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13 things that don’t make sense by Michael Brooks is a pretty interesting look into the world of scientific discoveries, or lack thereof. Because, you see, there are quite a few commonplace things that we take for granted, but cannot quite explain from the scientific point of view. Sure, you’ll say, it must be some extra-hard scientific stuff, a formula understandable only by an army of advanced PhDs who spend their lives figuring out these ultra-complicated tasks.

Well, not quite. It turns out that life itself is quite a mystery from the scientific point of view.

1. Life. In theory life in the universe appeared when electric currents went through the masses of hydrogen, ammonia, water and methane, therefore creating something animate out of a set of inanimate chemicals. In practice, for a few decades the scientists have been trying to achieve a similar effect on a smaller scale, but so far no one has been able to produce the Holy Grail - turning something lifeless into something that is actually live, such as a single-cell organism. The life itself, it seems, is a scientific anomaly that should not happen in this Universe according to the existing laws of chemistry.
2. Death. You’ve heard it before: two things you cannot avoid in life are death and taxes. Well, this is a very human-centric view of things, as it turns out there’s a variety of species (most of them vertebrates) that only get better with age. Some turtles, it seems, only get healthier and produce more children with age. Moreover, scientists are aware only of non-natural causes of their deaths - being run over by a truck or attacked by a bird. Are those turtles immortal, or are we observing just a small stage of their lifecycles (which could eclipse ours by generations)?
3. Dark matter. It’s not embarrassing for scientists to admit they don’t know something. After all, there are plenty of little details that remain unknown in many branches of science. So not knowing what constitutes dark matter would be an acceptable excuse, if it weren’t for the fact that dark matter comprises 96% of the Universe. We know that the Universe keeps expanding, but we cannot quite describe how and what happens to the space that used to be compacted previously. Dark matter is the giant elephant in the room in discussions related to astronomy or physics - we don’t know what it is, we’ve never seen it, and only infer its existence, yet roughly speaking it’s a major ingredient in the Universe we live in.
4. Varying constants. Physical constants are warm and fuzzy. We don’t know why they have the value they have, but we always substitute them into our equations and formulas, relying on decades of scientific research behind us, and the fact that they are, well, constants. However, there’s a fairly determined group of scientists that is looking into certain scientific constants and finding that their values have changed as the Universe aged. Determined might be an understatement, as anyone willing to travel to Gabon and mess with uranium there is certainly dedicated. What they’re finding is that the constants describing nuclear reactions were different two billion years ago compared to current constants.
5. Newton’s inverse square law. In 1994 scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory figured out they had a bug with Pioneer probes. Contrary to the Newton’s inverse square law, the Pioneers were drifting off course. They hired Slava Turyshev out of Jet Propulsion Lab to investigate the small bug, which was most likely to blame on some contamination or error in Pioneer design. 14 years later the bug still stands unresolved. Together with NASA the scientists have gone through heaps of papers figuring out what could go wrong, and the answer is still up in the air. If unresolved, the Pioneer trajectory might become the first evidence that it’s time to rethink Newton’s inverse square law.
6. Homeopathy. When it works, you hear all about it. Homeopathy is almost like religion, in the sense that it attracts either staunch believers, or extreme sceptics. The idea of diluting a certain ingredient with copious amounts of water doesn’t sit well with the majority of chemists, who point out that such small proportions call for a chance of the entire solution being water. Nevertheless, in Brooks’ book there’s an attempt at the explanation of what might be causing homeopathic effect - changes in molecular structure of water depending on the chemicals that it’s been in contact with, even if the chemicals have been filtered out. However, it’s still an attempt at best, since the scientific experiments that do achieve positive results are generally not reproducible.
7. Placebo effect. Perhaps related to the previous thing we don’t understand, placebo effect has some interesting features. The patient knowing or suspecting that they might be receiving a placebo behaves differently than those without any knowledge. Are we comforted by the sight of people in white robes and our local pharmacist dealing out the regular dose of medication? Or does body start producing entirely different set of hormones with mind suspecting that the recovery process is near. Placebo, if figured out, might become a huge money saver with the current drug prices, and hence attracts scientific research. The only thing missing? A definitive conclusion on the placebo effect.
8. Free will. A certain amount of human ideology rests on the idea of free will. So the idea of the body just reacting to some responses outside of the brain is uncomfortable. But picture this. You’re in bed, it’s time to get up, yet you want to spend a few more minutes in bed. Your conscious mind is sending the signals for the body to get vertical, and yet at some point, probably between the thoughts of pending shower and commute to work, you get up. The final decision done by something unconscious, something you don’t really have control over. While your conscious mind can submit an application to this unknown organ and request something happening, the body movements and behavior are triggered by something that is still largely unknown for science.
9. Cold fusion. It became one of the most ridiculous scientific ideas to get associated with, and no scientist would touch it nowadays with a 40-foot pole, since it brings the stigma. However, as some point out, peer pressure is pathway to missing out on some potential innovations in the field. What’s currently reproducible is the effect of cold fusion on a plastic called CR39. Placed by a piece of depleted uranium, CR39 shows similar patterns of radiation as placed into a cold fusion experiment.
10. Life on Mars. The Viking probes were declared to contain no evidence of life on Mars. The only person in the room who disagreed with the announcement was a bacteriological researcher, who came up with a clever idea of detecting life (fart reference coming soon). By adding radioactive isotopes to the nutrients fed into the foreign soil, the researchers would get any evidence of carbon-based life to produce gas (there it is), and by the virtue of having the food injected with isotopes, the Geiger counter would go ballistic, and hence you could validate existence of life in the soil, even if other tests came negative.
11. WOW signal. One would argue that scientists at SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have a pretty monotonous job. They’re waiting for a signal on 1420 MHz frequency. Why 1420? That’s the frequency of hydrogen, the most prevalent element in the Universe, so hopefully those extra-terrestrials will arrive at the same idea when sending the signal. So far no signal has arrived. Except on August 15th, 1977, when the signal came. It was very distinct, and caused Jerry Ehman to write "Wow!" on the margin of the printout. The signal never repeated, and the SETI folks have not heard anything similar since then.
12. Mimivirus is an interesting virus that does not seem to affect humans, except for the unique cases, when it actually does. It’s the virus that fight cancer cells among others, and hence draws a great deal of research attention.
13. Sex. If you’ve read this far, here’s a bonus entry. Yes, sex is one of those things that scientists do not quite understand (insert a proper nerd joke here). Looking at overall picture, the animal kingdom provides a great variety of alternative means of reproduction, that are much more efficient as far as number of offspring and the quality of gene preservation. A number of reptiles and fish are all-female or all-unisex species, copying themselves for the purposes of reproduction. Moreover, a number of species, like water fleas, can reproduce either sexually or asexually. You’d think that the species produced through asexual reproduction would be somehow inferior to the ones that appeared as a result of a sexual act, but there’s no solid scientific data to prove that or the opposite. What remains enigmatic is that if asexual reproduction would provide you with 2x the population compared to sexual (and that leaves out the time and energy spent on finding a mate, taking her to dinners and consequent ring shopping), why didn’t the entire animal world switch to asexual, as it’s obviously a more efficient process.

