Thoughts, ramblings and other stuff

The biggest news today is free flowing water on Mars. Google has a doodle already. And it's been on all the websites and news and late night shows. In perfect timing all of those also run the commercials for The Martian. It's almost as if that movie PR planned it for the marketing campaign.

It was suspected before with a photos that looked like a streams but we needed to be sure.
This time we knew where and when to look and here it is. Multiple photos and spectral analysis. Just like previously suspected it is very high in salt which is why it stays liquid in Mars cold atmosphere.




And for those of you who like me couldn't see it or were just asleep last night here are photos of the Supermoon Lunar Eclipse. It's pretty in red (although the previous ones I remember and in my dads description from Poland it's more brown in real life) but all I could see through clouds was this:

Remember that "impossible" drive that everyone agreed cannot work but few labs made it work? Sceptics said that it wasn't really working. That thrust was just natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating or some other environmental conditions external to the drive. So NASA used it in vacuum and it still works. The physicist are very aggravated as noone understands how it works. It's like something out of an sf novel. I hope it's really true. Not just because space travel but also because there a whole new branch of physics that will need to explain this. And maybe other impossible things are possible too - like wormholes at reasonable energy levels.

After all there are other planets out there. We discover more and more everyday and now you can name them. The International Astronomical Union started a NameExoWorlds contest were you can propose popular names for 15 stars and 32 planets. Just remember you need to explain your choices.

So if we are getting ready to space travel maybe also same better power storage system. Tesla just made new batteries. Not just for cars - for houses. Right now if you generate your own power (solar, wind, etc.) you cannot really store it. You can sell it back to the grid but it's usually at the times when it's least necessary (solar) or it's unpredictable (wind). But if you could store it for the night and cloudy days it wouldn't go to waste. That's what these are supposed to accomplish. And they come in different colours.

And something needs to run the calculations for all that space travel and new physics. Good thing that IBM just made a crucial breakthrough in quantum computing. They found a new method for correcting errors on a quantum circuit. Unfortunately quantum bits are prone to spontaneous flipping between 0 and 1 or changing the sign of the phase relationship. Those two types of quantum error (called bit-flip and phase-flip) that will occur in any real quantum computer. IBM found a way to detect them both at the same time which should allow for greater reliability of quantum computers which should finally make them usable.

Every year Science organises the Dance Your PhD contest. Here are all the finalist from Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Social Sciences categories. And this is the winner:


Science isn't always easy to portray in art and it's rarely accurate but Interstellar had it's own science advisor Kip Thorne is Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena design some of it's special effects. New Scientist has spoiler-free guide to the science of Interstellar. Space ships and science - two things I really like together.

And here is first teaser trailer for season 3 of Orphan Black - just in time for Orphan Black Friday

In celebration of Yuri's Night tomorrow this is a science post.

There is going to be a series of Lunar eclipses - roughly every 6 months - and the first one will happen this Monday night. By fluke, Monday is also the date of Mars’s closest approach to Earth, when our neighboring planet should appear larger and brighter than usual. Both Americas will see it whole early on Tuesday - the lunar eclipse will start around 2 a.m. EDT and and around 5 with totality, called the umbra, at 3:45 a.m. EDT.

The LHC discovered a strange new particle known as Z(4430). This new particle is about four times more massive than a proton, has a negative charge, and appears to be a theoretical particle known as a tetraquark. There were previous indications of this state of matter but LHC caught ten times more events then anybody else so we are more certain this is something that can exist. Due to strong force rules quarks cannot exist outside particles - they have to be together with other quarks to create a particle that has neutral colour charge. So baryons - protons and neutrons - have neutral colour because they contain quarkks with all three colour charges (blue, red and green) and mesons are neutral because they have a quark with colour charge and quark with a anti-that colour charge.

Under the rules of the strong force, there are other ways quarks could combine to form a neutral particle. One of these, the tetraquark, combines four quarks, where two particles have a particular color and the other two have the corresponding anti-colors. Others, such as the pentaquark (3 colors + a color anti-color pair) and the hexaquark (3 colors + 3 anti-colors) have been proposed. But so far all of these have been hypothetical.

