tingilinde

science, misinformation and fake news

A useful paper on the topic published in PNAS - outside their paywall I think

 

Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news

Dietram A. Scheufelea,1 and Nicole M. Krausea,1

Concerns about public misinformation in the United States—rang- ing from politics to science—are growing. Here, we provide an overview of how and why citizens become (and sometimes re- main) misinformed about science. Our discussion focuses specifi- cally on misinformation among individual citizens. However, it is impossible to understand individual information processing and acceptance without taking into account social networks, informa- tion ecologies, and other macro-level variables that provide impor- tant social context. Specifically, we show how being misinformed is a function of a person’s ability and motivation to spot falsehoods, but also of other group-level and societal factors that increase the chances of citizens to be exposed to correct(ive) information. We conclude by discussing a number of research areas—some of which echo themes of the 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineer- ing, and Medicine’s Communicating Science Effectively report—that will be particularly important for our future understanding of mis- information, specifically a systems approach to the problem of mis- information, the need for more systematic analyses of science communication in new media environments, and a (re)focusing on traditionally underserved audiences.

 

mechanical engineering at a major observatory

This is basically a vehicle to promote SolidWorks, but it shows some of the engineering at a major observatory.  Usually the focus is on the science and the software, but the optical and mechanical engineering is first rate. 

 

portable dna sequencing

Field DNA sequencers for identifying and tracking pathogenic viruses.  But a privacy risk too,

 

 

a year in wind over the north atlantic

Using the same data that drives the addictive surface wind map, a video of a last years winds over the North Atlantic. You'll want to go full screen on this one.

 

a quasicrystal thriller

A book review in Nature suggests an interesting non-technical science book.

snip

...

The Second Kind of Impossible: The Extraordinary Quest for a New Form of Matter Paul J. Steinhardt Simon & Schuster (2018)

Picture this. In Russia’s far east, a motley crew of conspirators races against time to solve a mystery hidden for billions of years. The enigma could link a speck of rock found in the dusty basement of an Italian museum to the evolution of the Solar System. To solve it, a brilliant theoretical physicist must overcome impossible odds, Kremlin agents, a vanished package, secret diaries and a trek across a volcanic peninsula.

...

 

 

 

pseudoscience in india

A rather embarrassing moment

The piece notes some say none of this has made its way into pubic policy.. (unlike the US) 

A tip of the ha to Greg

 

measuring the spin of a supermassive black hole

Very neat - looking at the x-ray glow of its lunch.  The astounding thing here is the black hole in question is spinning at half the speed of light

The paper on the arXiv

 

A Remarkably Loud Quasi-Periodicity after a Star is Disrupted by a Massive Black Hole

Dheeraj R. Pasham1∗, Ronald A. Remillard1, P. Chris Fragile2, Alessia Franchini3, Nicholas C. Stone4, Giuseppe Lodato3, Jeroen Homan1, Deepto Chakrabarty1, Frederick K. Baganoff1, James F. Steiner1, Eric R. Coughlin5, Nishanth R. Pasham6
1MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, Cambridge, MA 02139 2Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC 29424 3Department of Physics, University of Milan, Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Celoria 16 4Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 5Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3411 6Allyo, Sunnyvale, CA

The immense tidal forces of massive black holes can rip apart stars that come too close to them. As the resulting stellar debris spirals inwards, it heats up and emits x-rays when near the black hole. Here, we report the discovery of an exceptionally stable 131-second x-ray quasi-periodicity from a black hole after it disrupted a star. Using a black hole mass indicated from host galaxy scaling relations implies that, (1) this periodicity originates from very close to the black hole’s event horizon, and (2) the black hole is rapidly spinning. Our findings suggest that other disruption events with similar highly sensitive ob- servations likely also exhibit quasi-periodicities that encode information about the fundamental properties of their black holes.

 

extinctions

This age is becoming known as a period of major extinctions - a piece on snails.

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

ultra-cold plasmas

Normally hot comes to mind when you hear the word plasma.  Here are ultra-cold plasmas .. like milliKelvins using laser cooling.

magic angle graphene

some major excitement here

snip

...

Graphene had previously been cajoled into this behaviour by combining it with materials that were already known to be superconductors, or by chemically splicing it with other elements. This newfound ability to induce the same properties at the flick of a switch turned heads. “Now you put two, non-superconducting atomic layers together in a certain way and superconductivity pops up? I think that took everyone by surprise,” says ChunNing Jeanie Lau, a physicist at the Ohio State University in Columbus.

Physicists at the meeting were even more excited because of the way in which a graphene bilayer seems to become a superconductor. There were hints that its remarkable properties arose from strong interactions or ‘correlations’ between electrons — behaviour that is thought to underlie bizarre states of matter in more-complex materials. Some of those materials, namely ones that superconduct at relatively high temperatures (although still well below 0 °C), have baffled physicists for more than 30 years. If superconductivity in simple graphene is caused by the same mechanism, the material could be the Rosetta stone for understanding the phenomenon. That, in turn, could help researchers to engineer materials that superconduct close to room temperature, which would revolutionize many areas of modern technology, including transportation and computing.

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