New research suggests that the high radiation experienced by astronauts on interplanetary journeys could accelerate the onset of Alzheimer’s.
Some caveats: This research was done on Earth with mice. It also assumes that it will be impossible to protect astronauts from all types of radiation while on their journey.
Is the recently discovered Imperial tomb in China too dangerous to enter?
After discovering a secret palace hidden in China’s first emperor massive burial complex, Chinese technicians are nervous. Not because Qin Shi Huang’s tomb is the most important archeological discovery since Tutankhamun, but because they believe his burial place is full of deadly traps that will kill any trespassers. Not to talk about deadly quantities of mercury.
The secret courtyard-style palace tomb is a mind-numbing discovery. Situated in the heart of the Emperor’s 22-square-mile (56-square-kilometer) mortuary compound guarded by more than 6,000 (and counting) full-size statues of warriors, musicians and acrobats, the buried palace is 2,263 by 820 feet (690 by 250 meters). It includes 18 courtyard houses overlooked by one main building, where the emperor is supposed to be. The palace—which has already been partially mapped in 3D using volumetric scanners—occupied a space of 6,003,490 cubic feet (170,000 cubic meters). That’s one fourth the size of the Forbidden City in Beijing—for just one tomb.
Experts believe that the 249-foot-high (76-meter) structure covered with soil and kept dry thanks to a complex draining system, hides the body of the emperor and his courtiers. Nobody knows what’s the state of their bodies, but one of the leading archeologists believes that they are most likely destroyed by now.
Science discovers the obvious: The twelve most useless research papers of 2012.
I especially like #10: Driving when drunk is unsafe. Who wudda known?
A United Kingdom effort to drill down almost two miles to reach buired Lake Ellsworth in Antarctica has been abandoned.
The article doesn’t mention the failure of a boiler two weeks ago, which from their website apparently delayed drilling until this week.
The uncertainty of science: Half the facts you know are wrong.
Facts are being manufactured all of the time, and, as Arbesman shows, many of them turn out to be wrong. Checking each one is how the scientific process is supposed to work; experimental results need to be replicated by other researchers. So how many of the findings in 845,175 articles published in 2009 and recorded in PubMed, the free online medical database, were actually replicated? Not all that many. In 2011, a disquieting study in Nature reported that a team of researchers over 10 years was able to reproduce the results of only six out of 53 landmark papers in preclinical cancer research.
In 2005, the physician and statistician John Ioannides published “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLoS Medicine. Ioannides cataloged the flaws of much biomedical research, pointing out that reported studies are less likely to be true when they are small, the postulated effect is likely to be weak, research designs and endpoints are flexible, financial and nonfinancial conflicts of interest are common, and competition in the field is fierce. Ioannides concluded that “for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.”
Or in other words, anyone who claims the “science is settled” on any major scientific issue that other scientists are hotly debating is lying to you.
What the future was supposed to be like.
An evening pause: Below is a compilation of the twelve most spectacular solar flares of 2012, in chronological order. A detailed explanation of each can be found here.
Though the Sun continues to go through the weakest sunspot maximums in more than a hundred years, we now have some very sophisticated instruments in space that are able to observe whatever happens. And the Sun is still a raging inferno of billions of hydrogen bombs, all going off at once and continuously. Even during a weak minimum it still is more powerful than we can imagine. Consider: The Earth would be nothing mores than a small dot in each of these flares.
You can relax: New data has confirmed that asteroid 2011 AG5 will not hit the Earth in 2040.
More bad news for Al Gore: A new dataset of global hurricanes since 1970 shows absolutely no trend, up or down.
An meteorite that crashed in the Sierra Nevada mountains in April was traveling at the fastest speed on record for an meteorite, almost 18 miles per second.
The uncertainty of imagery: The recent youtube viral video showing an eagle swooping down to grab a toddler was faked.
Based on this example alone, it is becoming increasingly possible to fake a news story. You better have multiple sources on any strange event or else take it with a grain of salt.
The bar at the center of the Milky Way.
