AWH YEAH SCIENCE FO REALZ official science geek thread

[VeilSide]

Cockroach Superpower No. 42: They Don't Need to Pee
To survive in hostile environments, cockroaches rely on their own vermin: Blattabacterium,
a microbe that hitched a ride inside roaches some 140 million years ago, and hasn’t left since.

[VeilSide]

When antiscience kills: dowsing edition

I am no fan of pseudoscience, as you may have guessed. Dowsing is a practice that falls squarely in that field. It’s the idea that you can detect an object — usually water, but sometimes gold, or people, or whatever — using a y-shaped branch, or copper tubes, or some other simple device. Dowsers never really have a good explanation of how their devices work, but they tend to claim 100% accuracy.

However, James Randi has tested dowsers many, many times as part of the JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge. Not to keep you in suspense, but the money still sits in the bank. In other words, time and again, the dowsers fail. When a real, double-blind, statistical test is given, dowsers fail. Every single time.

That’s all well and good, and you might think it’s just another silly idea that nonsense-believers adhere to despite evidence. If someone wants to waste their money on a dowser, well, caveat emptor.

But what if your life depended on it? What if thousands of lives depended on it?

Such is the case in Iraq, where the military there is using what is essentially dowsing techniques to try to detect bombs in cars at military checkpoints. Let’s be very clear here: they are using provably useless antiscientific nonsense to try to find terrorists who carry explosives. They may as well use tea leaves, or palm reading, or seances.

This story just got major press; a reporter in Iraq wrote about it in the New York Times. It’s impossible to overstress how bad this situation is. Iraqi Major General Jehad al-Jabiri, who is the head of the Ministry of the Interior’s General Directorate for Combating Explosives, is a whole-hearted believer in this crap. He is such a believer that the Iraqi military are abandoning proven methods such as sniffer dogs.

Instead, the Iraqi have purchased hundreds of these so-called bomb-detection wands from a company called ATSC in the UK. The cost? Millions of dollars. Millions. On technology that James Randi has come right out and called "a totally fraudulent product". Bob Carroll of the Skeptic’s Dictionary agrees with Randi.

The NYT article also has expert advice from several explosives and military authorities (including long-time friend of the JREF Air Force Lt. Col (retired) Hal Bidlack), all of whom conclude that this device does nothing. Given the product description on the company’s own web page, I agree as well. The description makes no scientific sense at all; it claims it can detect ions from a distance without ever coming in contact with them, and that includes through lead, concrete, and more.

In other words, it’s magic.

This, however, won’t stop al-Jabiri, who chalks up any successes to the detector, and any failures to the operator. In a situation like that there is little hope he can be convinced him he’s wrong, especially when he says things like "I don’t care about Sandia or the Department of Justice or any of them. I know more about this issue than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world."

Really? Then why, as the NYT article indicates, did that dowsing wand fail on October 25, when terrorists detonated two tons of explosives killing 155 people? Four thousand pounds of explosives apparently got right past the magic wands’ sniffer. But at least they’re fast! Again, from the article:

Checking cars with dogs, however, is a slow process, whereas the wands take only a few seconds per vehicle. “Can you imagine dogs at all 400 checkpoints in Baghdad?” General Jabiri said. “The city would be a zoo.”

I suspect a zoo would be better than a slaughterhouse.

It’s arrogance and blind faith like that which has and will get people killed. And the people we’re talking about in many cases are our fighting men and women, people who have to put their own trust in the leaders in Iraq. This is not a game, not some lark. It’s real. And in this case, antiscience kills.

hm. maybe if the military was using this back in 2003 they would've found those pesky WMDs.
this makes me sad. really.

[VeilSide]

BEHOLD!
the uranium one is made... of yellowcake.

[VeilSide]

Octopus snatches coconut and runs
Scientists have been surprised to see octopuses carrying coconuts under water.
Very clever, octopi can now join the ranks of tool-using animals.

