News Briefs 20-04-2012
Posted by G.C at 06:43, 20 Apr 2012"Science asymptotically approaches reality."
- Pioneer anomaly, solved.
- Will the earth get sucker-punched by super solar storms?
- Ultra High Energy Cosmic Ray mystery remains unsolved.
- Lyrid meteor shower peaks this weekend.
- Missing dark matter rattles latest theories.
- Orbiton, detected.
- The sounds of satellite silence.
- Swedish Stonehenge?
- Ancient 'Wave of Poseidon' was legit.
- Sorry, Sedna.
- Synthetic DNA evolves. More here on XNA.
- Blink and you’ll miss it.
- Melting glaciers give ancient microbes new life.
- Unearthing the ‘tree of life’s’ roots.
- 3,000 Buddhas, buried no more.
- Did fire and eggs spell doom for dinosaurs?
- The marine fossils of Pedra de Fogo.
- Where nature grows, so do test scores.
- Brain’s singular ‘god spot’, disproven.
- From scar tissue to beating heart muscle.
- Talking plants and further proof they’re smarter than you think.
- The daze of apocalyptic days.
- Superman can have his X-Ray vision-- All I need is my trusty cellphone.
- 2029, the year we achieve fusion?
- Want to live forever, sans vampires? Eat buckyballs.
- Two brains, one consciousness… Welcome Spock.
- The co-mingling of Quantum Physics and Consciousness.
- Printing meds... Prescriptions are so last Friday.
- Kenya, centerpiece of evolution.
- Wytheville UFOs 25 years later and a crowd-sourced documentary by the witnesses.
- Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver… check!
- Chris Carter's 'Science & Psychic Phenomena', reviewed. Available here.
- Vacuum tube travel - The next Springfield monorail?
- How the light-saber’s sound was born.
- The hazy history of 420.
- This week’s evidence of the looming robot uprising… robot vision, unraveled.
With thanks to RPG, RMG and GT!
Quote of the Day:
“I am using the word theory as a scientist means it: a set of ideas so well established by observations and physical models that it is essentially indistinguishable from fact. That is different from the colloquial use that means "guess." To a scientist, you can bet your life on a theory. Remember, gravity is "just a theory" too.”
Philip C. Plait
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Comments
29 January 2009
23 hours 7 min
The Phil Plait quote apparently confuses two things: observations and theories.
Gravity as a "set of ideas...well established by observations and physical models" is indeed so well established you could indeed pretty much bet your life on it (though it still has so many anomalous glitches particularly on the cosmic scale of things it requires dark matter and dark energy to explain many of them away).
The current theory of gravity though depends on the graviton and if he'd staked his life on it being found any time during the last several decades he'd've lost it.
It may still be a few decades off before it's worth his while risking staking his life on the graviton - but by then a newer and better theory may've come along to explain why the graviton could never've really existed in the first place (or why its existence or otherwise is actually irrelevent).
1 May 2004
1 day 20 hours
According to this report, Pioneer 10 is accellerating towards the sun... I always thought it was heading out of the Solar System, in other words, away from the sun.
Or have I totally misread or misunderstood the report and mission?
Nostra