Sunday, April 8, 2018
Tuesday, March 20, 2018
Thursday, March 8, 2018
Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Monday, March 5, 2018
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Fwd: Alzheimer's
Researchers have found that gradually depleting an enzyme called BACE1 completely reverses the formation of amyloid plaques in the brains of mice with Alzheimer's disease, thereby improving the animals' cognitive function. The study raises hopes that drugs targeting this enzyme will be able to successfully treat Alzheimer's disease in humans.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Saturday, January 27, 2018
Friday, November 24, 2017
Galaxy Song - Monty Python Live in O2 Arena.
I was going to write a Facebook post about how absurd it all seems to
me, that we live on a big rock, rotating at 1037 miles an hour (less
as you move away from the equator), going around the Sun at 67,000
MPH, and moving around the galaxy at unfathomable speed, and all of
this is like a grain of sand on the beach of an immense cosmic ocean
that is forever expanding at an ever accelerating rate.
However, this video expresses it much better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqBThWK8rqE
me, that we live on a big rock, rotating at 1037 miles an hour (less
as you move away from the equator), going around the Sun at 67,000
MPH, and moving around the galaxy at unfathomable speed, and all of
this is like a grain of sand on the beach of an immense cosmic ocean
that is forever expanding at an ever accelerating rate.
However, this video expresses it much better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqBThWK8rqE
Sunday, November 19, 2017
Universe (Copy of Facebook Post.)
When I think of the Universe, I think of space. Lots and lots of space. There are around 100 billion galaxies, although I have heard that there might be more, and most galaxies contain at least 100 billion stars. Our Milky Way galaxy alone has between 100 and 400 billion stars and is a hundred thousand light years across. Our galaxy is so big that its gravitational attraction is strong enough to have smaller galaxies orbit it the way the moon orbits the earth.
But what the universe is made of is energy. Enormous amounts of it. Even empty space has energy. Most of the mass of elementary particles comes from the huge amount of energy inside those particles. Energy created the universe and energy causes it to expand at an ever accelerating rate. Energy created space itself.
Empty space is not empty, but full of fields that have energy in them. Everywhere there are fields that correspond to each elementary particle that makes up the universe, and a field for every force that defines how those particles interact. We can't see the fields, but we can observe the results of those fields. The universe is like a boiling pot of water full of energy, and we only observe what is on the surface.
Thursday, October 26, 2017
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe - with David Tong
If you have any interest in science, here is a recent hour long video that explains what quantum field theory is, in an easy to understand and entertaining way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNVQfWC_evg
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
The GOLDEN AGE of SCIENCE FICTION Television
The Expanse looks promising as a "hard sci-fi", but the first season seemed to drag out without advancing the story that much. The show has a ton of characters, so none of them stand out.
RIP Dark Matter. It was brilliant.
Stargate Atlantis was the best of the 3 Stargate series. It was consistently good. Stargate SG-1 that preceded it was uneven, and a little rough in the first season, but it turned out to be a great series. Stargate Universe got off to a very weak start, but by the second (and last) season it was really wonderful.
Babylon 5 in the 1990's was science fiction on the cheap. They used workstation computers to generate their special effects to save money. The first season was not that great. But it had an extremely rich storyline. The show improved in the second season and it turned into a wonderful TV series.
Star Trek Enterprise was my favorite of all the Star Trek series.
As far as "space" shows go, I don't think anything beats Battlestar Galactica.
LOST is more fantasy than science fiction, although it had a few science fiction elements. It is mostly a drama series that blew everyone away at how great it is. It is also more complicated and harder to follow than most shows.
Sunday, September 10, 2017
Fwd: Google Alert - telomeres
The link might interest you. :-)
 | ||
| telomeres | ||
| NEWS | ||
| This is the secret to a longer life The researchers focused on telomeres, which are proteins found in the cell's nucleus that stabilize the ends of chromosomes. Confused? Let me ... |
Saturday, September 9, 2017
What if We Never Went to the Moon?