[VeilSide]

The Physics of Space Battles
We have theorized about space battles for decades in films and TV, but what happens if we get out there, go terraform Mars, and the Martian colonists actually revolt. Or suppose we encounter hostile aliens. How would space combat actually go?

an awesome read. one of the best articles gizmodo has ever published, IMO.
reminds me of this other article about how the DeLorean in Back to the Future is also an excellent spaceship.

but i'll admit, i raged a little when i read this bit:

In space, laser light will travel almost forever without dissipating from diffraction.

i mean, physics isn't my thing, but i remember that diffraction effects aren't affected by a vacuum... so any beam should keep on spreading, right???

[Achilles]

Diffraction and divergence are two different things. Diffraction is the spreading that results when something, like light, interacts with a medium or obstacle, like our atmosphere. Beam divergence is basically a flashlight effect. The beam gets wider the farther it travels from it's aperture. A weapons-grade laser might create a more sustained beam, but it'd still widen eventually.The light emitted would travel forever, or until it came into contact with something, but the beam diameter would keep increasing the farther it traveled becoming less powerful. Even if divergence wasn't an issue, space itself is curved so the beam wouldn't travel straight.

Space battles seem cool, but it'd look silly if you saw it for real. The ships wouldn't be aerodynamic as typically found in sci-fi. They'd also seem to be moving side-to-side or up-and-down, rather than forwards, due to the vast distances in space and the lack of reference by having no objects near them. Reality sucks.

[The Joker]

FASTRA II: the world’s most powerful desktop supercomputer! Freaking sweet

[The Joker]

Video: Simulation Renders Entire Known Universe
Watch it and feel really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really small.

[VeilSide]

This Is a Mosquito Getting Killed By a Laser
Feb 11, 2010 11:45 PM



You're looking at a mosquito who got taken down mid-flight by a "Death Star" laser gun designed by Nathan Myhrvold. The malaria-carrying pest never saw it coming, but you can watch everything happen over and over again in this video.

The idea behind the "Death Star" laser is that it could be used to control mosquito populations in developing countries in hopes of reducing the number of deaths due to malaria, a disease frequently carried by the flying insects. The device was shown off during the TED 2010 conference and does in fact appear to be capable of tracking and killing mosquitoes. Oh, and it was built out of parts found on eBay. [Wired]

if I'm closer to getting my damn lightsaber, then I'll sacrifice a few mosquitoes for it!

[VeilSide]

Sports Science: "World Record Kick to the Groin [part 1] [part 2]


that... was nuts.

[Zero - The Nine Breaker]

dude...my nuts hurt just from watching that.

[VeilSide]

CubeStormer
The Worlds Fastest Lego Mindstorms RCX Speedcubing Robot. Built entirely
from lego elements now scanning and solving any 3x3x3 Rubik's cube combination
in under 12 seconds.


i, for one, welcome our pointless cube-solving robot overlords.

[VeilSide]

if only all textbooks could be like this.



i'd totally fib her nacci, if you know what i mean.

[Zero - The Nine Breaker]

i'd totally fib her nacci, if you know what i mean.

You've been to 4chan too many times my friend, I suggest you take a breather from there

[VeilSide]

rockets made of bacon, a song about bacon, broken windows, and beeping smoke detectors.
i could not think of a more wonderful experiment. here's how it was done:

okay, okay, it wasn't really an experiment. but wasn't that awesome???
please don't try this at home. i refuse to be responsible for any damage.

[VeilSide]

tl;dr

1. point to crotch area.
2. point to most attractive looking member of alien species.
3. pelvic thrust.

EDIT: my bad, image fixed.

[Zero - The Nine Breaker]

tl;dr

1. point to crotch area.
2. point to most attractive looking member of alien species.
3. pelvic thrust.

image is dead

[VeilSide]

What Makes a Fart?
"Did you know that no two farts are exactly alike? It’s true. Farts are sort of like snowflakes in that regard. Little, invisible, smelly, snowflakes."

[The Joker]

Man arrested at large hadron collider...

[Griffon]

I'm afraid that article came 16 days too late, Joker, ma boi