Cubbi
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| Saturday, February 6th, 2010 | | 8:59 am |
science in review: january 2010
Running a little late here because I spent this week in the humid warmth of McAllen, TX, and I probably miss a few cool things.. but anyway: in chemistry news, An isomer of hexasilabenze was created, Si6R6, which turned out to be tricyclic (and bright green). It apparently is aromatic in some loose sense, and the authors want to call this 'dismutational aromaticity'. Before this, only hexasilaprismane has been made, of all the Si6R6 isomers, and it was definitely not aromatic. Also, a quantum computing team calculated energy levels of hydrogen molecule to 20 bit precision using photonic quantum computer. Would be nice to be able to do quantum chemisty calculations on large molecules one day. in physics, the 80-year old bizarre prediction of Dirac's relativistic QM theory called "Zitterbewegung" was tentatively confirmed by a no less bizarre technique called 'quantum simulation', where hitting trapped ions with fine-tuned lasers makes them behave as free particles moving at fast speeds or as other types of quantum systems that are being simulated. Speaking of the bizarre, biology was rich in that last month (when isn't it?). Researchers attempted to tag some tree frogs with radio transmitters and learned something really weird: Tree frogs are apparently able to move into the bladder and urinate anything that was lodged in their body cavities: thorns, insects, radio transmitters. Also, a parasite was found, appropriately named Endaphis fugitiva, which jumps out of the banana aphid in which it lives when it realizes the aphid is in the jaws of a predator. In promiscuous (but not in monogamous) mouse species, sperm cells can recognize and team up with sperm cells of the same male or, in a lesser extent, sperm of a brother. They form packs that swim faster than a single sperm cell. Also a couple researchers from Cincinnati decided to circumsize fruit fly males with lasers to see if their penis ornaments help them in mating.. Obviously, they do. Speaking of sex, early last month a group from London made CNN news when they claimed that there is no G-spot in human females, simply by asking a whole lot of twins if they think they have any, arguing against an earlier italian study where G-spot was actually located with ultrasound. And of course as everyone knows, paleontology had two major discoveries to hit the news: A polish group found well tetrapod tracks in Middle Devonian, showing that tetrapods coexisted with elpistostegids (such as Tiktaalik) for over 10 million years in different niches. Some chinese paleontologists found melanosomes in fossil dinosaur feathers, suggesting that dino's plumage was striped russet-orange and white, overturning the idea that the color of prehistoric animals would never be known. How if they could find fossilized voice... Something cool about humans: Ever seen movies where cowboys duel, the bad guy draws and the good guy reacts and draws faster? There's truth to that: human brain reacts faster than acts (by a small margin, and with more mistakes, but faster). Another curous find about us: barefoot running subjects humans to four times less stress than shod running. Shoes make it easy to pick up the bad habit of landing on the heel. And finally the poor little Mars explorer Spirit, stuck in a sand pit with two broken wheels since November, was finally declared a "stationary research station" (also covered by xkcd). Current Mood:  geeky | | Saturday, January 9th, 2010 | | 10:46 am |
| | Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 | | 10:08 pm |
science in review: December 2009
Now that I've sufficiently recovered from the New Year celebrations, let's see what did the humanity learn in the past month. In chemistry, carbonic acid, H2CO3, was finally observed experimentally in solution. Speaking of simple targets, a teraherz study of water showed that dissolved ions neither weaken nor strengthen water's structure, and yet another study of caged water clusters showed how some can dry up and get rehydrated back. Another entertaining non-nano chemistry work, cyclooctatetraene was forcibly planarized and the resulting antiaromatic molecule studied experimentally. Closer to my interests, solid-state NMR can now be used to determine structures of nontrivial proteins and a new solution NMR sequence, HN(COCA)HAHB, was developed to study unfolded proteins. Finally someone seriously cares about coupling constants in protein structure analysis. In non-nano physics, mass of top quark has been ascertained to about 1% error. And in a rather groundbreaking quantum physics news, the 40 year old hypothesis of the universality of Efimov trimers has been experimentally shown to be true last month by the Hulet atom cooling lab in Rice U (cute picture of a high-five from Efimov to Hulet there). The first Efimov trimer itself was only observed in 2006, but this group confirmed the universality property and even observed Efimov tetramers. In biology, airflow inside dog's nose was studied: we now know that they smell with each nostril separately (like we hear sounds with each ear separately), and that they do not exhale scent when exhaling air. Microbiologists now know of a new giant virus from amoebae, although it doesn't surpass Mimivirus. Another group, while studying rock-breathing bacteria, figured out how they create biological "wires" that pass through the cell wall and conduct electricity between the cell and the rock. Psychology had a couple if interesting findings: a group of Swedish psychologists noticed that the time it takes for a newborn mammal to walk can be exactly calculated based on adult brain mass and gestation time, and that humans are not at all exceptional in their motor development. In more practical news, NYU psychologists demonstrated on human subjects that it's possible to completely erase fear attached to a memory if it is modified at reconsolidation time, as was known to be possible in rats (if you didn't know, after we recall any memory, there's a moment a few minutes later when it is being reassembled to be put back in permanent storage, and it can be forever modified or even erased at that point). Speaking of memory, someone at Case Western studying short-term memory managed to store information in vitro, in pieces of mammalian brain tissue. Astronomers finally found an unambiguous example of a pair-instability supernova, in another galaxy, naturally. In less distant news, Cassini was able to get a good look at the humongous planet-wide hexagonal cloud on Saturn, first spotted back in the 1980s by Voyager. And finally, in geology, the old and somewhat disputed deep mantle plume hypothesis gained solid experimental support with a new study of Hawaiian hot spot. Also, in case you feel guilty about drinking champagne at New Year's eve, it is just as good at preventing cardiovascular disease as red wine :) Almost forgot, last month's animal behavior brought us the tool-using octopus and the explosive duck erections! Current Mood: geeky | | Saturday, December 26th, 2009 | | 1:43 am |
How I spent 2000-2009, in pictures
I know it's only been nine years into the 21st century, not ten, but with everyone recapping the "decade", I figured I could, too! Year 2000: hugged a lion, saw Cats on Broadway, met ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) meetoolion in Connecticut, met jammet in Hanover      Year 2001: nuzzled a leopard, learned to drive, lived the opulent life of a dot-com programmer in San Jose, visited Disneyland for my 25th birthday.( pics cut )Year 2002: lost the dot-com job, had a bad break-up, completed Ph.D., moved to Long Island as a biochemist.( pics cut )Year 2003: met my future wife madamecrystal, worked a lot, met TiAMO, swam in a waterfall( pics cut )Year 2004: had a good time and made too many friends to count( pics cut )Year 2005: got good at DDR, changed jobs, moved to Queens, got black belt, visited Epcot in Orlando( pics cut )Year 2006: had a good time, also helped bring ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) li_furs together ( pics cut )Year 2007: got married, came back to CA for a honeymoon, ended the year working in Rhode Island ( pics cut )Year 2008: got the Jaguar, went to a nude beach for the first time, had even more good time. Yes, I am Krueger for every Halloween.( pics cut )Year 2009: became a karate judge (under USANKF), attended an AC/DC concert, finally found Balto( pics cut ) Current Mood:  cheerful | | Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 | | 9:12 pm |
| | Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 | | 12:13 pm |
global warming denialism
We've had a surge of anthropogenically forced climate change denialism lately, the stolen email incident even made it to Daily Show (the only news program I watch). In case anyone's doubted, they have exactly as much scientific credibility as AIDS denialists or the "vaccination causes autism" movement. Of course, quite a few politically-motivated environmentalists made stuff up where science was too boring, but even Al Gore's infamous "Inconvenient Truth" has ten times less factual errors than one global warming chapter of Lomborg's "Skeptical Environmentalist". Personally, I think pressuring people into feeling environmental anxiety and guilt is just as amoral as slandering climatologists (actually, I think a rational person should never experience guilt at all), but whether people deny or stretch the observed facts doesn't change the facts in the least. And since I've been running into internet discussions about this issue here and there, here are a collection of rebuttals by topic, for my own reference. Responses to common contrarian arguments at RealClimate, the most in-depth blog on this topic, since it is ran by actual climatologists: Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, and others. How to talk to a GW skeptic at IllConsidered, blog by Coby Beck, an AI software engineer. Skeptic Arguments by taxonomy at SkepticalScience, blog by John Cook, a solar physicist. Climate Chainge: A guide for the perplexed by New Scientist magazine, bad as it became. Current Mood: geeky | | Monday, December 14th, 2009 | | 12:44 am |
Writer's Block: Voulez-vous parler ...
