Posts tagged ‘Science’

August 22nd, 2009

Trying to make science respectable again

Forty years ago Americans were fascinated by science.

Science gave us Moon landings, microwave ovens and airbags. Science promised to end the drudgery in our lives, feed the hungry, extend our lifespans and cure our illnesses. Science was our great hope for the future.

In the last ten years or so we’ve seen our fascination with science replaced with disdain for intellectualism (see Anti-intellectualism is destroying America-FreThink.com and Anti-intellectualism-WayoftheMind.org)  and a return to fundamental theism. Under the influence of the ignorant and poorly informed, Americans have been encouraged to view science with scorn if not outright hostility. Science has been pitted against religious belief in what some portray as a winner-takes-all cage match. Where once Christians appreciated the contributions of science to our society they now consider science to be an effort to discredit their god. Science is being cast as the anti-Christ, the harbinger of the apocolypse. Theists claim that science is essentially atheistic and that atheists worship science instead of worshiping god. By attempting to conflate atheism with science they can dismiss the value of science with a clear conscience. Since scientists have failed to uncover any physical, conclusive and irrefutable evidence in support of a god, scientists must be anti-theism in the minds of the religious.

Atheism is the lack of a belief in gods. While the majority of those in the hard sciences identify themselves as atheists there are scientists who self-identify as theists.

A study has shown atheism in the west to be particularly prevalent among scientists, a tendency already quite marked at the beginning of the 20th century, developing into a dominant one during the course of the century. In 1914, James H. Leuba found that 58% of 1,000 randomly selected U.S. natural scientists expressed “disbelief or doubt in the existence of God” (defined as a personal God which interacts directly with human beings). The same study, repeated in 1996, gave a similar percentage of 60.7%; this number is 93% among the members of the National Academy of Sciences. Expressions of positive disbelief rose from 52% to 72%. (Source-Wikipedia)

This would indicate that science is not an exclusively atheistic field of study nor does it require an atheistic attitude to be a scientist.

Since theists can’t hope to do away with science they hope to pollute it with theistic mythology and ill-disguised attempts to turn theism into science with claims of an Intelligent Designer. Fundamental theists insist that science proceed from their bias alone. They insist that science adopt their conclusion (god did it) then make the evidence support that conclusion. They appear to be oblivious to the dishonesty inherent in this effort.

CreationismBothTheoriesTheists insist that evolution be taught as one theory among several and that ID is just as valid a theory as evolution. They make no effort to do the testing and research that may or may not substantiate their claims. Instead they insist we accept their claims just because they say we must.

As a result science has become diluted with nonsense and hampered by having to defend itself against poorly constructed and completely baseless claims of bias and atheism. Many of the complaints that theists lodge against scienceaccuse science of being materialistic. This betrays a lack of understanding of the
nature of science as well as ignorance of what “materialism” means.

But there are those in the sciences who are devoting themselves to making science popular again. They are doing their best to dispel the rumors, counter the lies and fight the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) being spread by science’s detractors.

Chris Mooney, author of ‘Unscientific America,’ talks about the significance of Pluto’s demotion from planet, the belief that vaccines are linked to autism, and the role played by religion.

Mooney, author of the 2005 bestseller “The Republican War on Science,” and his coauthor Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist at Duke University, seek to explain how Americans have come to minimize science in a time when, they assert, we will need it most — as global warming, advances in genetics and the possibility of large-scale engineering of the Earth’s climate loom in our future.

Pointing to what they see as a deep-seated streak of anti-intellectualism in this country, the authors write: “Americans built the bomb, reached the moon, decoded the genome, and created the Internet. And yet today this country is also home to a populace that, to an alarming extent, ignores scientific advances or outright rejects scientific principles.”

While not excusing the half of American adults who don’t know that the Earth orbits the sun once per year, Mooney and Kirshenbaum say that scientists hold the key to a better public understanding of science.

Religion is the reason they think they can’t accept evolution. That’s because they are told by their pastors from the pulpit, all across the country, that evolution is an assault on their identity, their moral universe and their ability to raise children who get taught this. So there’s been an attempt to create a hermetically sealed environment in the conservative Christian community that keeps this stuff out. And that’s a huge problem.

What’s preventing people from embracing science? We know it is religion, but do we really know why people are creationists? When I look at how many scientists approach the evolution issue, I don’t see that understanding.

If I read ScienceBlogs, what I see are endless eloquent refutations of the creationists based on science. It’s been done to death. Obviously, that doesn’t convince anybody. And that’s because people who don’t believe in evolution are not driven by scientific considerations. So that’s not how you should be trying to reach them

Clearly the Web is going to be part of the answer because there is no avoiding it. But I don’t think science-centered blogs or Twitter are going to be the way to reach beyond the people you are already reaching.

