Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #25 – 2017-02-22, 22:26:49 Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1QuoteMoreover, the seven planets have equilibrium temperatures low enough to make possible the presence of liquid water on their surfaces.
Seven planets Reply #26 – 2017-02-23, 11:32:13 Here one can choose a set of names for those seven planets. Last Edit: 2017-02-23, 14:25:24 by Barulheira
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #27 – 2017-02-23, 19:20:26 How about Bashful, Doc, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy and Grumpy.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #29 – 2017-03-02, 05:40:01 They're too far away for us to know… But they're intriguing, aren't they? BTW: Only three of the seven likely have liquid water… But Dems think that's a majority! Last Edit: 2017-03-02, 06:40:19 by OakdaleFTL
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #30 – 2017-03-02, 09:22:32 Oakdale managed to link the newly found planets to Dems. Next up should be krake tying them to Iraq war. 1 Likes
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #31 – 2017-03-02, 09:30:09 Don't worry ersi. I'd rather link you to a tragic product of the cold war.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #32 – 2017-03-02, 09:46:03 Quote from: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-bees-idUSKBN1685NGHundreds of North American bee species face extinction: study"It's a quiet but staggering crisis unfolding right under our noses that illuminates the unacceptably high cost of our careless addiction to pesticides and monoculture farming," its author, Kelsey Kopec, said in a statement.Habitat loss, along with heavy pesticide use, climate change and increasing urbanization are the main causes for declining bee populations, the study found. Jax would of course say that bees can be kept in cities just fine, perhaps even better than in the countryside.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #33 – 2017-03-02, 11:29:46 Quote from: ersi on 2017-03-02, 09:46:03Jax would of course say that bees can be kept in cities just fine, perhaps even better than in the countryside.If cities have less pesticide, that may potentially be less crazy than it sounds.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #34 – 2017-03-02, 11:36:44 Sure. Or if city bees are effectively a different species with ferocious adaptive capacity like city pigeons and rats are.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #35 – 2017-03-02, 22:35:39 Chinese solved the problem, miilions were turned into human bees polinizing trees.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #36 – 2017-03-10, 20:07:10 Could fast radio bursts really be powering alien space ships?QuoteAre alien radio beams causing one of the most mysterious signals from space? A new study by Manasvi Lingam and Avi Loeb at Harvard says that fast radio bursts (FRBs) could come from extraterrestrial radio beams being used as beacons or to power alien light sails.
Astrology Reply #37 – 2017-03-10, 21:10:34 UFOs? I prefer another explanation: that's how astrology works. Finally, Science's found out that astrologers were right all the time. Radio bursts.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #39 – 2017-03-19, 01:56:24 Where science intersects government policy, doesn't the science need to be robust?Nah! In the real world, politics is the realm of discourse. Who thinks that's the sensible way to go?
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #40 – 2017-03-20, 19:21:41 The Earth is flat - according to Shaquille O'Neal at least.[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKXCBlUPJqM[/video]
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #41 – 2017-06-13, 22:39:03 The Earth is flat for rich American idiot blacks, round for European idiot whites (so I'm not acused of discrimination) and the belly button of a God for a few others.It's very interesting how the first Greek (I forget his name this moment) realized why the Earth is round. He just measured the different shade lenghts, at the same time, in different parts of the world.How could he have such a mechanism to measure the same time at different places, never anyone asked about. Last Edit: 2017-06-13, 22:55:17 by Belfrager
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #43 – 2017-06-16, 23:25:19 bahmy questions remains... theres' no way of knowing the same time 800km away back on those times. That was a cruciall point to determine all the logics.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #44 – 2017-06-17, 09:01:23 Noon and solstice is easy to determine, even in prehistorical time. The crucial element is that the sun is (practically speaking) at zenith, directly overhead, at Syene at this date. Wells are dug vertical for pretty obvious reasons. A deep well is thus a very useful tool to get a precise vertical normal to the surface. Like the article stated Alexandria isn't exactly to the north of Syrene, thus "noon" at Alexandria didn't happen at exactly the same time as "noon" at Syene. This would have been a source of error, but a relatively minor one. The biggest, to measure the curvature of the Earth, would be the distance between Syene and Alexandria. "5000 stadia" was fairly accurate, and that was the most impressive (or lucky) part of the experiment. Accurate measurement of distance wasn't easy with the available tools.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #45 – 2017-06-17, 12:59:38 I was not clear, when the sun is vertical at Syrene is simple, when the sun is not vertical in Alexandria also simple but how two different observers, one at each place, knows that they were observing those phenomena exactly at the same time? That's the key factor, both knowing that they are exactly at the same time without instantaneous ways of comunication between 800kms.All the rest follows.The only way I see to be possible is by an imaginary experiment. Let's imagine that, at exactly the same time, [...] than the Eartth would be round.Formulating an hiphotesis that couldn't be veryfied at the time happened many times but it doesn't mean that a scientific discovery has been made. The same happened with Galileo.Only later, by other people and with different instruments, these hiphotesis turned into scientific knowledge.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #46 – 2017-06-17, 18:01:44 "Same day (summer solstice) at noon" is easy to achieve even with less civilized societies than 3rd century BC Greek Egypt. Now, noon in Alexandria would be about five minutes later than at Syene, as it is further to the west. A better way to measure it would be that the distance to a point straight to the north of Syene at the same latitude as Alexandria would be something like 4715 stadia (given that the distance between the cities were precisely 5000 stadia), an undershoot of about 5% or in other word an estimate that would be about 5% too large.
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #47 – 2017-07-09, 20:00:12 As frequently happens, Motl has an interesting post on his blog...
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #48 – 2018-01-15, 13:33:38 Computers are getting better than humans at readingQuoteArtificial intelligence programs built by Alibaba (BABA) and Microsoft (MSFT) have beaten humans on a Stanford University reading comprehension test."This is the first time that a machine has outperformed humans on such a test," Alibaba said in a statement Monday.[...]Alibaba has already put the technology to work on Singles Day, the world's biggest shopping bonanza, by using computers to answer a large number of customer service questions.So, from what I can gather, the said "reading comprehension" involves locating numerical-tabular information as in a product description. Soon enough, if the computer does not understand you because you are asking something beyond a product description, it's your fault. Be intelligible: Talk only data!
Re: What's Going on in Science? Reply #49 – 2018-01-15, 13:39:28 It's a little more than that, though it is wholly simplified into easily digestible chunks. The humans in question are low-paid drones working for Amazon Mechanical Turk.Paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05250All this was annoyingly difficult to find, but the same news item caught my eye this morning.
Topic: What's Going on in Science? (Read 10453 times)
