Science Quick Picks » Trends

Scientific Ideas That Seemed Crazy at the Time

Guest Blogger — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 17:55:54 +0000

By its very nature, science seeks to challenge. It asks brave questions, and comes up with answers that may seem ridiculous. Sometimes, those answers are not ridiculous, but become part of common knowledge, accepted by all. Here are just some of those ideas:

1) The Earth being round
The ancient Greeks were the first to realise that the earth is not flat, but round. Evidence included observations of the horizon, and early astronomy (it is a misconception that people believed in a flat earth into the Middle Ages: by then, most people knew it was round). At the time of discovery, the idea of a flat earth would have seemed counter-intuitive to many.

2) The Earth orbiting the sun
It was also the ancient Greeks who established at the earth orbited the sun, and not the other way around. The earth, they realised, was not the centre of the universe, but merely a part of it. This theory – heliocentrism – was espoused by Galileo in the seventeenth century, who challenged the Catholic church’s view that it was against the scripture, who accepted the idea relatively quickly.

3) Evolution
Darwin’s theory of evolution ran contrary to the creationist views which were mainstream in his time. However, overwhelming evidence led to its acceptance even by many religious people, although many still hold counter-evolutionary views, especially in the US.

4) Mendhelian inheritance
This is the theory, developed by Gregor Mendel in the 1860s, is the theory of how characteristics are passed down from one generation to another, through genes. His ideas were initially ignored: it was only in the twentieth century that they were taken up by other scientists, and went on to form the basis of modern genetics.

5) Global warming
The first theory that man’s activity could affect the world’s climate emerged in the late nineteenth century, but were disbelieved by most. It was not until the 1930s that scientists began to realise that they were likely true, and extensive research has taken place since. Nevertheless, the idea remains a controversial one, and is still refuted by some.

Other scientific theories are emerging all the time, and many seem utterly implausible. There is still so much that we do not know about our planet, and beyond it. Quantum physicists deal in ‘dark matter’ – so-called because they have limited understanding of what it is, though it is thought to be the basis of ‘black holes’. Other theories which seem impossible, but may yet be proven, are constantly studied. For example, it is thought that teleportation will be possible, perhaps within decades, and embryonic teleportation involving single atoms has already taken place: called ‘quantum entanglement’.

Another unlikely sounding theory is the ‘Copenhagen entanglement’. This holds that it is possible for something to be in two places at once: demonstrated by the ability of a particle to pass through two slits at the same time. There are many possible bizarre manifestations of these theories, and others. Who knows, they may yet come to shape our world.

Rachel is a freelance blogger with a background working on science parks and an interest in making science more accessible.

Scientific Ideas That Seemed Crazy at the Time is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Best International Universities

Guest Blogger — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 08:23:20 +0000

This a guest post by Diane Johnson. Diane graduated from the University of Utah and enjoys writing, particularly about travel and online classes.

After high school graduation many students decide to go to college, while some travel the world, and others start their careers. And within those main decisions there are other choices such as whether to go to a local college or move and attend a university in another state or country. Fortunately, US News and World Report ranks schools and puts out the “World’s Best Universities” list so students will know what their options are. So now students can earn a degree from a top rated university and still live abroad. This allows individuals to travel and experience something new but also increase their knowledge and skills. And these top rated international universities are located in many countries throughout the world.

England

1. University of Cambridge

4. University College – London

6. University of Oxford

7. Imperial College London

21. Kings College London

30. University of Bristol

Australia

20. Australian National University

37. University of Sydney

38. University of Melbourne

43. University of Queensland

46. University of New South Wales

Canada

18. McGill University

29. University of Toronto

44. University of British Columbia

Japan

24. University of Tokyo

25. Kyoto University

49. Osaka University

China

23. University of Hong Kong

40. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

42. The Chinese University of Hong Kong

47. Peking University

Other Top Rated Universities

19. ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)

22. University of Edinburgh

32. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

33. École Normale Supérieure de Paris (ENS Paris)

36. École Polytechnique, ParisTech

45. University of Copenhagen

51. Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg

52. Trinity College Dublin

56. University of Amsterdam

62. Uppsala University

If students are debating between going to college and traveling the world, they should know there is a third option. There are great universities everywhere and these universities made it into the top 100 of U.S. News & World Report’s World’s Best Universities: Top 400.

