Giant Freakin Robot

This Wednesday a new Nova miniseries premiers, and that means more sciency learning from smart guys who really know how to lay things out for us common folk. As much as I love to read science journals, and pour over scientific findings, I’m far from capable of understanding all of the intricate details found therein. That’s where you need a guy like Brian Greene, who with his Ira Glass like tone is able to explain even the most insanely complex physics concepts in an easy to digest manner.

In the below video from the episode “What is Space?” of Nova: The Fabric of the Cosmos, the Higgs Boson particle is addressed. The role of the Large Hadron Collider in searching for the particle is discussed, but even more interesting is Professor Higgs discussing the 1964 presentation where he flipped the common view of the universe on its ear with the suggestion of the Higgs-Boson particle.

Neanderthals do not conjure up images of fine dining in anyone’s mind. Most of us think of Neanderthals as those apeish humans from movies and old cartoons that hit women over the head with clubs. Or for those of us into reading books our college girlfriends loved, we got our info from Jean M. Auel’s Earth’s Children series. New findings indicate that Neanderthals may have enjoyed the finer things in life, like fish and small game birds. You know, the delicate faire that only the most civilized of us enjoy.

I’m most surprised to learn that this is a new finding when the aforementioned fictional, utterly non-scientific, book series deals with Neanderthals going on great fishing expeditions and hunting small game. Sure, big game hunts were the main source of meat, but Ayla learned to make Creb’s favorite dish (an Earth baked ptarmigan). I never questioned that this was a discrepancy in what we knew of Neanderthals. Of course,

Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College in Gambier, OH and Marie-Helene Moncel of France’s Natural History Museum in Paris found traces of fish scales, wood, hide, feathers and starch on tools that belongs to Neanderthals over 100,000 years ago. Findings like this give the tale of Neanderthal’s demise a bittersweet note. As if they had been slowly trying to evolve a more civilized nature, but along came modern humans and took the world over with our fancy future technology.

Take a moment to appreciate the human brain and the brilliance of its design. We make supercomputers that dwarf the brain’s ability to store and access information, but even the most advanced computers on the planet have infinitesimal processing power in comparison. Trying to simulate the power of brains, IBM has set out to reproduce the processing power equivalent of animal and human brains.

Blue Gene, the IBM supercomputer used for the experiment, was able to fully simulate a mouse, cat, and rat brain. They required just 512 processors, each of which is the equivalent of what’s in a standard home computer with 1 gigabyte of memory, to achieve the power of a mouse brain. IBM was able to get 147,456 processors working in parallel to start on the path to human brain simulation.

This astounding number of processors equals about 1.6 billion neurons and 8.87 trillion synapses in the human brain. It just so happens that this represent roughly 4.5% of our brain’s power. The study on cognitive computing by the group in Almaden is laid out in detail here.

A few weeks ago the world was rocked by the announcement that scientists had discovered something which went faster than the speed of light. That was a big deal because, all the laws of physics we know and hold dear, say that faster than light (FTL) travel is utterly impossible.

It was such big news that even the scientists who discovered it were hesitant to believe it, and at the time they cautioned everyone not to jump to any conclusions, as they engaged in further testing to confirm their findings. Maybe they’d just forgotten to carry a one or something. It has now been more than a month, and even though no one really wants to accept that this has happened (since it would change everything we know about physics), they still haven’t been able to find a concrete flaw in these crazy FTL conclusions.

The latest news is that scientists still think this must just be some mistake in calculation, but no one has been able to find the mistake. Discover Magazine has run several articles, for instance, with that as the tone but even there they haven’t really come up with a definitive explanation to brush off the findings of CERN, the guys who originally discovered the FTL neutrinos.

Basically what happened in the original experiment is this: Neutrinos were sent from one point, to another. We know that, if they were traveling at the speed of light or under it, they should have arrived at their destination in 2.4 milliseconds or more, an incredibly short period of time. But somehow, the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds early. That is of course an almost infinitesimal difference, yet if true then those neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light.

The top theory among scientists trying to debunk the notion of FTL travel by neutrinos involves looking for errors in the way the CERN team calculated the time involved. That’s reasonable since we’re dealing with such tiny, tiny units of measurement. It’s easy to make a mistake under those circumstances. Some for instance, think they may have failed to figure in the relative movement of GPS satellites rotating Earth, which were used to measure the time involved. Except, the CERN team’s original announcement says they took these things into account. Right now the debate seems to be over whether or not they really did, and once that gets sorted out it’ll surely be on to the next attempt at debunking their findings.