Monday 30 July 2012

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 30/07/12


Most powerful laser blast achieved:  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a fusion research laboratory, blasted their fuel pellet with the most powerful laser beam attained in history. The laboratory, holding already the record for the biggest and most powerful laser, generated 300 trillion watts of power. The technique used by the laboratory is firing 192 lasers within a few trillionths of a second onto a 2-millimeter-diameter target in order to reach pressures, inside the pellet, high enough to generate fusion. This would release an enormous amount of energy, which is cleaner than fission. Although we can already make fusion happen, the real problem in the fusion energy research is to take useful energy from it. Nobody managed yet to do it, but scientists at LLNL hope to reach a break-even point (in which energy expenditure to fire the lasers equals energy income from fusion) by the end of the year.


Bacteria consumes waste and produces energy:  A new microbial is capable of consuming organic waste and produce energy at the same time. The microbial consumes waste and an energetic potential is the end product. This technique constitutes about 2% of annual electrical American power consumption, but most of the energy produced is used to power the facilities. This is not a problem as the microbial still work on consuming waste. Unfortunately there are limits for these bacteria, as only organic waste can be consumed.


Furthest spiral galaxy discovered:  Hubble spots a new furthest spiral galaxy. About two-thirds of bright galaxies discovered is spiral. When astronomers at the university of Toronto discovered it, they immediately thought of an error, being 10.7 billion light-years distant from Earth. The distance was calculated from the light-shift and that puts the galaxy to an astounding age of 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The age of the universe now is around 14 billion years and that would make this galaxy the earliest spiral galaxy every found.

Advertisements and How to block them

I have been recently using a web-browser different than mine to perform some tests and I have noticed the copious amount of adverts which I was missing. I am using an ads blocker and, without it, I have found ads even in websites I did not expect having them.

For this reason, I decided to follow the masses and join an advertisement program. Not that I want to make money from it, but I need some more motivation to keep writing.

I do not have lots of readers, even if people say I deserve more, and I always do a long work of gathering info to provide accurate information about science and technology. Do not get me wrong, I really like doing it, but it takes time, and it is well known that time is money.

For these reasons, I will put adverts in this website.

But, since I feel guilty and I know that you might be an usual reader if you are reading this, I will tell you how to remove them!


How to block ads in your web browser


I use Firefox, and the easiest and more efficient way to block ads is using an extension called AdBlock Plus.

To install it, you just need to click the install button following the link I gav above and it will handle your ads automatically.

I am sure there are extensions similar to this one also in Chrome and other web browsers.

A really neat feature is that it also blocks YouTube adverts (the ones inside videos) making generally the web-surfing experience a great deal better.


Tuesday 24 July 2012

How to balance two forks on a toothpick

I posted a video a while ago about balancing forks on the rim of a cup:












This trick can be easily made using just 2 forks, 1 stick and a glass.
Your eyes won't believe it, but physics laws have not been violated in the making of this video.


The physics behind it


The center of mass of the system (forks + stick) falls around the middle of the stick, which lies exactly on the pivot.

That is the most stable position giving then stable equilibrium. Even for small displacements the system is balanced by a restoring torque.

Moreover, the system remain balanced even if half of the stick is burned, because the missing weight of the burned stick is negligible with respect to the weight of the whole system, then the center of mass approximately stays in the same position as before.


How to make it


The making of follows three simple steps:

1.   Put a toothpick (or any stick that can stand the weight of two forks) between the teeth of a fork.

2.   Take another fork (of the same kind) and push its teeth between the ones of the first fork. This is the most difficult bit as most of the times, the two forks and the toothpick will not stick together (you could use glue at this point without making the trick pointless, but I managed to do it without glue).

3.   Put the structure on any edge, trying to find the point on which it will balance (no glue allowed at this point). You will find it by the pressure on your fingers while you try to do it. The point depends on the shape of the forks and in my case the centre of mass fell on the middle of the toothpick.

3b.   Impress your friends!


Wednesday 18 July 2012

iGoogle is closing down. What now?



I have been a faithful user of iGoogle for years. I did not consider it something vital and did not spend much time on it, but when I've heard the news it will close in 16 months ( November 2013 ), I realized that it was my (only) daily source of world news, weather and recipes.

Even if, by far, not the most used website, I think Google is doing a bad move here. I know many people that use iGoogle, more than Google+, honestly, and even if I understand the choice, I think Google is pointing exactly in the direction that I do not like (promoting more profitable Google products).

This is an extract from the news page:

I really like iGoogle -- are there any other alternatives?
On your mobile device, Google Play offers applications ranging from games to news readers to home screen widgets.
If you’re a fan of Google Chrome, the Chrome Web Store provides a similar range of options like productivity tools and applications to check the weather. In addition, just like iGoogle, you can personalize Chrome with a theme.

This is as helpful as convincing users to set the blank page as homepage.
First of all, I am sure there is a big number (the majority? They should know) of people using iGoogle from PCs, including me, so Google Play is useless.
For the rest, they just suggest to use Google Chrome. Please tell me where is the bit where they suggest alternatives, if you can find it.

Since Google didn't do a great job providing alternatives, I went looking for them and I can suggest a few. As trying them out is worth a thousand words, I will not spend much time describing them.

-   Netvibes: maybe the second most popular after iGoogle
-   Protopage: very easy to use, but less implementations
-   Favoor: clean interface
-   uStart: there is no possibility to share content (which I regard as good)
-   Webmag: similar to Netvibes, promoted even for non-smartphones


Sunday 15 July 2012

Forthnightly Science News Digest - 15/07/12


higgs-like particle discovery

More hints towards the Higgs:  as you might have already heard, there is lots of excitement in the field of Particle Physics because of a new discovery. As announced on a CERN seminar on 4 July, a new particle at 126 GeV of mass was discovered to 5-sigmas. The particle resembles a lot the Standard Model Higgs, which is a particle predicted by the Higgs mechanism. This model assumes that we live immersed in a field which gives mass to particles and the Higgs would be a ripple in this field, that can be detected at particle accelerators. It is not certain yet, though, if this new particle is the Higgs we are looking for. For more info about the discovery itself, you can check out my in-depth easy-language article.