Best International Universities is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Science Online London 2010: How is the Web Changing Science?

Jorge Goncalves — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:28:07 +0000

Nature, Mendeley, and the British Library present Science Online London 2010, September 3-4, 2010 — British Library. How is the web changing the way we conduct, communicate, share, and evaluate research? How can we employ these trends for the greater good? This September, a brilliant group of scientists, bloggers, web entrepreneurs, and publishers will be meeting for two days to address these very questions.

In addition to a number of keynotes and talks, Science Online London is about community, and is an experience that you can shape. Exchange ideas with others like you. Propose and take part in un-conference sessions, ignite talks, two tours through the Royal Society, a Fringe-Frivolous Rooftop Debate with free drinks and discussions (limited to 50 attendees), or a trip to the Diamond Light Source Synchrotron.

See also the Science Online London Blog for more information and use the Wiki to give your suggestions.

Science Online London 2010: How is the Web Changing Science? is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Another Stunning Graphene Experimental Surprise

Jorge Goncalves — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:53:53 +0000

Graphene, the extraordinary form of carbon that consists of a single layer of carbon atoms, has produced another in a long list of experimental surprises. In the current issue of the journal Science, a multi-institutional team of researchers headed by Michael Crommie, a faculty senior scientist in the Materials Sciences Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, reports the creation of pseudo-magnetic fields far stronger than the strongest magnetic fields ever sustained in a laboratory – just by putting the right kind of strain onto a patch of graphene.

“We have shown experimentally that when graphene is stretched to form nanobubbles on a platinum substrate, electrons behave as if they were subject to magnetic fields in excess of 300 tesla, even though no magnetic field has actually been applied,” says Crommie. “This is a completely new physical effect that has no counterpart in any other condensed matter system.”

Crommie notes that “for over 100 years people have been sticking materials into magnetic fields to see how the electrons behave, but it’s impossible to sustain tremendously strong magnetic fields in a laboratory setting.” The current record is 85 tesla for a field that lasts only thousandths of a second. When stronger fields are created, the magnets blow themselves apart. The ability to make electrons behave as if they were in magnetic fields of 300 tesla or more – just by stretching graphene – offers a new window on a source of important applications and fundamental scientific discoveries going back over a century. This is made possible by graphene’s electronic behavior, which is unlike any other material’s.

A carbon atom has four valence electrons; in graphene (and in graphite, a stack of graphene layers), three electrons bond in a plane with their neighbors to form a strong hexagonal pattern, like chicken-wire. The fourth electron sticks up out of the plane and is free to hop from one atom to the next. The latter pi-bond electrons act as if they have no mass at all, like photons. They can move at almost one percent of the speed of light. The idea that a deformation of graphene might lead to the appearance of a pseudo-magnetic field first arose even before graphene sheets had been isolated, in the context of carbon nanotubes (which are simply rolled-up graphene). In early 2010, theorist Francisco Guinea of the Institute of Materials Science of Madrid and his colleagues developed these ideas and predicted that if graphene could be stretched along its three main crystallographic directions, it would effectively act as though it were placed in a uniform magnetic field. This is because strain changes the bond lengths between atoms and affects the way electrons move between them. The pseudo-magnetic field would reveal itself through its effects on electron orbits.

In classical physics, electrons in a magnetic field travel in circles called cyclotron orbits. These were named following Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron, because cyclotrons continuously accelerate charged particles (protons, in Lawrence’s case) in a curving path induced by a strong field. Viewed quantum mechanically, however, cyclotron orbits become quantized and exhibit discrete energy levels. Called Landau levels, these correspond to energies where constructive interference occurs in an orbiting electron’s quantum wave function. The number of electrons occupying each Landau level depends on the strength of the field – the stronger the field, the more energy spacing between Landau levels, and the denser the electron states become at each level – which is a key feature of the predicted pseudo-magnetic fields in graphene.

Describing their experimental discovery, Crommie says, “We had the benefit of a remarkable stroke of serendipity.”

Continue reading the press release Graphene Under Strain Creates Gigantic Pseudo-Magnetic Fields at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s News Center.