Now we are starting to capture those theoretical particles and we even know what they are made of - Z(4430) is made of a charm, an anti-charm, a down and an anti-up quarks.

Four teenagers were successfully implanted with lab-grown vaginas. The surgery was done 5 to 8 years ago and the organs are are working normally in four teenage patients who were among the first people to receive such an implant. All of them were born with a rare genetic condition - Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome - in which the vagina and uterus are underdeveloped or absent. The The vaginas were grown in a lab from patients own cells from small sample of vulvar tissue. The cells were grown on two sides of scaffold to get the right shape and the two different cell types vaginas are made of - muscle cells and vaginal epithelial cells. When the organs were ready the doctors implanted them connecting uterus with surgically made cavity. And now they work. Hopefully, all the people who need a vagina will have access to this procedure soon.

This Jason Barnes playing drums with his new metal prosthetic arm

Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded for cell package delivery system - vesicles. Membranes not only separate cells from outside but also create separate compartments inside the cell - most notably nucleus and mitochondria - but there is also long series of something that looks almost like a tube system. Ribosomes stick to part of it and produce proteins. Those proteins end up inside and can be transported inside but the system is long and twisted. Just like it's faster to take a ferry from Gdańsk to Stockholm then drive all around the Baltic Sea it is faster to send a stuff packaged from one compartment to the other. In a vesicle. That transport is highly regulated and used for many different things. That's how cells absorb the food from outside, how they spit out and absorb hormones and how they transport transmembrane proteins. All the countless ours I spent learning how the phagocytosis and endoplasmic reticulum and Golgi apparatus worked I never thought about people who made all those discoveries. It's funny how at some point things like that become basic knowledge of the subject - something you just know.

Prof James Rothman, from Yale University, found proteins embedded in the vesicles which act as the docking mechanism meaning the cargo is released in the correct location. Prof Randy Schekman, from the University of California at Berkeley, discovered the genes which regulated the transport system in yeast. He found that mutations in three genes resulted in a "situation resembling a poorly planned public transport system". Prof Thomas Sudhof, originally from Germany but now at Stanford University in the US, made breakthroughs in how the transport system works in the brain so that neurotransmitters are released at the precise time.

I was disappointed at the journalist disappointment because this is a very important system in the cell and the basic science Nobels are the ones touching the most important subjects.

Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to people who theorized existence of Higgs boson - Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and François Englert of the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, have won for developing the theory of how particles acquire mass. The theory is 50 years old but the experimental confirmation is brand new - not even a year old - so the delay in the announcement wasn't that surprising. Ever since few spectacular mistakes at the beginning Nobel committee has preference for waiting long enough to see that no one disproves it and that multiple sources can repeat the results. Still this was a big thing in physics and a long awaited one. And if they didn't do it now there might've not been another chance. Both laureates are in their 80s and Nobels are not given to dead people. I'm most disappointed in comparisons of the problems of finding Peter Higgs for comment during his vacation with the search for Higgs boson.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to theoretical chemists for devising computer simulations to understand chemical processes. Michael Levitt, a British-US citizen of Stanford University; US-Austrian Martin Karplus of Strasbourg University; and US-Israeli Arieh Warshel of the University of Southern California will share the prize. Modelling molecules is becoming a bigger and bigger thing in drug production where new molecular compounds are first tested for possible uses and molecular interactions before spending money on costly synthesis. It can also help predict protein shape and function which helps to understand how cell processes actually work. Those programs use the equations of quantum physics to simulate reactions as closely to reality as possible. It of course requires vast amounts of computing power to describe every electron and atomic nucleus so these detailed models are limited to small molecules with just a few atoms. To model larger molecules we still need to use classical computer models but they do not include descriptions of molecules' energy states, which is vital for simulating reactions. Still they both allow us to sift faster through the possibilities then any RL experiment and concentrate on most plausible possibilities making discoveries faster and drugs (just a little) cheaper.