This video is remarkably statist. Everybody looks at the benefit of government spending, and not the cost. Suppose the $200 billion adjusted for inflation dollars had been spent on something more useful? Cure diseases? Not go into as much debt, which has been compounding for the last 50 years? Reduce the burden of government on the free enterprise system? For a long time we have had more government than we can afford.
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
Fwd: Reducing many age related diseases
The drugs being tested are called senolytic agents, because they target senescent cells. These are cells that have stopped dividing and secrete toxic chemicals that damage adjacent cells. Accumulation of senescent cells, which increases with age, is associated with chronic conditions, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, most cancers, dementia, arthritis, osteopetrosis, and frailty.
Researchers at Mayo Clinic's Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging developed the first senolytic drugs to target these harmful cells. In a recent study led by The Scripps Research Institute, Mayo Clinic researchers and others confirmed that the senolytic drugs discovered at Mayo effectively clear senescent cells while leaving normal cells unaffected. The study, which was published in Nature Communications, also describes a new screening platform for finding additional senolytic drugs that will more optimally target senescent cells. The platform, together with additional human cell assays, identified and confirmed a new category of senolytic drugs, which are called HSP90 inhibitors.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/
Friday, August 25, 2017
Tuesday, August 22, 2017
Friday, August 18, 2017
Fields
We are made off stuff. If you break the stuff down to the smallest possible level, you get elementary particles. But according to Quantum Field Theory, what we experience as elementary particles are just fluctuations in the fields for those particles, in the same way a photon is a fluctuation in the electromagnetic field, and an electron is just a fluctuation the electric field. These fields overlap each other and exist throughout all of space. They interact, like the way the Higgs field gives particles mass. Reality for us is what we perceive, but the true reality may be just the fields. You could think of them as God's computer program for the Universe.
Best wishes,
John Coffey
Monday, August 14, 2017
The Quantum Experiment that Broke Reality | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
There are aspects of this experiment not mentioned that get even weirder. The bottom line is that particles moving through space act like waves. They don't become particles again until they are observed. The act of observing influences the event, and in some cases can influence the event after it has already happened. This is where it gets really weird.
There are alternate theories like the pilot wave theory, that more or less says that particles are just particles, but moving through an invisible field of waves.
Friday, August 11, 2017
Monday, August 7, 2017
Re: Top 10 Climate Change Lies Exposed
On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 2:47 AM, Albert Nelms <alnelms>
wrote:Another quick rundown of global warming lies. You've mentioned most of these issues in your debates with friends online.
https://youtu.be/ICGal_8qI8c
1. There is a long term consequence of raising the temperature 5 degrees celsius or more that is very bad, which is that the polar ice caps will completely melt. Based on current temperature trends, I don't think that this is likely to happen, and if it does happen, it will take 5000 years, giving us plenty of time to do something about it.
2. The direct effect of doubling CO2 in the atmosphere is an increase of 1.1 degrees celsius. Almost everybody agrees on this. There are a couple of dissenters who say that over geological periods of time you can't find a clear correlation, but there is so much else going on over geological periods, usually solar and orbital variation, that confuses the issue.
There are additional positive and negative feedbacks that are in dispute. Whereas the direct effect is 1.1 degrees celsius, the data since 1880 indicates to me that the Climate sensitivity is slightly under 2 degrees. That means that there is positive feedback, although solar variation could also be the cause. It also means that the climate sensitivity is less than the alarmists are claiming. I heard one lecturer say that the positive feedback was "0.6", which seems to me to be close.
Until about a week ago, I didn't see any evidence of positive feedback, but that was because I had miscalculated the Climate Sensitivity.
#3 and #4 are interesting points.
#12 He doesn't explain his point about acidity very well.
Warming does cause the oceans to release more CO2. There is also very little doubt that CO2 causes warming. The real issue is how much? The warming caused by CO2 is a logarithmic function, which means that you have to keep doubling the CO2 level to achieve the same result. Based on current temperature trends, we will run out of fossil fuels long before we reach an increase of 5 degrees celsius.
Wednesday, August 2, 2017
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