Friday, November 1

SCIENCE

An Atmospheric Scientist Explains The Weather Phenomenon Known As A Heat Dome Baking California And The West
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE

An Atmospheric Scientist Explains The Weather Phenomenon Known As A Heat Dome Baking California And The West

A heat dome occurs when a persistent region of high pressure traps heat over an area. The heat dome can stretch over several states and linger for days to weeks, leaving the people, crops and animals below to suffer through stagnant, hot air that can feel like an oven. Typically, heat domes are tied to the behavior of the jet stream, a band of fast winds high in the atmosphere that generally runs west to east. Normally, the jet stream has a wavelike pattern, meandering north and then south and then north again. When these meanders in the jet stream become bigger, they move slower and can become stationary. That’s when heat domes can occur. Heat domes involve high-pressure areas that trap and heat up the air below. NOAA When the jet stream swings far to the north, air piles up and sinks. ...
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A Black Hole At The Center Of The Milky Way Galaxy – Say Hello To Sagittarius A*
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE

A Black Hole At The Center Of The Milky Way Galaxy – Say Hello To Sagittarius A*

On May 12, 2022, astronomers on the Event Horizon Telescope team released an image of a black hole called Sagittarius A* that lies at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Chris Impey, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, explains how the team got this image and why it is such a big deal. This image shows Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. EHT Collaboration, CC BY-SA 1. What is Sagittarius A*? Sagittarius A* sits at the the center of our Milky Way galaxy, in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. For decades, astronomers have been measuring blasts of radio waves from an extremely compact source there. In the 1980s, two teams of astronomers started tracking the motions of stars near this mysterious source of radio waves. They saw stars whir...
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Uncovering The Genetic Basis Of Mental Illness Requires Data And Tools That Aren’t Just Based On White People – A International Team Is Collecting DNA Samples Around The Globe
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE, VIDEO REELS

Uncovering The Genetic Basis Of Mental Illness Requires Data And Tools That Aren’t Just Based On White People – A International Team Is Collecting DNA Samples Around The Globe

Mental illness is a growing public health problem. In 2019, an estimated 1 in 8 people around the world were affected by mental disorders like depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. While scientists have long known that many of these disorders run in families, their genetic basis isn’t entirely clear. One reason why is that the majority of existing genetic data used in research is overwhelmingly from white people. In 2003, the Human Genome Project generated the first “reference genome” of human DNA from a combination of samples donated by upstate New Yorkers, all of whom were of European ancestry. Researchers across many biomedical fields still use this reference genome in their work. But it doesn’t provide a complete picture of human genetics. Someone with a different genetic a...
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Frank Drake – The Drake Equation, For Alien Intelligence Is More Important Than Ever
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE

Frank Drake – The Drake Equation, For Alien Intelligence Is More Important Than Ever

How many intelligent civilizations should there be in our galaxy right now? In 1961, the US astrophysicist Frank Drake, who passed away on September 2 at the age of 92, came up with an equation to estimate this. The Drake equation, dating from a stage in his career when he was “too naive to be nervous” (as he later put it), has become famous and bears his name. This places Drake in the company of towering physicists with equations named after them including James Clerk Maxwell and Erwin Schrödinger. Unlike those, Drake’s equation does not encapsulate a law of nature. Instead it combines some poorly known probabilities into an informed estimate. Whatever reasonable values you feed into the equation (see image below) it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we shouldn’t be alone in the ga...
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Network Science Uncovers The Hidden Structure Of Community Dynamics – From In-Crowds To Power Couples
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SCIENCE

Network Science Uncovers The Hidden Structure Of Community Dynamics – From In-Crowds To Power Couples

The world is a networked place, literally and figuratively. The field of network science is used today to understand phenomena as diverse as the spread of misinformation, West African trade and protein-protein interactions in cells. Network science has uncovered several universal properties of complex social networks, which in turn has made it possible to learn details of particular networks. For example, the network consisting of the international financial corruption scheme uncovered by the Panama Papers investigation has an unusual lack of connections among its parts. But understanding the hidden structures of key elements of social networks, such as subgroups, has remained elusive. My colleagues and I have found two complex patterns in these networks that can help researchers better ...
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Changing Science Education To Improve Science Literacy
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EDUCATION, SCIENCE