The Google Doodle today is for Rosalind Franklin's 96th birthday. She's the physicist who took x-ray photos of DNA molecule that allowed Watson and Crick to deduce the DNA structure. She died years before the Nobel award for DNA structure discovery so she wasn't eligible but the way her achievements were marginalised meant she probably wouldn't get it anyway. I first heard about her when I watched The Race for the Double Helix Back in primary school. By the time I was actually learning about her in school she had a front seat among pantheon of women scientists. I was completely shocked that she was considered unknown which shows that I underestimated misogyny from very early age.

Of course, if she lived she might've discovered DNA structure herself and she might've gotten the Nobel. If it wasn't for ovarian cancer she might've been still alive today and advanced science in many other ways. Ovarian cancer is still one of the deadliest mostly because the late stage detection due to lack of symptoms. So if you think about contributing to science think about contributing to fighting it.

So I concentrated on body augmentation but other things happened in science recently, too.

We learned last years that dolphins introduce themselves by name (their signature whistle) but it turns out they also call friends and family members by their names (copy their signature whistles) when they look for them. That's makes them the only other animals, other then us, who call each other by names. And they also exhibit almost all our social behaviours - from extremely good to extremely bad - which shows on how fragile foundations our feeling of uniqueness is built (and that you think before you eat someone's mum).

Our whole universe might be even more fragile as scientist who study Higgs boson think that if the the recently discovered Higgs-like particle is really Higgs then its mass would make the universe inherently unstable, like a pencil balanced on its point. The vacuum of space should be most stable at its lowest energy and current Higgs mass calculations indicate that this is not it yet so our space is only temporarily stable and will ultimately collapse. Eventually, a little bubble of an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us. But some experimental results indicate that there might be more particles so Supersymmetry may save the universe, yet.

Speaking of pens and 3D-prining (I know it seems to pop up everywhere recently) - you can kickstart (and eventually own) a 3D-printing pen. It will use fast solidifying plastic and you will be able to doodle objects that you can then play with. This is like my childhood coming true as one of my favourite Polish children toons was Zaczarowany Ołówek (Enchanted Pencil) - whatever the main hero drew with that pencil became a real 3D-object. I used to wish I could have a pencil like that. Now, I can. I love living in 21st century.

I have to give a presentation tomorrow so I just wanted to post this nice explanation of this year's Physics Nobel

Kelly Thompson wrote a book about two superheroines (and already funded its publication) and decided to do 30 Days Of Superheroines to celebrate that. She posts collections of art for chosen superheroine everyday and it's so pretty. I also learned that there exists a version of Psylocke costume that doesn't suck. Why, oh why can't she wear this in comics:


Hearing the news about discover of Higgs-like particle the researchers at Europe's DANTE decided to hear what the boson sounded like and "sonifyied" the latest batch of collider data and io9 kindly posted it for us all to hear how pretty the mass sound like:

Did you ever do something stupid? Something you realised was a mistake the moment you finished doing it. You should've known better but somehow you did it anyway. I just did that. It's not life threatening or even changing but it can make my life annoying for a while. I feel so stupid because I'm usually so careful. I suppose it was just the amount of forms and sign ups and computer installations and registrations I did this week. I just missed the signs of the spam one until it was too late.

This however makes me feel more understanding for the OPERA scientist who finally announced that the neutrinos don't violate the light speed limit. Even though the mistakes were pretty mundane (a leaky fibre-optic cable and a malfunctioning clock) and the results were exactly what the scientists observing these "FTL" neutrinos always expected (they were wrong) it's still has to be hard admitting your mistakes in public. Especially, after it made all the news and got the public excited. The feeling of shame is not pleasant one. I certainly feel like kicking myself for being so stupid and falling for the stupidest spam scam. Their must feel awful. And then there are those crazies who will use it to prove scientist to be liars and wrong. Even though today announcement is exactly how science works (should work) - the results were tested and when they didn't pan out they were discarded. So at least they have that.

I just made the basic mistake as if it was my first day on the internets.Feel free to point and laugh.