I speak English and Russian fluently. Since French was the first foreign language I've learned, I still read enough French to shop at amazon.fr and ebay.fr, but not enough to understand anything spoken. I'd learn Chinese, because I'm a pessimist! Current Mood:  full | | Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 | | 12:50 pm |
science in review: november 2009
It's been four years since my last scientific publication, and while C++ is all good and profitable, I feel like I'm missing the fun stuff. So I randomly decided to check the news to keep myself informed.. Let's see what we've learned in November 2009, other than that the Moon is slightly damp and that LHC finally works. In chemistry, everyone who was crazy about fullerenes and nanotubes is now crazy about graphene (monolayer of graphite, first literally peeled off a chunk of graphite with Scotch tape by some Russians in 2004). In just last month people kept coming up with new ways to create it, new ways to modify it (and some more), new ways to calculate it, and new physical properties to measure. That whole nanoscience thing is a good source of funding! Adult neurogenesis (did you even know new brain cells are constantly born in adult brains?) is still a hot topic in neuroscience: these Japanese guys say the new brain cells not only form new memories (as a bunch of 2008 works has shown) but also clear out memories from hippocampus after they've been permanently stored in neocortex. Speaking of memory, this girl just showed that motor skills are stored by permanent rewiring of neurons, which is a neat explanation for why once you know how to ride a bicycle, you'll never forget. Also, speaking of brains, there was this cool review by the leading bee brain specialist (who once was a postdoc in Stony Brook, like me) saying that brain size does not change cognitive capacity. Continuing the search of minimal set of molecules required for life, a crowd of biochemists from all over Europe finally published their detailed analysis of one of the smallest bacteria, Mycoplasma pneumoniae, in three articles in Science: 1, 2, 3. They found it "more subtle and intricate than was previously considered possible". Well duh, it's a pathogen, it has to be able to change quickly, and under evolutionary pressure to be small it just had to reuse the same molecules in multiple ways. One thing evolution is good at is reuse. It's a good reminder of how dismally far is biochemistry from understanding the function of nearly all proteins. Decent advance, nevertheless. What else.. Astronomers, besides everybody's favorite slightly damp Moon bombing, found out that heliosphere is not smooth but has a weird ribbon going around it: Science 326:959 and four more papers in the same issue (how do they get so much space there with nothing but guesses??). Anthropologists, who had a bit of a debate about the 3'6" tall hobbit named Flo ( Homo floresiensis, fossil human-like specimen found in 2003) have a new article, from Stony Brook of all places, again saying it's a real specimen and not a sick H. erectus. Botanists discovered some altriustic plants (they change their morphology to cooperate with relatives and to compete with strangers growing nearby), and some plants that use camouflage to hide from herbivore animals. Who knew botany could be interesting? In kick-ass geological news, African continent is being torn asunder, with the gigantic Ethiopian Rift which suddenly appeared in 2005 in the middle of a desert, becoming 35 miles long and 20 feet wide in just a few days. A new article came out, which now says that it is no joke, this crack will one day become the middle of a new ocean. And just for fun, someone bothered to find out why a dash of flour tossed on the surface of water scatters out so very fast (hey, it's nanoscience!), and these girls say they got a good idea how to make the infertility pill for men. Current Mood: geeky | | Tuesday, November 10th, 2009 | | 10:40 pm |
So I heard you like Ray Bradbury?
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And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day -- the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue.
Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.
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Current Mood:  giddy | | Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | | 6:43 pm |
Fruit bats and their tongues.
Image (c) PLoS ONE |
I know it's two weeks old, but it's still amusing. To quote the article, "Our observations are the first to show regular fellatio in adult animals other than humans."
What I find really funny though is how unrealistically precise they were with their timing. Duration of copulation measured to one hundredth of a second? Really? With precision of give or take half a minute?