So you look at what kind of things have reached beyond. My best example is YouTube videos that go viral and get millions of views. There’s a couple of science videos that have really caught on. The Large Hadron Rap is the best. It’s rapping about the Large Hadron Collider. They go in the tube and they’re rapping about the fundamental nature of matter and what they’re going to discover, but it’s just cool. They are being nerds, but they are being fun nerds. It really was a smash hit.

Scientists are going to have to have a culture change. They will have to realize that it is important to train people in more than research. And the necessity of that is born out of the numbers game. Only a small number of people in graduate school today are going to be researchers because there aren’t enough positions. It will be a realignment of priorities for universities, granting agencies, and scientific societies.

I think a lot of executives at media companies need to have a mind-set change and stop thinking science coverage is death for ratings. That’s not necessarily so. The Discovery Channel is not doing that badly. Clearly, you can cover science well. The media needs to get over the “I’m-a-pissed-off-middle-school-student-and-science-isn’t-for-me” kind of mind set. Science coverage should be high-standard, it should be entertaining, it shouldn’t make them lose money. (Source-L.A. Times)

I wish them well. They face organized and well-financed opposition.

UNSPECIFIED - 1955: (FILE PHOTO) Actor Don He...

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What we really need is a Mr. Wizard for the 21st century.We need someone who can explain science and its findings in a way that is both entertaining and educational. We need to expose youngsters to the full history of the sciences as well as what the future could hold for a science-based society.

At the same time we need scientists like PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins to continue to speak out and expose the efforts of theists to compromise science and get around the scientific method. Atheism and science warrant separate defenses as they are not necessarily yoked. Just as not all scientists are atheists, not all atheists follow science. Both approaches to understanding our natural world may frequently come to similar conclusions, but that does not imply either correlation or causation.

We owe it to future generations to preserve our national dependence on and confidence in science.

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January 17th, 2009

Our world may be a giant hologram

For the past seven years, this German set-up has been looking for gravitational waves – ripples in space-time thrown off by super-dense astronomical objects such as neutron stars and black holes. GEO600 has not detected any gravitational waves so far, but it might inadvertently have made the most important discovery in physics for half a century.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

(Image: Wolfgang Filser / Max Planck Society)

(Image: Wolfgang Filser / Max Planck Society)

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.

The holograms you find on credit cards and banknotes are etched on two-dimensional plastic films. When light bounces off them, it recreates the appearance of a 3D image. In the 1990s physicists Leonard Susskind and Nobel prizewinner Gerard ‘t Hooft suggested that the same principle might apply to the universe as a whole. Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

The “holographic principle” challenges our sensibilities. It seems hard to believe that you woke up, brushed your teeth and are reading this article because of something happening on the boundary of the universe. No one knows what it would mean for us if we really do live in a hologram, yet theorists have good reasons to believe that many aspects of the holographic principle are true.

However Danzmann is cautious about Hogan’s proposal and believes more theoretical work needs to be done. “It’s intriguing,” he says. “But it’s not really a theory yet, more just an idea.” Like many others, Danzmann agrees it is too early to make any definitive claims. “Let’s wait and see,” he says. “We think it’s at least a year too early to get excited.”

So what would it mean it if holographic noise has been found? Cramer likens it to the discovery of unexpected noise by an antenna at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1964. That noise turned out to be the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the big bang fireball. “Not only did it earn Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson a Nobel prize, but it confirmed the big bang and opened up a whole field of cosmology,” says Cramer.

Hogan is more specific. “Forget Quantum of Solace, we would have directly observed the quantum of time,” says Hogan. “It’s the smallest possible interval of time – the Planck length divided by the speed of light.”

More importantly, confirming the holographic principle would be a big help to researchers trying to unite quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of gravity. Today the most popular approach to quantum gravity is string theory, which researchers hope could describe happenings in the universe at the most fundamental level. But it is not the only show in town. “Holographic space-time is used in certain approaches to quantising gravity that have a strong connection to string theory,” says Cramer. “Consequently, some quantum gravity theories might be falsified and others reinforced.”

Hogan agrees that if the holographic principle is confirmed, it rules out all approaches to quantum gravity that do not incorporate the holographic principle. Conversely, it would be a boost for those that do – including some derived from string theory and something called matrix theory. “Ultimately, we may have our first indication of how space-time emerges out of quantum theory.” As serendipitous discoveries go, it’s hard to get more ground-breaking than that. (Source-NewScientist)

Let yourself dwell on the possibilities raised in this article over the weekend. Think about the ramifications of finding out that our view of reality may be completely in error due to our limited senses as you go about your chores and do your shopping. Can we ever hope to step outside our conditioned world view and perceive reality as it truly exists?

