The Enlightening Science Thread

The Glass Age

Ever crack your cell phone screen? How about your car windshield? Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman (The MythBusters) explain why those days may soon be behind us. Watch as they conduct mind-bending demonstrations of strong, durable glass. This is the Glass Age, where materials science is constantly pushing boundaries and creating new possibilities for glass-enabled technology and design. Do watch the video in full as they conduct mind-bending demonstrations of strong, durable glass.

A Guy

New analyses of the hundreds of thousands of technical manuscripts submitted to arXiv, the repository of digital preprint articles, are offering some intriguing insights into the consequences—and geography—of scientific plagiarism. It appears that copying text from other papers is more common in some nations than others, but the outcome is generally the same for authors who copy extensively: Their papers don’t get cited much.

Source: Study of massive preprint archive hints at the geography of plagiarism | Science/AAAS | News

With World map breakdown.


Related Link:
arXiv.org e-Print archive
[1412.2716] Patterns of Text Reuse in a Scientific Corpus

Arelem said:

As usual when there is some sort of cool night sky event, Chicago was socked in with heavy cloud cover.

I feel your pain......The Winter climate in the upper third of the US is usually cloudy.
I've lived in the Harrisburg-Baltimore metroplex all my life (63years) and I've only experienced one partial Solar (see below) and a few Lunar eclipses due to cloud cover, meteor showers? Ha! My birthday coincides with the Perseids peak (July 17 – August 24; Peak August 12–13) and it is invariably cloudy mostly from a cold front that has thundershowers. I've seen one in the last 9years.

I have an observation tent that I've only used once about 20years ago to watch the Geminids, it is one of those older external aluminum frame types that I removed the stitching from three sides that made a flap in case it snowed or rained, I could toss the flap back over to protect the interior. I had binoculars, a sleeping-bag, heat, chairs, red lights for night vision, regular lights, TV-radio, and a cooler with sandwiches and libation.
It got down into the teen's, but I stuck it out and witnessed a good shower. I used it for a few more nights through February with my telescope for casual observing and every morning the dear wife took one look at me and asked; "Did you have fun?", and I replied Yes!

What I'm planning for is the Total Solar eclipse on August 21st, 2017 It's only going to be a partial in my area but my plans are to get as close to Hopkinsville, Kentucky where Maximum will occur. That will be my base and if it gets cloudy I can adjust either up or downstream of the path.

I was making plans with Britton30 to see if we could get hooked up to observe together since he lived nearby, but Life intervened and he passed on to a better life in early July.
You're going to have a partial for August 2017 and you'd only be 6½hours - 371miles away from the path of totality, if you want to hook up let me know here, and we could finalize through PM's. I'm 750miles and 12hours away with stops. Hope the crude oil and gas prices stay low. I just checked heating oil today and its $2.99US

This is what I had to deal with during last years partial Solar eclipse. Looking East towards Harrisburg, Pa. from the confluence of the Conodoguinet creek and Susquehanna river:


Here's first light:


Direction:

Computer scientists "crack" poker

This week's red-hot "Wow, Science!" news is the pronouncement, as many articles are happy to present it, that Poker Is Solved.

Loosely speaking, what this means is that if you invite a properly-programmed computer to join your poker evenings, you'll lose money week after week.

Actually, the idea of a game being "solved" means a bit more than that.

A top-ranked chess-playing computer will beat you every time, but chess is not "solved" to the point that every possible position that a game can reach has been enumerated, evaluated and pigeon-holed.

Source

A Guy

Thanks John for making me the "Author" of Space stuff thread.

Have We Found Alien Life?
Microbes that eat and breathe electricity have forced scientists to reimagine how life works—on this planet and others

Popular Science said:

Kenneth Nealson is looking awfully sane for a man who’s basically just told me that he has a colony of aliens incubating in his laboratory.

We’re huddled in his modest office at the University of Southern California (USC), on the fifth floor of Stauffer Hall. Nealson is wearing a rumpled short-sleeve shirt, a pair of old suede loafers, white socks—your standard relaxed academic attire—and leaning back comfortably in his chair. An encouraging collection of academic awards hangs on one wall. Propped behind him is a well-worn guitar, which he sometimes breaks out to accompany his wife’s singing. And across the hall is the explanation for his quiet confidence: beakers and bottles full of bacteria that are busily breaking the long-accepted rules of biology.

Life, Nealson is explaining, all comes down to energy. From the mightiest blue whale to the most humble microbe, every organism depends on moving and manipulating electrons; it’s the fuel that living matter uses to survive, grow, and reproduce. The bacteria at USC depend on energy, too, but they obtain it in a fundamentally different fashion. They don’t breathe in the sense that you and I do. In the most extreme cases, they don’t consume any conventional food, either. Instead, they power themselves in the most elemental way: by eating and breathing electricity. Nealson gestures at his lab. That’s what they are doing right there, right now.

...more

Strange fossils from China don't seem to fit any known hominin species. Could they be something new?

They're not quite Neanderthals and not quite modern humans. They're something else, but no one is sure what.

Newly-examined fossils suggest that an unknown species of human was roaming parts of northern China between 60,000 and 120,000 years ago. Alternatively, the fossils could be the result of interbreeding between two of the known species.

We know there were as many as four other early humans living on Earth when modern humans were still confined to Africa. The Neanderthals lived in Europe, the Denisovans in Asia and the "hobbit" Homo floresiensis in Indonesia: plus there was a mysterious fourth group from Eurasia that interbred with the Denisovans.

More: BBC - Earth - Is this a new species of human?

Astronomers find oldest-known solar system › News in Science (ABC Science)