Another Stunning Graphene Experimental Surprise is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

PlanIT Valley: The First Sustainable City in the World

Jorge Goncalves — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 19:16:03 +0000

PlanIT Valley promises to be the first sustainable city from an economic, social, technological and environmental point of view. The story begins as many others, on a local level: Miguel Rodrigues, a Portuguese entrepreneur, simply wanted to build an electric car factory in Paredes, near Porto (Portugal). But the idea quickly jumped borders, transformed itself onto a global stage which became the project to build an intelligent city in Paredes and became a Harvard case study. “It is amazing the confluence of paths of Miguel Rodrigues. He met Celso Ferreira, President of Paredes, and introduced him Peter Van Manen, from McLaren Electronics, and Manuel Simas, from Microsoft Automotive, who knew Steve Lewis, from Living PlanIT.”

Living PlanIT, the company that will operate PlanIT Valley, predicts that the new city will occupy an area of 1700 hectares, host 12 thousand companies and create tens of thousands of jobs. Investment might exceed 10 billion euro, involving partners such as Cisco, McLaren and Buro Happold and could be considered a Project of National Interest (PIN).

Companies like IBM, Bosch, Intel and Microsoft have also been reported as potential partners. Planned to be an urban scale living laboratory where new techniques will be used to reduce the impact of infrastructure on the environment, this new city plans to host companies and researchers, retail, hotels, housing, offices, industry and entertainment venues, combining intelligent buildings and advanced mobility, transport and communication solutions.

At the core of Living PlanIT’s approach is an integrated platform for managing city operations. The high-level convergence of information and control systems with the fabric of buildings, infrastructure, places and mobility is critical to being able to respond holistically to the challenges posed by urbanization and associated issues of environmental sustainability. The convergence of manufacturing processes and enabling technologies is delivered through Living PlanIT and Cisco’s ecosystem of partners.

Cisco’s technologies provide the infrastructure for Living PlanIT’s Xtreme Construction (XTC) and Urban Operating System (UOS) platforms. XTC provides the method by which technologies are embedded in the fabrication of buildings and places while the UOS provides the orchestration, sensing and operational framework for urban environments. This process separates and supports city hardware such as renewable energy, water and waste systems from resident and user focused applications

PlanIT Valley – Next Generation Intelligent City: Innovation in a Living Laboratory
In order to demonstrate technological innovation at urban scale Living PlanIT will soon break ground at a 1,700 hectare (4,000 acre) Greenfield site in the municipality of Paredes outside Porto, Portugal. This is the initial phase in the construction of the first of a new generation of intelligent cities – PlanIT Valley.

PlanIT Valley will be the R&D platform for Living PlanIT and its Partners. The assimilation of technologies in PlanIT Valley means that innovations can be deployed at city scale.

PlanIT Valley: The First Sustainable City in the World is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

World University News Special Report: Research and the World Cup

Jorge Goncalves — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:34:26 +0000

‘Hundreds of thousands of football fans from around the world descended on South Africa last week to watch the 2010 FIFA World Cup which kicked off on Friday. The mega-event has gripped the imagination of the nation, including its students, academics and universities.

The World Cup has generated reams of research into the event and its multiple impacts. At the Second World Conference on Soccer and Science last week, academics presented studies into the ‘beautiful game’. Universities are housing fans and staging events, and students are helping out as volunteers. There have been lectures, including a seven-part Extra Time series on soccer delivered by academics from South Africa and Germany, the 2006 World Cup host.’

Continue reading Research and the World Cup.

World University News Special Report: Research and the World Cup is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

BELLA: Building a Table-Top Accelerator

Jorge Goncalves — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:46:54 +0000

BELLA: Accelerating Science by Accelerating Electrons: Berkeley Lab scientists stunned the world in 2006 when they proved they could accelerate electrons to very high energies (1 GeV, or a billion electron volts) in a distance of centimeters rather than hundreds of meters. Using the same concepts, those scientists plan to take the project to the next level and build a laser-based accelerator capable of zapping electron beams to energies exceeding 10 GeV in a distance of just one meter.

