Naucni radovi zanimljivi za siru javnost

[fonTelefon]

Najzad prava nauka po meri naseg druga kalemara :D Last year, a group of Japanese physicists grabbed headlines around the world by announcing that they could induce superconductivity in a sample of iron telluride by soaking it in red wine. They found that other alcoholic drinks also worked--white wine, beer, sake and so on--but red wine was by far the best.The question, of course, is why. What is it about red wine that does the trick?Today, these guys provide an answer, at least in part. Keita Deguchi at the National Institute for Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, and a few buddies, say the mystery ingredient is tartaric acid and have the experimental data to show that it plays an important role in the process. First, some background. Iron-based superconductors were discovered in 2008 and have since become the focus of intense interest. Deguchi and co study iron telluride which does not superconduct unless some of the telluride atoms are replaced with sulphur, forming FeTeS. But even then, FeTeS doesn't superconduct unless it goes through a final processing stage; heating it in water, for example. Nobody knows what this process does or how it can convert an ordinary material into a superconductor. But some liquids are better than others, as determined by the fraction of the sample they convert into a superconductor.This is the stage Deguchi and co have been puzzling over. Their approach is to make a sample of FeTeS, cut it up into slices and then heat each slice in a different liquid. Water works quite well but whiskey, shochu and beer are all better. And of course, red wine is the best of all.Now Deguchi and co have repeated the experiment with different types of red wine to see which works best. They've used wines made with a single grape variety including gamay, pinot noir, merlot, carbernet sauvignon and sangiovese.It turns out that the best performer is a wine made from the gamay grape--for the connoisseurs, that's a 2009 Beajoulais from the Paul Beaudet winery in central France. They then analysed the wines to see which ingredient correlated best with superconducting performance and settled on tartaric acid as the likely culprit. The Beaujolais has the highest tartaric acid concentration. Finally, they repeated the experiment using a mixture of water and tartaric acid to find out how well it performed.Interestingly, they found that the solution performed better than water alone but not as well as the Beaujolais.So while tartaric acid is clearly part of the answer, there must be another component of red wine that somehow encourages the transition to a superconducting state.That's a useful step forward for a team clearly dedicated to unravelling the mysterious powers of alcohol. On that basis alone, the work must be applauded. However, there are still plenty of unanswered questions here, not least of which is how the superconducting transition process occurs at all in the presence of these liquids. Corkscrews on standby.

[iDemo]

"Professor Ariely directs the Center for Advanced Hindsight."sta reci.

Mozda nema smisla ali ima veze: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards", Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

[fonTelefon]

Mozda nema smisla ali ima veze: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards", Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Ovo je smisao zivota.Solving Sudoku puzzles is one of the most popular pastimes in the world. Puzzles range in difficulty from easy to very challenging; the hardest puzzles tend to have the most empty cells. The current paper compares the performance of three computer algorithms in solving puzzles. Backtracking, simulated annealing, and alternating projections are generic methods for attacking combinatorial optimization problems. Our results favor backtracking. It infallibly solves Sudoku puzzles or deduces that a unique solution does not exist. However, backtracking does not scale well in high-dimensional combinatorial optimization. Hence, it is useful to expose statistics students to the other two solution techniques in a concrete setting. Simulated annealing shares a common structure with MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) and enjoys wide applicability. The method of alternating projections solves the feasibility problem in convex programming. Converting a discrete optimization problem into a continuous optimization problem opens up the possibility of handling combinatorial problems of much higher dimensionality.

[dekss]

Born Nice? Peoples' Niceness May Reside in Their Genes, Study Finds

[dekss]

Comparison of the limits to growth with thirty years of reality

[Zverilla]

Mice That Eat Yogurt Have Larger Testicles

[fonTelefon]

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.1492v1.pdfMogu li tajmauti da promene ishod utakmice?

[betty]

oprostite na ruznom jeziku, verovatno ce uskoro biti negde i vest na engleskom. ukratko, pronadjene su genetske razlike izmedju jednojajcanih blizanaca.krenulo se od ispitivanja faktora adhd-a, i cinjenice da se jednojajcani blizanci nekad razlikuju po tome koliko su u stanju da odrzavaju paznju. do sada se smatralo da to po defaultu znaci da i okolina utice na formiranje ovog problema. ovi istrazivaci su, medjutim, nasli suptilnu razliku u genima, koja se tice broja kopija odredjenih (inace identicnih) sekvenci. a ta razlika je povezana sa prisustvom adhd-a. heh.

