothers have arrived on earth, and they came from far outside our solar system, possibly even from another galaxy!

Earlier this year, scientists working on the IceCube experiment in Antarctica discovered Ernie and Bert, two neutrinos with energies over 100 times higher than the protons that circulate in the LHC and now those same scientists report that they have found 28 neutrinos that must have come to earth from explosions in the distant universe.

> http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/11/south-pole-detector-spots-28-out-of-this-world-neutrinos/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrinos
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_astronomy

Neuroscience - today and tomorrow

Nature takes a look at the technologies that will enable us to unravel some of the mind's mysteries.
http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-solving-the-brain-1.13382 - Researchers want to understand the ways in which brain circuitry changes — through the constant growth and retreat of synapses — as life rolls by.

"Reaching this goal will require innovative new technologies, ranging from nanotechnologies to genetics to optics, that can capture the electrical activity coursing through neurons, prod those neurons to find out what they do, map the underlying anatomical circuits in fine detail and process the exabytes of information all this work will spit out. “Think about it,” says neuroscientist Konrad Kording of Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. “The human brain produces in 30 seconds as much data as the Hubble Space Telescope has produced in its lifetime.”

the most daunting part of the brain challenge lies in storing and handling data. One cubic millimetre of brain tissue will generate an estimated 2,000 terabytes of electron-microscopy information using Lichtman and Denk's new microscope, for example. Denk estimates that an entire mouse brain could produce 60 petabytes and a human brain about 200 exabytes. This amount of data will rival the entire digital content of today's world, “including Facebook and all the big data stores”, says Lichtman."

I was particularly impressed with the predictions made by IMEC, a nanoelectronics research organization. They recently unveiled a prototype 'neuroprobe'. One-centimetre long and as thin as a dollar bill, the probe packs in 52 thin wires and switches that neuroscientists can flip seamlessly between 456 silicon electrodes.

When inserted into a mouse brain, the electrodes dotted across the imec probe can span — and record from — all layers of the animal's brain simultaneously, from the cortex to the thalamus in the brainstem. This could help neuroscientists to unpick the circuitry that connects them. “This prototype can be scaled up,” says Peter Peumans, director of bio- and nanoelectronics at imec. Within three years, he says, the neuroprobes will have up to 2,000 electrodes and more than 200 wires.

It's a pretty good read if you are looking for an update on the current and future state of Neuroscience.
http://www.nature.com/news/neuroscience-solving-the-brain-1.13382

Looking for more brainy links?
> Make up your mind
http://goo.gl/O80gGP .
> How does the world look through the eyes of neuroscience?http://goo.gl/MFHj5v .
> Old Brains Learning New Tricks
http://goo.gl/IZYnTR .
> Inception
http://goo.gl/qFXsgl .

Casting Light on Sound to See its Shadow

"When light passes between areas of different air density, it bends. You've probably noticed the way distant pavement seems to shimmer on a hot day, or the way stars appear to twinkle. You're seeing light that has been distorted as it passes through varying air densities, which are in turn created by varying temperatures and pressures.

In the mid-19th century, German physicist August Toepler invented a photography technique called Schlieren Flow Visualization to visually capture these changes in density. The setup is a bit hard to explain in words (watch the video above for a full explanation) but it allows scientists and engineers to see things that are normally invisible: the rising heat from a candle, the turbulence around an airplane wing, the plume of a sneeze.

It can also be used to see sound. Sound, after all, is just another change in air density — a traveling compression wave. A speaker pushes on the surrounding air, creating a wave that travels outward until it encounters the ear drum."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren_photography
High Speed Schlieren Video of Premixed Flame, Spark Ignition
http://www.npr.org/2014/04/09/300563606/what-does-sound-look-like

The experiments stoking fusion's fire

Are these about to set the world ablaze or will they fizzle and fade? If we are serious about finding out we better start throwing money at them.

You might have heard of the most popular fusion design, tokamaks like JET (Joint European Torus) and ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), devices that look like giant donuts and utilize giant magnets to confine and accelerate plasma. Or perhaps you've heard of NIF's (National Ignition Facility) laser initiated approach which counts on a massive 192 barrel laser cannon to focus all its energy on a tiny pellet in order to compress it to such a degree as to achieve ignition. Those two approaches have received the most attention and as a result have sucked up most of fusion's funding in the last few decades. They do look promising and are worth every penny spent but a variety of new approaches has been picking up steam which too are deserving of a much closer look and thus the funds to do so.

Nature digs into some of them with this excellent article that shines a bit of light on the secretive start-ups that claim to have found the answer to our energy woes. There's Tri Alpha's linear design trying to get things going by having 2 directly opposite plasma cannons fire at each other in sync as well as Helion Energy's somewhat similar colliding-beam reactor and last but not least they also talk a bit about General Fusion's approach which hopes to literally hammer their plasma into obedience.

http://www.nature.com/news/plasma-physics-the-fusion-upstarts-1.15592

If you think that's an exhaustive listing, you'd be wrong. Another big one is Lawrenceville Plasma Physics's Focus Fusion idea but there's also various teams hoping to work on different types of stellarators as well as the so called triple-threat methods. So many avenues worth exploring yet so few funds to do so. Luckily the private sector is chipping in a bit because else these would all have been shot down before even having had a chance of making it to the door. The fact that VCs, including some really big names, are investing in these should raise eyebrows as they don't typically start pumping money into something unless the road to market is somewhat mapped. Is it possible that fusion will follow the google model and reach the world from someone's garage? It might not seem likely but the chance definitely exists for all those billions invested in traditional designs to be bypassed by one really good innovative idea.