Changing Science Education To Improve Science Literacy

To graduate with a science major, college students must complete between 40 and 60 credit hours of science coursework. That means spending around 2,500 hours in the classroom throughout their undergraduate career. However, research has shown that despite all that effort, most college science courses give students only a fragmented understanding of fundamental scientific concepts. The teaching method reinforces memorization of isolated facts, proceeding from one textbook chapter to the next without necessarily making connections between them, instead of learning how to use the information and connect those facts meaningfully. The ability to make these connections is important beyond the classroom as well, because it’s the basis of science literacy: the ability to use scientific knowledge ...
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Robots Can Be Companions, Caregivers, Collaborators — And Social Influencers
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY

Robots Can Be Companions, Caregivers, Collaborators — And Social Influencers

In the mid-1990s, there was research going on at Stanford University that would change the way we think about computers. The Media Equation experiments were simple: participants were asked to interact with a computer that acted socially for a few minutes after which, they were asked to give feedback about the interaction. Participants would provide this feedback either on the same computer (No. 1) they had just been working on or on another computer (No. 2) across the room. The study found that participants responding on computer No. 2 were far more critical of computer No. 1 than those responding on the same machine they’d worked on. People responding on the first computer seemed to not want to hurt the computer’s feelings to its face, but had no problem talking about it behind its back...
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Seeing The Universe More Clearly Than Even Its Own Engineers Hoped For – The James Webb Space Telescope Is Finally Ready To Do Science
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY

Seeing The Universe More Clearly Than Even Its Own Engineers Hoped For – The James Webb Space Telescope Is Finally Ready To Do Science

NASA is scheduled to release the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope on July 12, 2022. They’ll mark the beginning of the next era in astronomy as Webb – the largest space telescope ever built – begins collecting scientific data that will help answer questions about the earliest moments of the universe and allow astronomers to study exoplanets in greater detail than ever before. But it has taken nearly eight months of travel, setup, testing and calibration to make sure this most valuable of telescopes is ready for prime time. Marcia Rieke, an astronomer at the University of Arizona and the scientist in charge of one of Webb’s four cameras, explains what she and her colleagues have been doing to get this telescope up and running. 1. What’s happened since the telescope launch...
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Why Doesn’t Anybody Seem To Care That The US Military Has Officially Published Three UFO Videos?
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IN OTHER NEWS, SCIENCE

Why Doesn’t Anybody Seem To Care That The US Military Has Officially Published Three UFO Videos?

On April 27, 2020, the US Department of Defense issued a public statement authorising the release of three “UFO” videos taken by US Navy pilots. The footage appears to depict airborne, heat-emitting objects with no visible wings, fuselage or exhaust, performing aerodynamically in ways that no known aircraft can achieve. The DoD doesn’t use the terms “unidentified flying object” or “UFO” but does clearly state “the aerial phenomena observed in the videos remain characterized as ‘unidentified’.” Thoughts about what UFOs are vary widely – from illusions to alien spacecraft. However, a workable, conservative definition is: “intelligently-controlled airborne objects not apparently made by humans”. Only a small fraction of UFO reports collected globally over the past seven decades seem to des...
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Just Remember The Story Of Philipp Lenard And Albert Einstein – When Science Gets Ugly
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SCIENCE

Just Remember The Story Of Philipp Lenard And Albert Einstein – When Science Gets Ugly

Scientists are not always as scientific as many suppose. Recent well-publicized cases of scientific fraud prove that scientists can be as susceptible to the allures of wealth, power and fame as politicians, the group that enjoys the lowest public trust. Glaring recent cases have included falsified results in the development of an HIV vaccine and new techniques for producing stem cells. The dispute between Philipp Lenard and Albert Einstein sheds considerable light on the power of nonscientific concerns to sway scientists. NASA via Wikimedia Commons Such breaches prove that scientists do not always base their work strictly on rigorous experimentation, data collection and analysis, and hypothesis testing. In fact, scientists frequently disagree with one another, both as individuals and as ...
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