[lostfanforever]

Why the bubbles in Guinness sink -_-

[Roger Sanchez]

Uz današnji dan ispunjen perverzijama... -_-

It was the sight of a young male Adélie penguin attempting to have sex with a dead female that particularly unnerved George Murray Levick, a scientist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition. No such observation had ever been recorded before, as far as he knew, and Levick, a typical Edwardian Englishman, was horrified. Blizzards and freezing cold were one thing. Penguin perversion was another.Worse was to come, however. Levick spent the Antarctic summer of 1911-12 observing the colony of Adélies at Cape Adare, making him the only scientist to this day to have studied an entire breeding cycle there. During that time, he witnessed males having sex with other males and also with dead females, including several that had died the previous year. He also saw them sexually coerce females and chicks and occasionally kill them.Levick blamed this "astonishing depravity" on "hooligan males" and wrote down his observations in Greek so that only an educated gentleman would understand the horrors he had witnessed. Back in Britain he produced a paper (in English), titled Natural History of the Adélie Penguin. However, the section about the animal's sexual proclivities was deemed to be so shocking it was removed to preserve decency. Levick then used this material as the basis for a separate short paper, Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin, which was privately circulated among a handful of experts.In fact, Levick's observations turned out to be well ahead of their time. Scientists had to wait another 50 years before the remarkable sexual antics of the Adélie were revealed. By this time his pamphlet and its detailed records of Adélie shenanigans had been lost to science .But now a copy of Sexual Habits of the Adélie Penguin has been unearthed, thanks to sleuthing by Douglas Russell, curator of birds at the Natural History Museum, who discovered a copy among records of the work of Scott's expeditions and has had it published in the journal Polar Record, with an accompanying analysis of Levick's work."The pamphlet, declined for publication with the official Scott expedition reports, commented on the frequency of sexual activity, auto-erotic behaviour, and seemingly aberrant behaviour of young unpaired males and females, including necrophilia, sexual coercion, sexual and physical abuse of chicks and homosexual behaviour," states the analysis written by Russell and colleagues William Sladen and David Ainley. "His observations were, however, accurate, valid and, with the benefit of hindsight, deserving of publication."Levick's lost masterpiece certainly has its eye-watering moments with its descriptions of male Adélies who gather in "little hooligan bands of half a dozen or more and hang about the outskirts of the knolls, whose inhabitants they annoy by their constant acts of depravity". Injured females are mounted by members of these "gangs", others have their chicks "misused before the very eyes of its parents". Some chicks are crushed and injured, others are killed.It is startling stuff, though Russell told the Observer that recent studies have helped understand the behaviour of these "hooligan" penguins. "Adélies gather at their colonies in October to start to breed. They have only a few weeks to do that and young adults simply have no experience of how to behave. Many respond to inappropriate cues. Hence the seeming depravity of their behaviour. For example, a dead penguin, lying with its eyes half-open, is very similar in appearance to a compliant female. The result is the so-called necrophilia that Levick witnessed and which so disgusted him."In addition, the penguin is the most humanlike of all birds in its appearance and its behaviour is most often interpreted in anthropomorphic terms, added Russell. For this reason, Adélie behaviour, when it was observed for the first time in detail, seemed especially shocking. "Levick was also a gentleman, travelling with a group of men in very difficult circumstances, witnessing behaviour he neither expected nor understood," said Russell. "It is not surprising that he was shocked by his findings."The discovery ofLevick's paper is important because its helps shed new knowledge on a species that has been called the bellwether of climate change. "The Adélie needs pack ice from which to dive to get fish. When that ice disappears, numbers may crash – and we will have a clear warning that things are getting bad," said Russell.Levick's experiences with the Adélie penguins were not the only root of his suffering in the Antarctic. In February 1912, he and five other members of Scott's team were waiting to be picked up by the expedition ship, Terra Nova, but found that pack ice had blocked its route. The men had to spend an entire Antarctic winter huddled in an ice cave with no provisions and only an occasional seal or penguin to eat. "They ate blubber, cooked with blubber, had blubber lamps," recalled one expedition member. "Their clothes and gear were soaked with blubber, and the soot blackened them, their sleeping bags, cookers, walls and roof, choked their throats and inflamed their eyes."Remarkably, the men all survived and Levick returned to England in 1913 – in time to sign up for the first world war. He served in the Grand Fleet and at Gallipoli, and after the war founded the British Schools Exploring Society in 1932, of which he was president until his death in June 1956. An obituary described him as "a truly great English gentleman".

[Jolly Roger]

Do humans dream of android prostitutes?Sexbots/robostitutes: društvene, moralne, emotivne, medicinske, bračne, ekonomske implikacije... itd... zanimljivo... Edited June 11, 2012 by Jolly Roger

[dekss]

Scientists: Apple makes your brain go all religious

British neuroscientists declare that the brain of an Apple disciple is not dissimilar to those who experience religious devotion.

[hollow]

Mosquito inspired microneedle

[Aineko]

mozda nije bas zanimljivo za preterano siroku javnost, ali svaki bench slave...pardon, biomolecular PhD student ce me razumeti :Dspas od pipetiranjem izazvanog tendonitisa i dosadnih protokolaposebno zanimljivo je treniranje u virtuelnom okruzenju, tj. cinjenica da robot nije specijalista i moci ce da se prilagodi labovima koji rade na razlicitim organizmima/model sistemima.edit: ironija je samo sto ce verovatno moci da ga priuste samo oni labovi koji se bave poljima za koje je ionako vec skoro sve mehanizovano <_<

Edited July 28, 2012 by estel

[Aineko]

History as a science?