Science Talk
Some strange things are going on in science right now. I never thought I would hear any scientist say what I’m about to tell you, but a physicist did say this. He said he was getting worried, because of some of the things we found out while we was smashing protons together. He came out with a statement which indicated the source of his worry was that he felt we may be at a point in physics where we will never be able to find out any more about how the universe works. This sort of reminds me of a statement which was made over 100 years ago by the head of the patent office in the United States. He wanted to close down the patent office, because he said there couldn’t possibly be any more inventions and that everything that could be invented already was. I think just because it may be harder and take longer to find things out doesn’t mean we never will. The human race is very resilient. We never seem to give up on anything. I am sure we are looking for answers about the universe and we will just keep digging until we find them. He said he was worried, because he felt that the only way we could prove certain things would be if we were able to prove alternate universes actually exist and this might never be possible.
One very unexpected invention has come out of MIT and it is a new incandescent bulb. The incandescent bulb has been so inefficient it has been banned in several countries including the United States. The replacement has been either florescent lighting or LEDs. No one ever thought the incandescent bulb could ever return, but scientists at MIT have created one which is even more efficient than those bulbs which replaced it. The new bulb uses photonic crystals which recycle the waste energy. This allows the bulbs to be more efficient than anything we have now. It’ll probably boil down to economics. What I mean by this is these bulbs will have to be cheap enough to be able to replace what we are using today. The output doesn’t seem to be a problem. It is a kind of amazing thing when you think about it, the incandescent bulb had hardly changed in 100 years, and it makes you wonder why more efficient ones weren’t developed before. The best description of this new bulb is the filament hasn’t changed very much, but the area surrounding it reflects the energy back to the filament so that it can be reused.
A new material, a polymer, has been designed in the laboratory and it is very unique. When you heat it you can change it shape and when it cools down it goes back to the original shape which it remembered. A new class of material has been invented and it is called programmable matter. A demonstration was held of this material which first appeared as a flat square shaped film and as it was heated and it assumed the shape of an origami bird. When it was cooled it went through several different shape changes, before it returned to its original shape. I’m sure this astounded the scientific audience. A second demonstration was held where this material was progressively changed into more and more complex shapes, this was done five times. Scientists said that this method revealed that you can use this material to access a variety of much more complicated permanent shapes which opens up all sorts of possibilities. I would think this material could be very useful in air and space travel.
A scientist has stated 600 million years ago something changed in biology which caused everything to be the way it is now. He described life as sort of being like a photocopy of DNA, which is passed along from one being to the next and when this copy gets something wrong, depending on how big this mistake is, things change and life could even be wiped out. A group of scientist has published a paper which states that 600 million years ago ancient protozoa predecessors received a serious mutation and this allowed them to evolve into complex multicellular organisms. They claim this allowed the development of multicellular organisms instead of just single cellular ones. They claim that all it took was one tiny tweak to one gene and this created all the complex life we see today. The team said they never would have believed that only one mutation could have created what we know as humans and all the animals around us.
Dr. J. Craig Venter, who is believed to be the greatest scientist of the 21st century, claims he can tell by examining DNA what a person would look and sound like. Venter was the first one to create a microscopic artificial life form. He sequenced the human genome and is working on things like using a 3-D printer to copy life from one area to another. When you think about it, this is really a very cool project. If you could do this with a 3-D printer it wouldn’t be necessary to carry loads of plants and seeds with you if you’re going to colonize a planet. You could just copy them with your printer and then plant them. The way Venter figured out what a person would look and sound like from their DNA was by examining thousands of sets of genes from different people and isolating those genes which determine our appearance. He took thousands of samples from all different people and sequenced them and correlated them with 3-D models of people’s faces.
Scientists in China claim they have observed quantum communication inside a living cell and they feel this is an important step forward in finding ways to reverse aging. What they are talking about is transferring a quantum state from one place to another. As crazy as this sounds the scientists say before making a decision to rejuvenate or not, the major components in the cell may use flashes which allows them to communicate until a consensus is reached. I have to admit this is one of the stranger things I have heard lately, but a lot of strange things are coming out that we never suspected.
Scientists in Antarctica are using the giant telescope to study neutrinos. Neutrinos are particles that have no mass and pass directly through the earth and even us. They have always fascinated the scientific community and they come in different flavors. Some have more energy than others. Scientists feel that studying the more energetic ones will reveal the most violent events in the universe including stellar explosions and Gamma-ray bursts.
