Club P.A.N.

In October 2007, a Workshop was hosted by Cristina Gomes, Chloe Cipoletta, Dr. Herbinger, Mr. Guilahoux and Mr. Ouattara in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where the teachers from the Club P.A.N. schools were introduced to the project. To see a small video please visit the 2007 workshop section.

Cristina Gomes: Chimps compile Nixon-style 'enemies list'

Chimpanzees have at least one thing in common with the late US president Richard Nixon: tracking those who do them favours and putting those who don't come up to scratch on an "enemies list". Nearly 3000 hours of observations of wild chimpanzees show that they keep tabs on which of the troop has groomed them the most - returning the favour to frequent groomers, while freezing out the selfish ones. In a way, grooming works like currency in chimpanzees, says Cristina Gomes, a behavioural ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "If you don't have a set price, then you're susceptible to being cheated and cooperation would probably break down."

Cristina Gomes: Chimpanzees exchange meat for sex

Dra. Cristina Gomes

Chimpanzees enter into "deals" whereby they exchange meat for sex, according to researchers. Male chimps that are willing to share the proceeds of their hunting expeditions mate twice as often as their more selfish counterparts. This is a long-term exchange, so males continue to share their catch with females when they are not fertile, copulating with them when they are. The team describe their findings in the journal PLoS One. Cristina Gomes and her colleagues, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, studied chimps in the Tai Forest reserve in Ivory Coast.

"The males still share with them - they might share meat with a female one day, and only copulate with her a day or two later." Dr. Gomes thinks that her findings could even provide clues about human evolution.

15 foods that kill fat

How the laws of physics emerged ?

Last year Dr. Laughlin and Dr. David Pines, a theorist at the University of Illinois and Los Alamos National Laboratory, published a manifesto declaring that the “science of the past,” which seeks to distill the richness of reality into a few simple equations governing subatomic particles, was coming to an impasse. Many complex systems — the very ones the solid-staters study — appear to be irreducible. Made of many interlocking parts, they display a kind of synergy, obeying “higher organizing principles” that cannot be further simplified no matter how hard you try. Carrying the idea even further, some solid-state physicists are trying to show that the laws of relativity, long considered part of the very bedrock of the physical world, are not platonic truths that have existed since time began.

Jeanne Calment: A French woman with the longest confirmed lifespan in history at age 122 years 164 days

When asked on one occasion for her prescription for a long life, she mentioned garlic, vegetables, cigarettes, red wine, and avoiding brawls. On another occasion, she ascribed her longevity and relatively youthful appearance for her age to olive oil, which she said she poured on all her food and rubbed onto her skin, as well as a diet of port wine, and nearly 2 pounds of chocolate eaten every week.

Robot achieves scientific first (Adam and Eve)

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators. Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The team has just completed a successor robot called Eve, which is about to work with Adam on a series of experiments designed to find new drugs to treat tropical diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis. “Adam is a prototype,” says Prof King. “Eve is better designed and more elegant.”

So You Want to Become a Physicist?

I’ve often been asked the question: how do you become a physicist? Let me first say that physicists, from a fairly early age, are fascinated by the universe and its fantastic wonders. We want to be part of the romantic, exciting adventure to tease apart its mysteries and understand the nature of physical reality. That’s the driving force behind our lives. We are more interested in black holes and the origin of the universe than with making tons of money and driving flashy cars. We also realize that physics forms the foundation for biology, chemistry, geology, etc. and the wealth of modern civilization. We realize that physicists pioneered the pivotal discoveries of the 20th century which revolutionized the world (e.g. the transistor, the laser, splitting the atom, TV and radio, MRI and PET scans, quantum theory and relativity, unraveling the DNA molecule was done by physicists. But people often ask the question: do I have to be an Einstein to become a physicist? The answer is NO. Sure, physicists have to be proficient in mathematics, but the main thing is to have that curiosity and drive. One of the greatest physicists of all time, Michael Faraday, started out as a penniless, uneducated apprentice, but he was persistent and creative and then went on to revolutionize modern civilization with electric motors and dynamos. Much of the worlds gross domestic product depends on his work.

UCF physicist says Hollywood movies hurt students' understanding of science

Two University of Central Florida professors show just how poorly Hollywood writers and directors understand science in an article published in the German journal “Praxis der Naturwissenschaften Physik”.
 
Common sense may indicate that people should know the stunts in movies are just make believe, but the professors say that’s not necessarily true. Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway, as depicted in the movie Speed. And, if that were realistic, a ramp would be needed to adjust the direction of motion to even try to make the leap, said UCF professor Costas J. Efthimiou, who co-authored the article. “Students come here, and they don’t have any basic understanding of science,” he said. “Sure, people say everyone knows the movies are not real, but my experience is many of the students believe what they see on the screen.” And that’s not just a UCF problem. Efthimiou said students across the United States seem to have the same challenge with science. It starts young. The Science and Engineering Indicators 2006 report seems to support his observations. The report shows that the average science scores among 12th graders in the U.S. dropped from the previous year. The scores remained stagnant in the fourth and eighth grades. Worse, only about one-third of all students tested were proficient, meaning they had a solid understanding of what they should know.

Using Superheroes to Teach Physics: College Courses in Sci-Fi

One of the more perplexing questions facing science these days is this one: How do we get more young people interested in science? Leading the way are a number of college courses -- that can be taken for credit -- that focus on the science in science fiction. After all, why can't superheroes, Star Trek and Harry Potter teach us about the answer to life, the universe and everything? (Or, at least debate the merits of the answer "42".)

