“Where’s my flying car?” is something of an informal motto among technology malcontents, annoyed that the science fiction of the 50s never materialized – but that funeral selfies did.
Well, there’s a solid answer to this question now: your flying car is in Vienna, but you’ll need a few hundred thousand euros, a personal airfield and a pilot’s licence to use it."------http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/...25958.html
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/11865...-certainty
EXCERPT (Carlo Rovelli): ...in my field, fundamental theoretical physics, for thirty years we have failed. There hasn’t been a major success in theoretical physics in the last few decades after the standard model, somehow. Of course there are ideas. These ideas might turn out to be right [...] or not. But we don’t know, and for the moment Nature has not said yes, in any sense. I suspect that this might be in part because of the wrong ideas we have about science, and because methodologically we’re doing something wrong—at least in theoretical physics, and perhaps also in other sciences.
[...] The very expression “scientifically proven” is a contradiction in terms. There’s nothing that is scientifically proven. The core of science is the deep awareness that we have wrong ideas, we have prejudices. We have ingrained prejudices. In our conceptual structure for grasping reality, there might be something not appropriate, something we may have to revise to understand better. So at any moment we have a vision of reality that is effective, it’s good, it’s the best we have found so far. It’s the most credible we have found so far; it’s mostly correct. But, at the same time, it’s not taken as certain, and any element of it is a priori open for revision. Why do we have this continuous "?"...
[...] This takes me to another point, which is, Should a scientist think about philosophy or not? It’s the fashion today to discard philosophy, to say now that we have science, we don’t need philosophy. I find this attitude naïve, for two reasons. One is historical. Just look back. Heisenberg would have never done quantum mechanics without being full of philosophy. Einstein would have never done relativity without having read all the philosophers and having a head full of philosophy. Galileo would never have done what he did without having a head full of Plato. Newton thought of himself as a philosopher and started by discussing this with Descartes and had strong philosophical ideas.
Even Maxwell, Boltzmann—all the major steps of science in the past were done by people who were very aware of methodological, fundamental, even metaphysical questions being posed. When Heisenberg does quantum mechanics, he is in a completely philosophical frame of mind. He says that in classical mechanics there’s something philosophically wrong, there’s not enough emphasis on empiricism. It is exactly this philosophical reading that allows him to construct that fantastically new physical theory, quantum mechanics.
The divorce between this strict dialogue between philosophers and scientists is very recent, in the second half of the 20th century. It has worked because in the first half of the 20th century people were so smart. Einstein and Heisenberg and Dirac and company put together relativity and quantum theory and did all the conceptual work. The physics of the second half of the century has been, in a sense, a physics of application of the great ideas of the people of the ’30s—of the Einsteins and the Heisenbergs.
When you want to apply these ideas, when you do atomic physics, you need less conceptual thinking. But now we’re back to basics, in a sense. When we do quantum gravity, it's not just application. The scientists who say “I don't care about philosophy” —it’s not true that they don’t care about philosophy, because they have a philosophy. They’re using a philosophy of science. They’re applying a methodology. They have a head full of ideas about what philosophy they’re using; they’re just not aware of them and they take them for granted, as if this were obvious and clear, when it’s far from obvious and clear. They’re taking a position without knowing that there are many other possibilities around that might work much better and might be more interesting for them.
There is narrow-mindedness, if I may say so, in many of my colleagues who don’t want to learn what’s being said in the philosophy of science. There is also a narrow-mindedness in a lot of areas of philosophy and the humanities, whose proponents don’t want to learn about science—which is even more narrow-minded. Restricting our vision of reality today to just the core content of science or the core content of the humanities is being blind to the complexity of reality, which we can grasp from a number of points of view. The two points of view can teach each other and, I believe, enlarge each other.
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/195
EXCERPT: As humans, we’re often told to celebrate our individuality and the unique features that distinguish us from each other. But what about elementary particles? Is one electron pretty much the same as the next? It may seem like a frivolous question, but the answer has profound consequences for the foundations of quantum theory. When carrying out quantum calculations, physicists must assume that electrons are identical and indistinguishable, and they formalize this using a rule called the symmetrization postulate. So far, experiments seem to back this procedure. But Philip Goyal, a physicist at the University of Albany, New York, wants to know if the rule is just a mathematical trick needed to get the sums to work, or if it is a true feature of reality. What he discovers could have implications for the existence of unexpected new elementary particles....
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/30/scienc...today.html
EXCERPT: [...] The scientists compared these genomes with those of living Europeans. As they reported last month in Nature, the study revealed something scientists never knew: Europeans today have genes from three very different populations.
The oldest of these populations were the first Europeans, who appear to have lived as hunter-gatherers. The second were farmers who expanded into Europe about 8,500 years ago from the Near East.