"The average duration of penis licking was 19.14±3.45 s, representing about 8.7% of the average duration of copulation (220.29±26.19 s (N = 14)). [...] The pairs spent more time copulating if the female licked her mate's penis [...] than on occasions when females did not show licking behavior (121.83±20.56 s, N = 6)"
Well, I guess that's PLoS ONE for you. |
Current Mood:  amused | | Friday, October 30th, 2009 | | 11:47 pm |
Halloween 2009
Hey, tomorrow is Halloween (longislanders, btw, party at our house!) and it will be 7 years since I walked out of JFK airport with a giant suitcase full of clothes, books, and hard drives. It's amazing how much stuff happened to me since then. Now let's see how much candy can I eat today before the trick-o-treaters come tomorrow. Current Mood:  bouncy | | Friday, September 4th, 2009 | | 2:07 pm |
ocaml got really lazy now
Redesigning and managing the team of rewriting by myself the C++ core of all software we make at work, from scratch, stirred up my interest in programming to the point that I started randomly writing programs during free time commute to work. Guess what, ocaml, the one functional language practical enough to be used in real world. from science to file sharing, and good enough to have been stolen by Microsoft, finally learned how to do infinite lazy lists while I wasn't looking. What used to take half a page of hand-crafted code fiddling with explicit lazy constructors and forced calls, is now done like this: list of all integer numbers above zero: value naturals = let rec n a = fstream [: `a; n (a+1) :] in n 1;list of all fibonacci numbers: value fibs = let rec f a b = fstream [: `a; f b (a + b) :] in f 0 1;And yes, in case anyone reading this is into programming like me, I know Haskell had infinite lists for 19 years, but Haskell is not for real world, plus these little "fstream" constructs from ocaml allow much crazier stuff done to them, by means of functional and backtracking parsers. Current Mood: geeky | | Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 | | 12:19 am |
Li Wei
 I totally forgot on whose lj (if it was lj) I saw a link to Li Wei's photography, these days I'm so busy at work I cannot remember what I had for breakfast. But hey, he's pretty crazy with his imagination and the ability to take a picture like that with no photoshopping. Even though he has a bizarre habit of falling into things head first - he makes one lousy superhero. Current Mood: amused | | Monday, August 31st, 2009 | | 1:48 pm |
Microscopes show C-H bonds now O.o
  As BBC reports on this article in Science published by a bunch of crazy IBM researchers from Zurich, atomic force microscopes can be tuned so insanely well now that even C-H bonds become (kinda) visible! (the molecule on the picture is pentacene) (The first picture is from IBM press release, the second picture is taken (and greatly reduced in size) from Science 325, 1110 (2009), without permission) Current Mood: geeky | | Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 | | 11:00 pm |
thought of the weekend
More laser tag arenas should have mirrors, it adds a whole new dimension to the game. Current Mood:  thirsty | | Saturday, August 1st, 2009 | | 3:29 am |
| | Friday, July 24th, 2009 | | 7:30 pm |
Fried chicken and champagne!
I had to go to Austin for a quick business trip, and out of the patchwork of places I went to eat, I liked best the brand new eating establishment there on San Jacinto and 3rd, called Max's Wine Dive, which was still open at midnight and served some rather nice food. And I could watch them cook it. And their slogan sums them best: "Fried chicken and Champagne? Why the hell not!?" Also, I have now participated in Space Balls Quote-a-thon at the Alamo. Austin is Wierd. | | Friday, July 10th, 2009 | | 1:37 pm |
A C++ epiphany
boost::asio::async_read_until is the best invention since std::vector! Current Mood:  think async | | Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | | 5:53 pm |
I know who the real father of science fiction is!
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Jules Verne got brought up in an IRC conversation, and I started remembering his novels. Honestly, I never cared for his quaint science fiction, as awesome as it was from historical point of view (air conditioning, TV, and the Internet in the 19th century!), but his adventure novels completely swept my imagination. Captain Hatteras, Fifteen-year-old captain, Captain Nemo, Children of Captain Grant, various explorers, pirates, scientists, and tribesmen.
In fact, his Mysterious Island is what made me a chemist: the true hero of the story was a engineer, who made everything, from steel to dynamite, out of raw materials. Odd how few people around me have even heard of that novel, although they all know about Captain Nemo (who meets his end in the Island) |
and now, anthrocon. Current Mood:  thoughtful | | Sunday, June 21st, 2009 | | 12:26 pm |
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