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January 12th, 2009

The world’s only immortal animal

Turritopsis nutricula is a hydrozoan, and it’s considered by scientists to be the only animal that cheated death.

Solitary organisms are (according to current belief) doomed to die, after they completed their life cycle. Hydrozoa are a huge class of predatory animals that live mostly in saltwater, closely related to jellyfish and corals. Eggs and sperm from an adult jellyfish (medusa) and they then develop into polyp stage. Medusae evolve asexually from polyps.

Still, our Turritopsis nutricula managed to find a way to beat that. What these little folks do is they revert completely to a sexually immature, colonial stage after they reach sexual maturity. (Source-ZMEscience)

hydrozoa

I realize the article doesn’t go into enough depth on this, but suppose this behavior can be documented well enough to accept as plausible and possible. How does that impact our old belief that death comes to us all?

Death, the great equalizer. Nothing is certain but death and taxes. Death is the great reward, the deep sleep. For ages it has been the one certainty we could all agree on. We may not have the slightest clue what is going on in life, but we cannot deny that at the end of it all, every single living thing dies. Or does it?

Here’s a case where biology suggests a conflict between reality and the perception that every living thing dies. Maybe we’ve been wrong.

Isn’t it amazing that a simple polyp may possess the ability to do something that humans have wanted to be able to do for our entire history. A simple polyp can do something that religion has promised humanity since antiquity but never been able to bring to pass. All the promises, all the rewards, await us after death. We still all die. I think it’s safe to say that every person alive right now will die. But not this polyp.

On the other side of the aisle, how does this impact scientific presumptions? The presumption of death is pretty widespread. This might add a dimension to “life” that we have dismissed as impossible up to now.

Now that we understand how this process works, will we start to find other living things that practice immortality?

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July 2nd, 2008

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

From Wired:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

Einstein

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

The big target here isn’t advertising, though. It’s science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete. Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the “beautiful story” phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don’t know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about “dominant” and “recessive” genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton’s laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

In short, the more we learn about biology, the further we find ourselves from a model that can explain it.

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

Never before have such vast quantities of data been accessible to anyone anywhere.  Search is a far more useful tool than the scientific method for sorting through mountains of data.

Will correlation be enough?  Can it productively replace the scientific method?  Will the way we “do” science alter dramatically in the coming years?

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January 2nd, 2008

Scientists find missing evolutionary link using tiny fungus crystal

Creationists like to latch on to minor points to try and make major claims. One of the more popular latch points for them is the transition from single cell, or simple, lifeforms to the more complex, multicellular forms. Since up until now science has not had a ready explanation for that jump, creationists and the ID crowd want to assume that god must have been responsible. It does no good to tell these people that just because we don’t have an answer to the “how” in many of nature’s processes this does not lead logically to a conclusion that “god did it”.

Well, now we are a bit closer to understanding that change from simple to complex life, and there’s still no sign of a god’s involvement.

The crystal structure of a molecule from a primitive fungus has served as a time machine to show researchers more about the evolution of life from the simple to the complex.

By studying the three-dimensional version of the fungus protein bound to an RNA molecule, scientists from Purdue University and the University of Texas at Austin have been able to visualize how life progressed from an early self-replicating molecule that also performed chemical reactions to one in which proteins assumed some of the work.

“Now we can see how RNA progressed to share functions with proteins,” said Alan Lambowitz, director of the University of Texas Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology. “This was a critical missing step.”

Results of the study were published in Thursday’s (Jan. 3) issue of the journal Nature.

“It’s thought that RNA, or a molecule like it, may have been among the first molecules of life, both carrying genetic code that can be transmitted from generation to generation and folding into structures so these molecules could work inside cells,” said Purdue structural biologist Barbara Golden. “At some point, RNA evolved and became capable of making proteins. At that point, proteins started taking over roles that RNA played previously – acting as catalysts and building structures in cells.”

In order to show this and learn more about the evolution from RNA to more complex life forms, Lambowitz and Paul Paukstelis, lead author and a research scientist at the Texas institute, needed to be able to see how the fungus’ protein worked. That’s where Golden’s team joined the effort and crystallized the molecule at Purdue’s macromolecular crystallization facility.

