science Archives - Page 9 of 10

Deep Thoughts by Kilobot 142

The CBC news site had an article about a Harvard research group that built 1,024 tiny robots. The “Kilobots” have three tiny legs and are powered by a rechargeable battery. They express a “hive mentality” in which the researchers can send a signal to the group of robots and they will assemble into groupings of…

Millions and Billions

When I was a teenager in Canada there was a time when many people were talking about the concept of a million. People would wave their lottery ticket and talk about how wealthy they would be when they won a million dollars. They talked about government debts that were measured in millions of dollars. People…

Slide Rules and Gopher Protocols

(Click on the thumb-nail image for a larger picture.) In my junior high education we used logarithm tables to do specific types of math and in grade 10 science I purchased a slide rule to do my calculations. In 1975, calculators were not very sophisticated, they were expensive, and my physics teacher believed we all…

Quantum Mathematics

Two experiences within a few days have shaped my thinking for this blog. Earlier this week a friend made the statement that our world cannot fight the truth. Some in our world want to say that certain things are right when the fact is that they are not. He then used the metaphor that 2…

Thinking and Doing

(Click on the thumbnail image for a larger picture.) A recent article published in the journal Science found that “participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think.”1 Humans are capable of day-dreaming, fantasizing, meditating, and praying but when given time and space…

Europa

The May 17 issue of Science News features a series of articles about Europa, the fourth largest moon of Jupiter. Europa is perhaps the most interesting moon in our solar system. At roughly two thirds the size of our own moon (with a mass of just 0.0080 times the mass of earth) it is still…

Old Footprints

There is an interesting article at Science News about ancient footprints found in petrified mud in England. According to the explanations presented in the article, some ancient ancestors of humans walked through the mud at least 780,000 years ago, and the footprints stayed in that mud and were protected from erosion for many years until…

Follow-up to DNA Sequencing

Now that researchers have sequenced the first human genomes and several large mammalian genomes, attention has shifted to looking at ancient people groups and mixed ethnic persons to see what genes code for the distinctions between different collections of people. The reality is that we have many more genes in common and many more common…

Gene Therapy

Molecular biologists have been searching for years to find efficient and effective ways of accomplishing gene therapy. None of the attempts thus far have worked. One of the most promising in recent years is explained in an article published in the journal Science in February of 2013. The researchers suggest that using an RNA guiding…

Avian Einsteins

You may already know of my interest in crows, jays, and other intelligent bird species. (If not, you can catch up by reading previous blog posts.) Today I want to share with you another interesting study that suggests that crows have the ability to teach other crows to avoid dangerous human individuals. Researchers at the University…