Arsenic bacteria might not live without phosphorous after all:  on December 2010, NASA claimed an extraordinary news, the news that life could substitute arsenic to phosphorous. There are 6 elements, without which life cannot exist, and phosphorous is one of them. Research by NASA showed that some bacteria were substituting phosphorous with arsenic and managing to live with arsenic. People were ready to "expand definition of life", but further research is showing that bacteria do not replace all the phosphorous with arsenic and there might be evidence that these bacteria cannot survive with no phosphorous at all. NASA stated that research is not complete yet.

Ocean acidification in California and CO2 in the atmosphere:  scientists from Gruber's group investigate, using a model, the acidification of the waters near the California Current System, which are susceptible to ocean acidification. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere threatens the health of the ocean and its variate ecosystem, changing the saturation state of Argonite. If you still doubt about CO2 high levels having an effect on Earth, science says they do: http://www.co2science.org/.

Magnetic cells isolated for the first time:  magnetic cells are found in animals, such as birds and fishes. There are claims that these cells are used to perceive the Earth's magnetic field and have a sense of orientation (literally a sixth-sense based on magnetism). Walker et al. of the University of Auckland, performing studies on trout's nose cells, managed to isolate cells containing magnetite, which is the strongest magnet. The task was hard to accomplish because of the scarce availability of magnetic cells. As their magnetic field could interfere with each others one, each one of them is a distance apart, so only a few of those are found over a thousand normal cells. The magnetite found by the group was stronger than they expected and could also be used to get a sense of latitude and longitude (a small GPS). The next step is now to find whether this magnetic cells are linked to the brain and used for orientation.

Monday 9 July 2012

Higgsteria - How to interpret the mass spectrum graph

The seminar on the 4th of July held at CERN in Geneva - despite the use of Comic Sans font - gave very interesting news to the Physics community.

ATLAS and CMS, two experiments from LHC, both discovered a new particle (5-sigma level is a requirement for a discovery) at 126 GeV in the mass spectrum.

Jargon apart, if you are not a physicist, you can read info about the Higgs boson (such as what is the Higgs, what is a boson, how does it give mass to other particles...) pretty much everywhere nowadays.

What many people may wonder is: what is this ? And what about this 95% confidence level (CL)? But, most importantly, what is 126 GeV?
In this post I will give you an idea, with simple language, about these concepts and you will be finally able to understand this (not-so) mysterious graph.


Saturday 7 July 2012

The sad truth with vegetables

Food chart!
Bacon is out of scale

However easy to cook they are, there will always be a meat-alternative which is tastier.

Wednesday 4 July 2012

How to recover a deleted post in Blogger

It is very easy to accidentally delete a post in Blogger, especially when mass deleting posts, as it is common that a precious post keeps a previous selection and gets deleted with the unwanted ones.

It happened to me as well. Unfortunately, Blogger does not provide any help for restoring a deleted post, but fortunately I kept a backup copy of my blog and just re-posted it again. I noticed, though, that the html link to the post was different (even if re-posted with the same date and title of the old one). It was the same as before, but with a -01.html at the end.
This is bad, because everybody who made a link to the old post now linked to a 404 Error (non existent URL).

This gave me the suspicion that Blogger stored the deleted posts somewhere, and I found a way to restore it fully, with pictures, number of views and comments.

The 5 steps to recover a deleted post in Blogger

  1. First of all you need to retrieve your deleted post ID. If you have it, you can skip to step 4. If you don't have it, the only solution is to find it in cached web pages from search engines. For this reasons, this procedure will not work for very new posts or private blogs.
  2. Find your old post in any search engine. For example, for my previous post, I googled "natural selection and prime numbers" and I have found the URL "http://www.badscientist.net/2012/06/natural-selection-and-prime-numbers.html". Now you need to access the cached content (click on Cached in Google when hovering with the mouse on the >>).
  3. Access the Source code (in Firefox, right-click anywhere in the page and "View Page Source") and find this line:

    <div class='post-outer'>
    <div class='post hentry' itemscope='itemscope' itemtype='http://schema.org/BlogPosting'>
    <a name='2003347239440929962'>a>
    <h3 class='post-title entry-title' itemprop='name'>
    Natural selection and prime numbers
    h3>
    
    
    Here, the post ID is 2003347239440929962.
  4. Now that you have the post ID, create a new post in your blog, the usual way. In the URL bar you see above the editing fields, for example:

    http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4658705474308031765#editor/target=post;postID=2231649307872317536

    replace the number after postID with the deleted post ID. In this case, I will replace  2231649307872317536  with  2003347239440929962  .

  5. Press Enter and your old deleted post will (magically) reappear. You can edit it again or just press Publish to have it back.

Hope this helps, let me know if there are easier ways to do that.

In order to prevent this from happening again, I revert to draft posts, instead of deleting them directly. The posts, this way, will not be on the web, but it will give me time to see if I did any mistakes before deleting a post completely.

Sunday 1 July 2012

Microsoftian Rhapsody


Me, Windows Me


Is this the hard drive?
Is this ram memory?
Caught in a bootload,
No escape from SCSI
Open your ROMS,
Look up to the BIOS and see,
I'm a read-only, I need no fixing,
Because I'm easy run, easy load,
Little Hz, little clock,
Any slow the boot loads doesn't really matter to
Me, WinMe



Inspired from this video.