“Obviously, we can’t see the process of moving from RNA to RNA and proteins and then to DNA, without a time machine,” Golden said. “But by using this fungus protein, we can see this process occurring in modern life.”

Looking at the crystal, the scientists saw two things, Golden said. One was that this protein uses two completely different molecular surfaces to perform its two roles. The second is that the protein seems to perform the same job that RNA performed in other simple organisms.

“The crystal structure provides a snapshot of how, during evolution, protein molecules came to assist RNA molecules in their biological functions and ultimately assumed roles previously played by RNA,” Golden said.

The rest of the article, and a cool animation of the crystal, at: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/x/2008a/080102GoldenEnzyme.html

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January 1st, 2008

ID, it deserves to be Expelled

Writing on the ScienceBlogs, pharyngula is someone I read daily. A while ago he posted this video, which he describes better than I ever could, and attempts to correct a few of the glaring misconceptions spouted by O’Reilly and Stein.

Two people vying to out-stupid each other

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Evolution (or as he called it, “Darwinism”) is a weak theory with many gaps that was fit for the 19th century, but not the 21st. This is a ludicrous statement; Darwin would scarcely recognize what we were talking about if he attended an evolutionary biology conference today. We’ve added genetics, population genetics, molecular biology, and developmental biology to the heart of the theory.
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ID is an effort to fill in the gaps, and is a sincere effort to add new knowledge to the theory. That’s false. Look at the books written by IDists: from Darwin’s Black Box to Icons of Evolution to The Edge of Evolution, they are all about complaining about evolution while providing no new useful suggestions for research.
*

This is a free speech issue, we just want to be able to express our side of the story. I don’t see anyone rushing to censor Fox News, or shutting down the printing presses that dare to publish Behe’s or Gonzalez’s books. This is not about free speech, and no one’s speech is being restricted. It is about quality education: will we have our kids taught baseless nonsense because some people want to smuggle their idiosyncratic religious beliefs into the classroom? It’s about quality research: shall we fund and support unproductive and scientifically indefensible ideas because a third-rate character actor likes them? It’s about defending what science is: science is not about wishing something were true and inventing excuse for it; it’s about serious self-criticism and substantial work going into testing ideas. ID simply isn’t science.

I think we get a good glimpse of the dogmatic and dishonest tack Expelled is going to take. It’s going to be one solid wall of lies, insisting that we must privilege the hypothesis that “a deity created life” with the same seriousness that we do population genetics or the biochemistry of abiogenesis.

Has anyone who doesn’t buy into the whole Intelligent Design nonsense seen this movie yet? I’d love to read an objective review.

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January 1st, 2008

Tied Up in Knots

From ScienceNewsOnline:

Call it Murphy’s Law of knots: If something can get tangled up, it will. “Anything that’s long and flexible seems to somehow end up knotted,” says Andrew Belmonte, an applied mathematician at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Belmonte has plenty of alarming anecdotal evidence. “It certainly happens in my house, with the cords of the venetian blind.” But the knot scourge is a global one, as anyone who owns a desktop computer can confirm after peeking at the mess of connection cables and power cords behind the desk.

Now, scientists think they may have found out how and why things find their way into knotty arrangements. By tumbling a string of rope inside a box, biophysicists Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith have discovered that knots—even complex knots—form surprisingly fast and often. The string first coils up, and then its free ends swivel around the other coils, tracing a random path among them. That essentially makes the coils into a braid, producing knots, the scientists say.

The results’ relevance may go well beyond explaining the epidemic of tangled venetian blind cords. That’s because spontaneous knots seem to be prevalent in nature, especially in biological molecules. For example, knottiness may be crucial to the workings of certain proteins (see “Knots in Proteins”). And knots can randomly form in DNA, hampering duplication or gene expression—so much so that living cells deploy special knot-chopping enzymes.

But even if Raymer and Smith’s results don’t prove to be directly relevant to the molecules of life, they are “a very good beginning” for a general study of physical knots, according to Belmonte. “Now we can at least ask these questions: Are there universal laws of knots?”

I find knots fascinating.  Chaotic systems tend to boggle the mind, and having your mind boggled now and then keeps it well exercised.  Another chaotic state that often frustrates scientists is turbulence.

A report from USA Today:

Turbulence does more than toss around luggage on airplanes and spill coffee on traveler’s laps — it confuses the heck out of scientists. A new experiment may suggest why — fluid dynamicists may have been missing something fundamental about turbulence for a good long time.