Quantum communication: When 0 + 0 is not equal to 0

One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and unicycling his way around Bell Labs. Shannon’s theory concerns how a message created at one point in space can be reproduced at another point in space. He calls the conduit for such a process a channel and the limits imposed by the universe on this process the channel capacity. The capacity of a communications channel is hugely important idea. It tells you, among other things, the rate at which you can send information from one location to another, without loss. If you’ve ever made a phone call, watched television or surfed the internet you’ll have benefited from the work associated with this idea. In recent years, our ideas about communication have been transformed by the possibility of using quantum particles to carry information. When that happens the strange rules of quantum mechanics govern what can and cannot be sent from one region of space to another. This kind of thinking has has spawned the entirely new fields of quantum communication and quantum computing.

Time as a Dynamical Variable

Clocks are dynamical systems, notwithstanding our usual formalism in which time is treated as an external parameter. A dynamical variable which may be identified with time is explicitly constructed for a variety of simple dynamical systems. This variable is canonically conjugate to the Hamiltonian. The complications brought about by the semiboundedness of the Hamiltonian are taken into account and the spectral properties of the time operator are examined. For relativistic systems boosts affect the time variable in a familiar manner. It is pointed out that all physical clock times are cyclic, contrary to Newton’s view of a ‘uniformly flowing time’.

Theory of Tachyons (Faster than Light Propagation)

It had long been assumed that the theory of relativity has established the speed of light as the highest speed allowed. If this were so, we would never be able to study the contemporary physical conditions beyond our galaxy; and in practice, beyond the solar system. It would be, therefore, desirable to have particles that travel beyond the speed of light.

Quantum Zeno Effect

In a closed quantum system an "unstable particle" which seems to decay, is a metastable state which evolves in a probability conserving manner; some of the probability goes with the fraction that has "decayed." A systematic analysis of the decay amplitude in terms of the spectral density of the decaying state determines the evolution. Classical law of radioactivity has a strict exponential decay, but in quantum theory this is only approximately so; for very short times the decay probability increases as the square of the time interval; so a metastable quantum system which is frequently observed (and reset) would remain essentially unchanged. This is the Quantum Zeno effect discovered by Misra and Sudarshan (J. Math. Phys.). Chiu and Sudarshan studied the rigorous theory of decay and exhibited the short time Zeno regime, and the long term Khalfin regime in addition to the exponential regime. With Gorini and Chiu, Sudarshan developed a formalism of analytic continuation of the vector space of quantum mechanics; he developed it fully into Quantum Mechanics in Dual Spaces.

3D or Not 3D: That Is the Question

You saw the 3D Monsters vs Aliens commercial during the Super Bowl — maybe with the special glasses or, without them, as a myopic blur. If you took your kids to the Jonas Brothers movie, you sat through nearly a dozen trailers for 3D movies to be released this year. Perhaps you saw the latest issues of TIME, People and three other Time Inc. publications promoting 3D as "pretty darn cool," and citing such top directors as Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson as being in in love with the process.

The nanorians are amongst us - and everyone knows why

"European Nano2life prize for Münster scientist: the complex world of the nanoparticle simply explained They are all around us, but no-one can see them: no, Torsten Vielhaber is not describing a sci-fi screenplay when he starts talking about nanorians. The Münster chemist has, rather, created a world in order to explain the essence of nanoparticles in a comprehensible way. The 27 year-old has now been awarded the European Nano2life Prize for his clear translation of complex scientific relationships (see also attached interview). Nanorians are tiny beings, invisible to the naked eye. As soon as they are brought to life, they begin helping us to heal diseases or to extend the service life of machines. This has woken the urge to research in the University of Münster scientist. You cannot get hold of, sniff or taste nanobiotechnology, he says. The particles at the heart of everything are much smaller than a hair on your arm. Up to 60,000 times smaller, to be precise. To explain: the 27 year-old compares nanoparticles to apples. “If the earth were an apple, then an apple would be the size of an atom. 3,500 of these atoms in a crate would be a nanoparticle five nanometres (nm) in size: 12,000 times thinner than a hair.”

Experience WorldWide Telescope

Immerse yourself in a seamless beautiful environment. WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Experience narrated guided tours from astronomers and educators featuring interesting places in the sky.

Reinventing HTML (Tim BL)

Making standards is hard work. Its hard because it involves listening to other people and figuring out what they mean, which means figuring out where they are coming from, how they are using words, and so on. There is the age-old tradeoff for any group as to whether to zoom along happily, in relative isolation, putting off the day when they ask for reviews, or whether to get lots of people involved early on, so a wider community gets on board earlier, with all the time that costs. That's a trade-off which won't go away. The solutions tend to be different for each case, each working group. Some have lots of reviewers and some few, some have lots of time, some urgent deadlines.

Web Hypertext Application Technology

This is a series of demos intended for showing implementations of HTML5 in (non-final) browsers available in September 2008. Configuration:

• Open Terminal in Presentation mode
• Hide dock
• Open Opera, Firefox, Safari, VMWare with IE, Chrome
• Clear all their caches, form autofill, history, download history

HTML 5 Draft Recommendation — 28 March 2009

HTML5

This specification evolves HTML and its related APIs to ease the authoring of Web-based applications. Additions include context menus, a direct-mode graphics canvas, a full duplex client-server communication channel, more semantics, audio and video, various features for offline Web applications, sandboxed iframes, and scoped styling. Heavy emphasis is placed on keeping the language backwards compatible with existing legacy user agents and on keeping user agents backwards compatible with existing legacy documents.

Also, see /http://www.w3.org/html/wg/markup-spec/
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http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/