This is the science magazine for St. Pauls. It is a combination of articles and links from within and from outside the school. It is also currently a work in progress.
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Using projection and gestures to create interactive relationship with information - video embedded below:
Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a next generation user interface which can accurately detect the users finger and what it is touching, creating an interactive touchscreen-like system, using objects in the real word.
“We think paper and many other objects could be manipulated by touching them, as with a touchscreen. This system doesn’t use any special hardware; it consists of just a device like an ordinary webcam, plus a commercial projector. Its capabilities are achieved by image processing technology.”
Using this technology, information can be imported from a document as data, by selecting the necessary parts with your finger.
Scotsman: Scottish scientists have been given the go-ahead for the world’s first trials in humans of synthetic blood.
Researchers based at the Scottish Centre for Regenerative Medicine (SCRM) in Edinburgh hope to use stem cells to manufacture blood on an industrial scale to help end shortages and prevent infections being passed on in donations.
The UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has now granted a licence so scientists can make blood from stem cells which can be tested in humans – the first step towards large-scale clinical trials, which will hopefully lead to the routine use of blood created in this way.
Hubble has spotted an ancient galaxy that shouldn’t exist
This galaxy is so large, so fully-formed, astronomers say it shouldn’t exist at all. It’s called a “grand-design” spiral galaxy, and unlike most galaxies of its kind, this one is old. Like, really,reallyold. According to a new study conducted by researchers using NASA’s Hubble Telescope, it dates back roughly 10.7-billion years — and that makes it the most ancient spiral galaxy we’ve ever discovered.
“The vast majority of old galaxies look like train wrecks,” said UCLA astrophysicist Alice Shapley in a press release. “Our first thought was, why is this one so different, and so beautiful?”
The realization of quantum networks is one of the major challenges of modern physics. Now, new research shows how high-quality photons can be generated from ‘solid-state’ chips, bringing us closer to the quantum ‘internet’.
Image:An artist’s impression of distributed qubits (the bright spots) linked to each other via photons (the light beams). The colours of the beams represent that the optical frequency of the photons in each link can be tailored to the needs of the network.Credit:Mete Atature
The number of transistors on a microprocessor continues to double every two years, amazingly holding firm to a prediction by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore almost 50 years ago. If this is to continue, conceptual and technical advances harnessing the power of quantum mechanics in microchips will need to be investigated within the next decade.
“We are at the dawn of quantum-enabled technologies, and quantum computing is one of many thrilling possibilities,” says Dr Mete Atature from University of Cambridge Department of Physics. “Our results in particular suggest that multiple distant qubits in a distributed quantum network can share a highly coherent and programmable photonic interconnect that is liberated from the detrimental properties of the chips. Consequently, the ability to generate quantum entanglement and perform quantum teleportation between distant quantum-dot spin qubits with very high fidelity is now only a matter of time.”
Developing a distributed quantum network is one promising direction pursued by many researchers today. A variety of solid-state systems are currently being investigated as candidates for quantum bits of information, or qubits, as well as a number of approaches to quantum computing protocols, and the race is on for identifying the best combination.
Obama is in the news for mixing up star wars and star trek, but the big story is this recent report that scientists were able to connect the brains of two rats so that one could telepathically help answer riddles for the other. Oh, and they were able to do this with pairs of rats on different…
(CNN)— A 2-year-old Mississippi girl is the first child to be “functionally cured” of HIV, researchers announced Sunday.Researchers said they believe early intervention — in this case within 30 hours of birth — with three anti-viral drugs was key to the outcome. A “functional cure” is when the presence of the virus is so small, lifelong treatment is not necessary and standard clinical tests cannot detect the virus in the blood. The finding was announced at the 2013 Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta. The unidentified girl was born HIV-positive to a mother who received no prenatal care and was not diagnosed as HIV-positive herself until just before delivery. “We didn’t have the opportunity to treat the mom during the pregnancy as we would like to be able do to prevent transmission to the baby,” said Dr. Hannah Gay. Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, told CNN the timing of intervention in this case, before the baby was diagnosed HIV-positive, may deserve “more emphasis than the particular drugs or number of drugs used.”