Renowned physicist Richard Feynman called turbulence the most important unsolved problem of classical physics, the body of engineering knowledge stretching roughly from Archimedes to Einstein. No one really understands precisely how the flow of gas or liquids transitions from smooth flow to choppy turbulence (not even something as simple as the point at which water from your tap goes from a smooth, or laminar, translucence to burbling foam.)

This drives engineers nuts (I can attest to this as a former engineer) because turbulence disrupts and drags air, gas and liquids that flow in and on everything from pipelines to airplane wings to artificial heart valves — all the apparatus of an industrial society — in ways both costly and unpredictable. To take just one example, turbulence costs U.S. airlines an annual $100 million due to injuries and delays, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s estimates.

Naturally, we do know some things about turbulence, observations that pertain to air, gas and liquids alike. “Generally, the motion of fluids is smooth and laminar at low speeds but becomes highly disordered and turbulent as the velocity increases,” notes a paper by a physics team led by Bjorn Hof of the United Kingdom’s University of Manchester in the current Nature. After making the full-fledged transition from smooth to turbulent flow, the paper adds, “it is generally assumed that, under steady conditions, the turbulent state will persist indefinitely.”

Whoops, maybe not. Experiments described by Hof’s team suggests that assumption may be wrong. The finding in fact suggests that turbulence may be reversible, contradicting decades of engineering dogma, and offering unexpected insight into how turbulence works.

The team looked at turbulence in an pipe nearly 100 feet long with an internal diameter of about 0.16 inches, allowing for turbulence observation times about 10 times longer than those undertaken by any other lab facility, the team contends. By injecting water into water flowing down the pipe to create “turbulent puffs,” the team attempted to measure whether turbulence persisted under different flow conditions. Turbulence cuts the speed of the water flowing out of the center of the pipe about 30% while increasing flow speed on the pipe’s walls, so that water flowing smoothly out of the pipe emerges with a differently-shaped jet than turbulent flow, making the measurements easy.

“In contrast to previous findings,” the team found that turbulence in the pipe always returned to smooth flows, if one waited long enough. The finding suggests that rather than turbulence obliterating smooth flow, fluids somehow retain the ability to reorganize themselves back into a regular pattern.

“This is a conceptual shift and a very intriguing one,” says mechanical engineer Charles Meneveau of the Turbulence Research Group at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. “There are big implications for control of pipe flow,” he says, cautioning that the results must now be confirmed by other researchers.

Let’s focus on that last sentence for a moment.  This is what separates scientific inquiry from religious belief; postulations in science are either confirmed or dismissed by other scientists conducting their own experiments, and those findings are tested, as are those findings.  Contrary evidence can derail a promising hypothesis.  In religion, evidence is “faith” based and purely personal.  Lack of evidence is dismissed, and nothing is presented that can be verified empirically.

I hope these articles get your new year started with an exercised brain.

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January 1st, 2008

2008 National High School Essay Contest

From Alliance for Science:
2008 National High School Essay Contest
For our second annual National High School Essay Contest we invite students to submit essays of not more than 1,000 words on one of two topics — “Climate and Evolution” or “Agriculture and Evolution.”

Submission deadline is February 29, 2008.

Student prizes start with $300 for first place, and includes incentives for sponsoring teachers. Watch those word counts! Several essays among our early submissions have no word count on the registration form, or the word count is over 1,000. Read the Official Rules – essays must be no longer than 1,000 words!

Eligibility:

All students in grade twelve or below in the United States or U.S. territories. Eligible students must be attending a public, private, parochial school, home school or participating in a high school correspondence program. Eligibility of
prospective winners will be verified before the award of any prizes. Alliance for Science members and their families are not eligible. Essay contest judges and their families are also not eligible.

Essay Ideas:

Throughout the ages, the earth has undergone major climate change. Some present-day cities were once covered in sheets of ice and some temperate zones were once lush tropics. These changes had a significant effect on the types of animals that thrived and the species that became extinct. If climate change speeds up, what will happen to the environments where endangered animals now live? How do the latest scientific projections of the rate of climate change compare with the spans of time over which evolution has occurred? Will new species of plants and animals arise with the characteristics needed to adapt to an altered climate, or will many forms of life simply become extinct?
When considering this issue, think about how evolution has shaped the variation in animal characteristics like fur and insulating features like the down feathers of geese that protect against the cold. “Warm blooded” animals such as mammals are generally more able to cope with temperature variation than reptiles. Are changes in global climate pattern likely to affect the distribution of these different animal types? Consider migratory animals – will changes in the weather disrupt the timing or destinations of migratory birds or animal herds?
Even the human body may not be immune to the impact of climate. Will this alter the future evolution of the human species, or will technological factors completely compensate for any potential change in climate?

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