But most living Europeans also carry genes from a third population, which appears to have arrived more recently. Dr. Reich and his colleagues found the closest match in DNA taken from a 24,000-year-old individual in Siberia, suggesting that the third wave of immigrants hailed from north Eurasia. The ancient Europeans that the scientists studied did not share this North Eurasian DNA. They concluded that this third wave must have moved into Europe after 7,000 years ago.
[...] It is not until 6,400 years ago that the scientists find the first genetic evidence on the Great Hungarian Plain for light brown hair. And the milk mutation appeared even later, just 3,100 years ago.
It is possible that these new genes and others were brought to the plain by successive waves of immigrants. But natural selection probably played a role in making these genes pervasive....
http://www.livescience.com/48543-how-zom...lture.html
EXCERPT: ...the modern conception of a zombie dates back to 1968, in a movie that doesn't so much as use the word: George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead." "He didn't call them zombies, and he didn't think about them as zombies," said Ozzy Inguanzo [...] "Audiences saw these lumbering dead people, and they called them zombies … therefore, they became zombies," he said. Since then, the walking undead have wormed their way into video games, comic books [...] The true zombie origin story dates back further than 1968, of course. The sad beginning of the myth harks back to Haiti during the 1600s and 1700s, when African slaves were worked to death on sugar plantations. As UC Irvine journalism instructor Amy Wilentz pointed out in the New York Times in 2012, it's not hard to see how the notion of a dead body, stripped of will and personality, forced to do the bidding of a sorcerer, would occur to an enslaved people....
http://www.livescience.com/48502-magic-m...works.html
EXCERPT: Magic mushrooms may give users trippy experiences by creating a hyperconnected brain. The active ingredient in the psychedelic drug, psilocybin, seems to completely disrupt the normal communication networks in the brain, by connecting "brain regions that don't normally talk together," said study co-author Paul Expert, a physicist at King's College London. The research, which was published Oct. 28 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, is part of a larger effort to understand how psychedelic drugs work, in the hopes that they could one day be used by psychiatrists — in carefully controlled settings — to treat conditions such as depression, Expert said....
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...103114.php
New Haven, Conn. – Geologists are letting the air out of a nagging mystery about the development of animal life on Earth.
Scientists have long speculated as to why animal species didn't flourish sooner, once sufficient oxygen covered the Earth's surface. Animals began to prosper at the end of the Proterozoic period, about 800 million years ago — but what about the billion-year stretch before that, when most researchers think there also was plenty of oxygen?
Well, it seems the air wasn't so great then, after all.
In a study published Oct. 30 in Science, Yale researcher Noah Planavsky and his colleagues found that oxygen levels during the "boring billion" period were only 0.1% of what they are today. In other words, Earth's atmosphere couldn't have supported a diversity of creatures, no matter what genetic advancements were poised to occur.
"There is no question that genetic and ecological innovation must ultimately be behind the rise of animals, but it is equally unavoidable that animals need a certain level of oxygen," said Planavsky, co-lead author of the research along with Christopher Reinhard of the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We're providing the first evidence that oxygen levels were low enough during this period to potentially prevent the rise of animals."
The scientists found their evidence by analyzing chromium (Cr) isotopes in ancient sediments from China, Australia, Canada, and the United States. Chromium is found in the Earth's continental crust, and chromium oxidation is directly linked to the presence of free oxygen in the atmosphere.
Specifically, the team studied samples deposited in shallow, iron-rich ocean areas, near the shore. They compared their data with other samples taken from younger locales known to have higher levels of oxygen.
Oxygen's role in controlling the first appearance of animals has long vexed scientists. "We were missing the right approach until now," Planavsky said. "Chromium gave us the proxy." Previous estimates put the oxygen level at 40% of today's conditions during pre-animal times, leaving open the possibility that oxygen was already plentiful enough to support animal life.
In the new study, the researchers acknowledged that oxygen levels were "highly dynamic" in the early atmosphere, with the potential for occasional spikes. However, they said, "It seems clear that there is a first-order difference in the nature of Earth surface Cr cycling" before and after the rise of animals.
"If we are right, our results will really change how people view the origins of animals and other complex life, and their relationships to the co-evolving environment," said co-author Tim Lyons of the University of California-Riverside. "This could be a game changer."
"There's a lot of interest right now in a broader discussion surrounding the role that environmental stability played in the evolution of complex life, and we think our results are a significant contribution to that," Reinhard said.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...103114.php
EXCERPT: The pathogen Giardia duodenalis is present in mussels from freshwater run-off sites and from areas where California Sea Lions lounge along the coast of California, according to a team of researchers from the University of California, Davis. One of the G. duodenalis strains found is known to infect humans; the two others occur mostly in dogs and other canids. "Thus, the detection of these assemblages implies a potential public health risk if consuming fecally contaminated water or uncooked shellfish," says coauthor Woutrina Smith. The research is published ahead of print in Applied and Environmental Microbiology....