“We are hoping that future studies will show that very early institution of effective therapy will result in this same outcome consistently,” she said on the eve of the conference.
What if we could see how the Jovian moon Europa would look like if its ocean weren’t frozen over? This may just be a mere illustrative depiction as done by an artist but it still raises our curiosity and imagination. If creatures lived on such an ocean world without the freezing temperatures who knows what kind of species would rise what kind of intelligence they’d have, adaptation skills, and size! But let me not downplay the fact that species have been shown to survive even on freezing temperatures. This is why I love artistic representations on observations we’ve witnessed in nature. The ‘what if’ sensations shoot through the roof, and that’s okay.
Europa as It Is Today: Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is slightly smaller than the Earth’s Moon. Like the Earth, Europa is thought to have an iron core, a rocky mantle and a surface ocean of salty water.
Unlike on Earth, however, this ocean is deep enough to cover the whole surface of Europa, and being far from the sun, the ocean surface is globally frozen over.
seven-year-old girl has become the first child leukaemia patient to be successfully treated by doctors using a disabled form of the virus that causes Aids to reprogramme the immune system.
When chemotherapy failed to work for Emily Whitehead, diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, she underwent a new experimental treatment at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
It involved tricking her immune system into fighting the cancer cells.
Dr Stephan Grupp, Director of the Centre for Childhood Cancer Research at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told CBS: “We’ve treated the first couple of patients and we’ve been blown away by the results”.
They’ve been very exciting.
“We collect cells of the immune system from a patient, so we use the patient’s own cells. We put in a new gene in those cells that makes the cells go after cancer cells and then we put those cells back in the patient.”
2012 saw major advances in science, remarkable feats of human achievement, and sea-changes in politics, international conflict, and human relations. These nine talks should help you frame the essential ideas that shaped events this past year.
About a year ago, we featured a video in which a fluid droplet bouncing on a vibrating pool demonstrated some aspects of the wave-particle duality fundamental to quantum mechanics. Work on this system continues and this new video focuses on studying some of the statistics of such a bouncing droplet—called a walker in the video—when it is confined to a circular corral. Using strobe lighting and capturing one frame per bounce, the vertical motion of these droplets is filtered out and the walking motion and the surface waves that guide it are captured. When the droplet is allowed to walk for an extended time, its path appears complicated and seemingly random, but it is possible to build a statistical picture and a probability density field that describe where the walker is most likely to be, much the way one describes the likelihood of locating a quantum particle. Parallels between the physical macroscale system and quantum-mechanical theory are drawn. (Video credit: D. Harris and J. Bush; submission by D. Harris)
A few months ago, physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive. His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein’s law of relativity.
This being the internet and all, it might not surprise you to find out that the question of whether 1 = 0.9999999… (infinitely repeating 9’s) is a pretty hot area of argument across message boards and blogs, because people will argue about anything on the internet.
But this argument has actually been raging for some time. I was listening to an interview with math dude Steven Strogatz on NPR’s Science Friday when I was reminded of it. Strogatz has a cool-sounding new book out called The Joy of X, that explores how math, when you disconnect it from all those ugly chalkboard proofs, is fascinatingly intertwined in every part of our lives. So why the controversy? This problem messes with our idea of what “equals” means. It just gets a little wacky when we apply logic that is meant for words to the world of numbers. There’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to the number.
In the real number system, 1 can be shown to equal “0.999…” pretty easily, although that doesn’t necessarily explain why it is the way it is. That’s a discussion for you and your math professor.
Here’s your thought experiment: Take a pie. It represents “1”, a whole pie. Cut it into 3 equal pieces, each representing 1/3, or “0.333…” repeating. Put those pieces back together and you have a whole pie, or 1 (assuming you didn’t lose any crumbs). Get it? Pretty weird.
