The BBC showed a tiny bit of footage from the Challenger Deep mission. It is not very exciting, though. It may be that they are reserving the better footage for a National geographic special later.
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
One of the tenets of science is that the results be reproducible. One consequence of this maxim is that any paper that is published should have sufficient information that would enable anyone who wishes to do so to replicate the results. But there is no real incentive for people to try and replicate the work of others. It takes a lot of time and effort and one cannot publish a confirmation of someone else’s result unless the original result was so revolutionary that supportive evidence is called for. The cold fusion and the faster-than-light neutrino stories were examples of such high-profile cases. [Read more…]
Last Sunday, film director James Cameron became just the third person to go to the deepest part of the ocean, in the region known as Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench. He did this in an updated version of the 1960 expedition to the same spot in the bathyscaphe Trieste. [Read more…]
Today’s Cleveland Plain Dealer front page headline is that the past winter was the warmest on record ever since data was kept beginning 141 years ago, being a whopping eight degrees higher than average. This past week the daytime highs have been in the mid-70s, when the normal temperatures should be in the mid-40s. Yesterday it was over 80 degrees. People are wandering around in shorts and t-shirts, unthinkable for March. [Read more…]
Helium is extremely valuable for research and technology because it boils at the low temperature of -269oC, close to the lowest attainable temperature known as absolute zero (-273oC) and thus is used in its liquid form whenever extremely low temperatures are required. [Read more…]
The late Carl Sagan was much sought after by the popular press to comment on science issues and he would rightly be cautious about expressing opinions about things that were unknown. He would sometimes be pressed to provide a more definitive response, being asked what his ‘gut feeling’ was, to which he replied “But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.” [Read more…]
A different research group called ICARUS has repeated the earlier experiment done by the OPERA group and found that neutrino speeds do not exceed the speed of light after all. You can read the paper here. [Read more…]
I have noticed that when I make calls on Skype, I sometimes hear a small echo of my voice. This has a remarkably discombobulating effect, making it almost impossible to continue speaking.
I learned that a Japanese company has used this effect to create a speech jamming gun that you can use to silence speakers whom you find annoying. [Read more…]
The commonly accepted theory for the original human settlers in the US is that 15,000 years ago they crossed over from Asia to America near the Bering Sea that had a land bridge then or at most required a short boat ride.
Hence I was intrigued by this news article (via Machines Like Us) that there is some evidence that the first humans here may consist of a people known as Solutreans who came from Europe 20,000 years ago by [Read more…]
When we think of social science studies that use surveys to look at features of the general population, we tend to assume that they go out and find a randomized sample of people, either by mail or phone or in person, and that each such study finds its own sample, so that any person [Read more…]