Lockheed - Solve for X: Charles Chase on energy for everyone
Google Talks - Focus Fusion: The Fastest Route to Cheap, Clean Energy
TED - Michel Laberge: How synchronized hammer strikes could generate nuclear fusion

Related posts
> A Star in a Bottle (ITER - Tokamak)

> National Ignition Facility (NIF - laser based confinement)
https://plus.google.com/108487783243149848473/posts/UHEhKLCyxLs

> Nuclear man; the humane power station (fission poetry?)
https://plus.google.com/108487783243149848473/posts/6LKW1s5yW2h

Photo below; General fusion's current experimental prototype on top and what they hope to build below. At the center of the containment vessel, within the spun liquid metal's vortex, plasma rings (think smoke rings) composed of the deuterium-tritium fuel are injected from both above and below which merge to form a single magnetized plasma target. The protruding cylinders you see in the pictures house the pistons used to batter the liquid metal into a fusion susceptible environment. When they are all fired at the same time they send a shockwave through the spinning lead-lithium mixture that gets stronger as it travel towards the center of the vessel where it rapidly collapses the vortex cavity with the plasma in it generating a fusion burst. Quite the turn on wouldn't you say? :)

A Geek's Guide to Paris - Part 2: Paris hides art, science and history in plain sight.

Paris played a huge role in both the renaissance and the following age of enlightenment and acted as a magnet for French but also international scientists and artists. Many squares house huge monuments that commemorate legendary heroes while other inspiring works of art burst onto the street from almost every bridge and public building. All the parks and even many private houses are decorated with impressive classical statues and a bustling modern street art scene consistently manages to surprise.

Curie, Lavoisier, Descartes, Ampère, Pasteur, Voltaire, Diderot, Lamarck, Carnot, Lagrange, Laplace, Cuvier, Fourier, Foucault, Fermat, Mandelbrot, Coulomb, Coriolis, Pascal, Poincaré, Diesel, Renault, Langevin, Fresnel, Broca, Galois, Grothendieck, Navier, ... are only some of the great minds that have lived and worked in Paris and traces of them can be found all over the place. The photo album below will take you on a scientific and artistic pilgrimage through all of Paris.

If all this talk about Paris has awakened within you the desire to go there, check out this map I made. It will guide you to all the points mentioned in both my previous post and this one;

Thanks once again +Denise Case for inviting me to the #fivedayquest . I'd be interested in hearing more from +Jonas Neergaard-Nielsen. He's an expert photographer who shares stunning shots pretty much non-stop but he makes a living working the sexiest job of all time. After earning a PhD at the legendary Niels Bohr Institute he graduated from quantum wizard to a jedi knight active in quantum optics research. He states that his G+ may be as messy as his brain... so follow his stream at your own risk but I'd say it's well worth it. :)

Construction of the ESS, the European Spallation Source, has begun!

The town of Lund, in Sweden, is already home to a number of major scientific facilities, including one of the most advanced synchrotron X-ray sources, the MAX IV, scheduled for inauguration in 2016. Now Lund will also be the site of the world's most powerful neutron source, the €1.8 billion European Spallation Source (ESS).

Spallation is the process for producing neutrons by means of a particle accelerator and a heavy metal target. The ESS's 600-meter long linear accelerator will fire protons derived from hydrogen gas at a velocity just below the speed of light at a target made out of the metal tungsten.

The metal target absorbs the proton beam and transforms into fast neutrons. Which is basically just a really polite way of saying that the proton beam rips the target a new one which causes it to spill its guts all over the place, showering its environment with fast neutrons. To contain the extreme level of highly penetrating gamma and fast neutron radiation the target chamber is surrounded by a radiation shielding system, a 7000 ton sphere of steel. If that kind of talk doesn't get your heart racing I don't know what will! ;)

When the neutrons are slowed down they are, guided by beam lines, lead towards experimental stations where they allow us to see through matter on the smallest of scales. Because neutrons have no charge, they don't scatter on electrons and can penetrate deep into atoms and probe atomic nuclei directly, which is not possible with X-rays.

Two factors make neutrons especially interesting. With X-rays you only "see" the heavy elements, but with neutrons, which interact with light elements such as hydrogen and carbon, you can probe a wider range of materials, with applications in molecular biology, biomedical research, and even food science.

The second factor is that neutrons carry a magnetic moment. They interact with the magnetic moments of atoms and thus can assist researchers investigating materials like superconductors.

A big thanks to the more than a dozen European countries that are funding the project, especially Sweden and Denmark, the two biggest backers. If all goes well first light should be produced in 2019.

http://europeanspallationsource.se/science-using-neutrons

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Spallation_Source