Month: January 2016

Most interesting scientific news?

“Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.’ We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change.” Science has thus become a big story, if not the big story: news that will stay news.”

The forgotten slaves of Tromelin Island

On July 31, 1760, L’Utile, a ship of the French East Indian Company loaded with an illegal cargo of ~160 Malagasy slaves, was shipwrecked on a barren, windswept islet now known as Tromelin Island, 500 km east of Madagascar. The French crew, with the help of the surviving Malagasy, built a makeshift boat and set sail for Madagascar 2 months later, leaving behind 60 Malagasy with 3 months’ provisions, a letter recognising their good conduct and the promise that someone would come back for them. Weeks passed, then months, then years. Since 2006, archaeological teams have gone to Tromelin to examine the wreck site and learn about the lives of the marooned Malagasy

Passenger Drones

EHang has shown a drone which can transport humans. The drone will be totally automated, meaning passengers will input a destination and have no control during the flight. This will make the machine safer by eliminating “the most dangerous part of standard modes of transportation, human error.”

2016-10-12:

Flyt Aerospace has flown a person using a personal vertical takeoff and landing inside a hangar. They are taking commercial drone flight systems and combining them for personal flight.

Super-Earth in our solar system?

It doesn’t seem to be part of the Proxima Centauri system, it must be closer and correspondingly smaller. With just 2 observations it isn’t possible to determine the object’s orbit, so we can only guess at its distance and size. One possibility (and the one I think most likely) is that it’s an extreme trans-Neptunian object ~100 astronomical units away from the Sun, which is further than Sedna at 86 AU. This would make it the most distant known object in the solar system, but likely smaller than Pluto.

Another possibility (which seems more likely to the object’s discoverers) is that it is ~300 AU away and ~1.5 times the size of Earth, making it the first “super-Earth” found in our solar system. Observations of trans-Neptunian objects have led to some speculation that 1 or 2 super-Earths could lurk in the outer solar system, so it’s not out of the question. There’s reason to be cautious of this idea, however, because of its location. Proxima Centauri is ~42 degrees away from the ecliptic. Most large solar system lay within a few degrees of the ecliptic, and even Sedna’s orbit is only inclined ~12 degrees from it.

A third possibility is that the object is a cool brown dwarf ~20k AU away. Such an object should also be visible in the infrared, so there would still be the question as to why it wasn’t discovered by earlier infrared sky surveys. Its proximity to Proxima Centauri would seem to make such an object easy to find.

Gout returns

These dietary problems are translating to a resurgence of a handful of preventable diseases. In the U.K., 3m people are malnourished, and malnutrition-related hospitalizations spiked by 50%. 100k patients were hospitalized with gout. Gout—typically related to a buildup of uric acid due to over-consuming alcohol and rich foods—is a problem in the US, as well. The prevalence of gout in the US has steadily risen over the past 20 years, affecting more than 8m Americans in 2011.

Guns And States

In summary, with my personal confidence levels: 1. Scatterplots showing raw correlations between gun ownership and “gun deaths” are entirely driven by suicide, and therefore dishonest to use to prove that guns cause murder (~100% confidence) 2. But if you adjust for all relevant confounders, there is a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates (~90% confidence). This relationship is likely causal (~66% confidence). 3. The majority of the difference between America’s murder rate and that of other First World countries is not because of easier access to guns in America (~90% confidence). 4. But some of it is due to easier access to guns. This is probably 0.5 murders/100K/year. 5. An Australian-style gun control program that worked and had no side effects would probably prevent 2000 murders in the US. It would also prevent a much larger number of suicides. I am otherwise ignoring suicides in this piece because discussing them would make me too angry. 6. Probably the amount of lost gun-related enjoyment an Australian-style gun control program would cause do not outweigh the benefits. 7. This analysis makes me tentatively in favor of Australian-style gun control for the US, but I can’t say anything for sure until I’ve also looked more into the experimental evidence from various smaller-scale gun control programs, which I’m not going to do.

Bioreactor protein synthesis

The key to the cell-free reactions in the new bioreactor is a permeable nanoporous membrane and serpentine (snake-like) design, made using a combination of electron-beam lithography and advanced material-deposition processes. The long serpentine channels allow for exchange of materials between parallel reactor and feeder channels. With this approach, the team can control the exchange of metabolites, energy, and species that inhibit production of the desired protein. The design also extends reaction times and improves yields. Lives of soldiers and others injured in remote locations could be saved with a cell-free protein synthesis device; could also produce custom orphan drugs and personalized medicines at low cost

Medieval fingerprints

A new study will apply modern forensic crime solving techniques to the Middle Ages by examining the hand and fingerprints left on wax seals from the 12th to 14th centuries. The prints will also literally be run through AFIS, comparing fingerprints that are at least 700 years old to modern ones. Researchers are looking for any close or approximate matches even over centuries. Any such discoveries will contribute significantly the study of print identification, which isn’t as well-established, scientifically speaking, as some TV programs would have you believe.