journalofscience

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Coolest stuff of the day.

Listen to the ‘Imperial March’ from Star Wars played on 64 floppy disc drives.

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Logarithmic Scale

One good use of logarithms is using them to compare different things.

On first look, they might not seem suited to making comparisons easier.

Logarithms stretch smaller numbers apart and compress larger numbers together, so numbers that are normally evenly spaced are not with a logarithmic scale.

But, the real importance is realizing how they help you compare things of very different sizes.

Under logarithms, going up by a constant factor means going up by the same size step, so you can easily tell the comparative difference in size.

Actually, because of this, many human senses work on a logarithmic scale. It is much better to be able to say “this thing is twice as heave as that thing” than “this thing has 1.5 kilograms of mass more than that thing.” It also allows the same system to notice big differences and fine differences, by stretching things that are too small and compressing things that are too big.

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The growth of knowledge* *Degrees not actually required. Just time, effort, and dedication.

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Recycling Coffee Grounds for Science

Ever contemplated if the coffee grounds you’re about to toss away could be put to better use? Quite a number of scientists have, with proposed uses in fields ranging from bioenergy to food and pharmaceutical industries. Some proposals involve recovering a chemical of interest from the coffee grounds, but a collaboration among researchers in Italy and Spain shows that the dregs, grit and all, can be just as useful to the scientific community.

In this study, coffee grounds were treated with boiling hydrochloric acid, creating a black powder which exhibited high antioxidant potency. The resulting boiled coffee grounds were then applied in a number of experiments to examine their potential in the pharmaceutical, food, and polymer industries. Read more…

Photo credit: Scott Schiller (schill/Flicker)

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Amazing transparent fish caught in New Zealand seas.

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As beautiful as they are rare, frost flowers are created when extremely thin layers of ice are pushed out from the stems of plants and sometimes even wood.

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Beneath the water of Mangroves

"Mangroves are shrubs or small trees that grow in coastal saline or brackish water. The term is also used for tropical coastal vegetation consisting of such species. Mangroves occur worldwide in the tropics and subtropics, mainly between latitudes 25° N and 25° S. In the year 2000, the area of mangroves was 53,190 square miles (137,760 km²), spanning 118 countries and territories.

Mangroves are salt tolerant trees, also called halophytes, and are adapted to life in harsh coastal conditions. They contain a complex salt filtration system and complex root system to cope with salt water immersion and wave action. They are adapted to the low oxygen (anoxic) conditions of waterlogged mud.

The word is used in at least three senses: (1) most broadly to refer to the habitat and entire plant assemblage or mangal, for which the terms mangrove forest biome, mangrove swamp and mangrove forest are also used, (2) to refer to all trees and large shrubs in the mangrove swamp, and (3) narrowly to refer to the mangrove family of plants, the Rhizophoraceae, or even more specifically just to mangrove trees of the genus Rhizophora.

The mangrove biome, or mangal, is a distinct saline woodland or shrubland habitat characterized by depositional coastal environments, where fine sediments (often with high organic content) collect in areas protected from high-energy wave action. The saline conditions tolerated by various mangrove species range from brackish water, through pure seawater (30 to 40 ppt [parts per thousand]), to water concentrated by evaporation to over twice the salinity of ocean seawater (up to 90 ppt)."

 - Wikipedia

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The code that took America's Apollo 11  to the moon in the 1960's has been published

When programmers at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory set out to develop the flight software for the Apollo 11 space program in the mid-1960s, the necessary technology did not exist. They had to invent it.

They came up with a new way to store computer programs, called “rope memory,” and created a special version of the assembly programming language. Assembly itself is obscure to many of today’s programmers—it’s very difficult to read, intended to be easily understood by computers, not humans. For the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), MIT programmers wrote thousands of lines of that esoteric code.

Here’s a very 1960s data visualization of just how much code they wrote—this is Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the project, standing next to a stack of paper containing the software:

The AGC code has been available to the public for quite a while–it was first uploaded by tech researcher Ron Burkey in 2003, after he’d transcribed it from scanned images of the original hardcopies MIT had put online. That is, he manually typed out each line, one by one.

“It was scanned by an airplane pilot named Gary Neff in Colorado,” Burkey said in an email. “MIT got hold of the scans and put them online in the form of page images, which unfortunately had been mutilated in the process to the point of being unreadable in places.” Burkey reconstructed the unreadable parts, he said, using his engineering skills to fill in the blanks.

 “Quite a bit later, I managed to get some replacement scans from Gary Neff for the unreadable parts and fortunately found out that the parts I filled in were 100% correct!” he said.

As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, the code-sharing site where millions of programmers hang out these days.

Within hours, coders began dissecting the software, particularly looking at the code comments the AGC’s original programmers had written. In programming, comments are plain-English descriptions of what task is being performed at a given point. But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.

One of the source code files, for example, is called BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE, and the opening comments explain why:

About 900 lines into that subroutine, a reader can see the playfulness of the original programming team come through, in the first and last comments in this block of code:

In the file called LUNAR_LANDING_GUIDANCE_EQUATIONS.s, it appears that two lines of code were  meant to be temporary ended up being permanent, against the hopes of one programmer:

In the same file, there’s also code that appears to instruct an astronaut to “crank the silly thing around.”

“That code is all about positioning the antenna for the LR (landing radar),” Burkey explained. “I presume that it’s displaying a code to warn the astronaut to reposition it.”

And in the PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.s file, which is described as “the keyboard and display system program … exchanged between the AGC and the computer operator,” there’s a peculiar Shakespeare quote:

This is likely a reference to the AGC programming language itself, as one Reddit user . The language used predetermined “nouns” and “verbs” to execute operations. The verb pointed out 37, for example, means “Run program,” while the noun 33 means “Time to ignition.”

Now that the code is on GitHub, programmers can actually suggest changes and file issues. And, of course, they have

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White Blood Cell Chases Bacteria

Your body uses white blood cells to fight off the bacteria and viruses that invade your body and make you sick. In this video, you can see a white blood cell called a neutrophilchase down a Staphylococcus aureus bacterium.

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The Scale of the Universe

This amazing video illustrates the scale of over 100 items within the observable universe ranging from galaxies to insects, nebulae and stars to molecules and atoms.

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Taking Census; like or reblog if you are a Natural science blog. This census closes on the 23rd of July. The next census for this demographic is scheduled for 16/01/2017 in 6 months time.

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Circuit Scribe is a rollerball pen that writes with conductive silver ink. It makes creating circuits as easy as doodling.

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#science #maths #funny #humor #joke

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Heart of Gold