Month: June 2012

Necessity of the interdisciplinary

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A strange cosmic “crucifix” in 774 AD, recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, could be explained by the occurrence of a supernova, perhaps rendered unobservable by a dense cloud of gas between Earth and the dying star that scattered all but some of the light. The real story, however, is that of Jonathon Allen, who came … Read more

Understanding the Solar System from within a shard

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A new variant of titanium oxide was discovered less than two days ago at Caltech, embedded within the famous Allende meteorite, which crashed on Earth in 1969. Using electron diffraction, mineralogists found the mineral, named panguite after the Chinese legend of Pan Gu, in a refractory incursion (RI). In the early stages of the formation … Read more

What’s allowed and disallowed in the name of SUSY

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The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) is due to begin on July 7 in Melbourne. This is the 26th episode of the most prestigious scientific conference on particle physics. In keeping with its stature, scientists from the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the LHC plan to announce the results of preliminary tests conducted … Read more

The post-reporter era

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One of the foundation stones of journalism is the process of reporting. That there is a messenger working the gap between an event and a story provides for news to exist and exist with myriad nuances attached to it. There are ethical and moral issues, technical considerations, writing styles, and presentation formats to perfect. The … Read more

Fizzed-out futures

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Initiatives are arising to plug holes in the Indian education system, or so they claim. Many are ambitious, some even overreaching, but they also exist in the company of those that are honest. However, the cause for concern is that such projects are being viewed as extracurricular to the prevailing education system-even by those who … Read more

A simplification of superfluidity

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“Once people tell me what symmetry the system starts with and what symmetry it ends up with, and whether the broken symmetries can be interchanged, I can work out exactly how many bosons there are and if that leads to weird behavior or not,” Murayama said. “We’ve tried it on more than 10 systems, and … Read more

Universality of the Lotka-Volterra equations

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If humankind were to discover a planet that harbours water, and if, by some provenance, the same unicellular organisms that were the precursors to Earth-bound evolution were to be introduced into this environment…

  1. Would the significant differences between our evolutionary pattern and their evolutionary pattern be equivalent in any measure to the significant differences between our environment and theirs? (akin to linguistic relativity; see Whorf-Sapir hypothesis) How might we measure these differences?
  2. How would the second-degree Kolmogorov model predator/prey population functions change? (Lotka-Volterra equations)
  3. Will the timeframe for “onset” of intelligence be determinable? Will intelligence manifest itself again at all? (Naturalism)
  4. Will the Earthborn megapode be able to recognize the “alien” megapode (or vice versa)? (Vitalism)
  5. Will evolutionary parameters in similar environments be similar, or will small changes in the evolution of genetic components manifest as large deviations in the final morphology?