When completed in about four years, the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator, or BELLA, will demonstrate the promise of a novel and compact method of accelerating high-energy particles, by making use of a series of synchronized laser systems. The results will be of interest not only to high-energy particle physicists but also to chemists, biologists, doctors, and national security officials.

Related reading from Berkeley Labs: BELLA – The Next Stage in Laser Wakefield Acceleration

BELLA: Building a Table-Top Accelerator is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Next Generation Nanofilms

Jorge Goncalves — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:54:31 +0000

Next generation nanofilms created – new research described in AIP’s the Journal of Chemical Physics. ‘With the human genome in hand, biochemists have cataloged the 3-D structures of thousands of proteins isolated from living cells. But one important class of proteins — those stuck in the cell membranes — has proven difficult to extract and study in 3-D crystals. Now an international team of scientists has developed a way to train such molecules to line up neatly on the surface of water in thin, tissue-like layers called nanofilms. This technique should allow biochemists to better see and study the molecules and may lead to a new generation of molecular electronics and ultra-thin materials only one molecule thick.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time aligned films less than a nanometer thick have been produced,” say Iftach Nevo, a Marie Curie fellow at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and Leslie Leiserowitz of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Together with their colleagues at these institutions and at the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Germany and Northwestern University in Evanston, they describe their research in the 14 April 2009 issue of The Journal of Chemical Physics, published by the American Institute of Physics.

One way of creating a nanofilm is to build it on the surface of water. First, the building blocks of the film are dissolved in a volatile substance. When a drop of this solution is splashed onto water, the solvent evaporates. The building blocks left floating on the water interact with each other and spontaneously come together – like soap scum in a bathtub – to create a thin crystalline layer.

The shortcoming of this technique is that the thin crystals in the film created will be a mess. Like a mob in a dance club, molecules floating on a surface tend to spin around chaotically with little regard for order. Different patches of molecules will point different, random directions. Because the orientation of these molecules dictates the electrical, magnetic, and optical properties of the final film, these jumbled regions are difficult to develop into useful technologies. They are also difficult to analyze using imaging techniques like X-ray diffraction.

To force the molecules to line up, the team blasted them with nanosecond laser pulses. These pulses create an electric field that interacts with the molecules, rotating them slowly. The electric field associated with these laser pulses is polarized, filtered so that all of the light waves vibrate in the same direction. Molecules caught in the laser feel most stable when they line up along this direction, a process analogous to the needle in a compass swinging to line up with the Earth’s magnetic field. Eventually, this forms an aligned film with long range order.

The technique has not been completely perfected yet. Its success rate is about 30 percent, but the group believes that a better understanding of what is happening during the evaporation process and how the molecules interact with each other just before solidifying into a film will improve the efficiency.’

Next Generation Nanofilms is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Open Access Directory (OAD)

Jorge Goncalves — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:04:40 +0000

Press Release: Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists – for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal “declarations of independence” – and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.

Open Access Directory (OAD) is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

On the Road to an Antitumor Vaccine

Jorge Goncalves — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:54:17 +0000

Polymeric Nanoparticles for Tumor Vaccines. ‘The quest for an effective antitumor vaccine has received a boost from the results of work aimed at developing a nanoparticle that delivers tumor antigens to the immune system cells that trigger antibody production. The results of this effort, led by Shinsaku Nakagawa, Ph.D., and Naoki Okada, Ph.D., of Osaka University in Japan, were published in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

Vaccines are complex preparations of proteins and other materials designed to produce maximal immune response to those proteins. One factor that determines a vaccine’s potency is the ability of this mixture to trigger a recognition event between the protein antigen and immune system cells known as antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Using the biocompatible polymer poly(y-glutamic acid), the investigators were able to create self-assembling nanoparticles that entrap proteins as they form. The resulting nanoparticles were relatively stable, releasing their protein content over the course of a month. The investigators also demonstrated that they could freeze-dry these nanoparticles and reconstitute them without altering the functionality of the entrapped protein, a desirable property for any vaccine vehicle designed for use outside of major medical centers.’

On the Road to an Antitumor Vaccine is a post from Science Quick Picks, a blog dedicated to the world of Science.

Science Quick Picks » Trends

Scientific Ideas That Seemed Crazy at the Time

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Best International Universities

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Another Stunning Graphene Experimental Surprise

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