Slashdot had a story on brain control headsets coming out soon from Emotiv. The company seems to have done a fair bit of research in linking various neural activity to explicit emotions. They’re targeting gaming market, and hoping to introduce game that analyze your emotions as well as kinetic signals that the brain is sending towards the other body organs. What’s also cool is they’re launching an SDK:

Additionally, Emotiv has announced the commercial availability of its full SDK. The SDK has been upgraded significantly since it was first announced in March 2007 at last year’s GDC. The commercially available version of the kit now includes:

• 2 beta-version neuroheadsets
• Software toolkit that exposes the APIs
• Full access to detection libraries
• Suite of development tools for effective creation and integration of applications with content

The Emotiv EPOC is the world’s first consumer neuroheadset. It detects and processes human conscious thoughts and expressions and non-conscious emotions. By integrating the Emotiv EPOC into their games or other applications, developers can dramatically enhance interactivity, gameplay and player enjoyment by, for example, enabling characters to respond to a player’s smile, laugh or frown; by adjusting the game dynamically in response to player emotions such as frustration or excitement; and enabling players to manipulate objects in a game or even make them disappear using the power of their thoughts.

Headset itself will cost $299 once released into commercial production, the SDK details are available here.

The bionic arm project, sponsored by DARPA and executed by Deka Research and Development Corp. run by Dean Kamen (inventor of Segway, among other things), is nearing completion and might undergo clinical trials if DARPA sees the project fit, IEEE Spectrum says: “The arm has motor control fine enough for test subjects to pluck chocolate-covered coffee beans one by one, pick up a power drill, unlock a door, and shake a hand. Six preconfigured grip settings make this possible, with names like chuck grip, key grip, and power grip. The different grips are shortcuts for the main operations humans perform daily.”

There’s a pretty interesting article in today’s New York Times on Boltzmann’s brains and probability of a human reincarnation arising purely from the entropy in the Universe. Among the infinitesimal amount of atoms, what is the probability of a combination forming, replicating your structure entirely?

In an interview Dr. Linde described these brains as a form of reincarnation. Over the course of eternity, he said, anything is possible. After some Big Bang in the far future, he said, “it’s possible that you yourself will re-emerge. Eventually you will appear with your table and your computer.” But it’s more likely, he went on, that you will be reincarnated as an isolated brain, without the baggage of stars and galaxies. In terms of probability, he said, “It’s cheaper.”

Massively multiplayer online games are always interesting to study as far as network optimizations and data transfer optimizations that they resort two. Researchers from Thailand and China are building a Linux-based peer-to-peer massively multiplayer online game and have published a paper on the problems they encountered:

Building real-time interactive P2P game playing applications in Linux posses many challenges and opens a wide area of research. There have been many implementations of remote interactive servers for game playing in some universities or companies providing collaborative access to the remote services.

Most current systems that provide a collaborative remote game environment either use the (multi) Unicast technique or the Multicast technique to transmit data packets to the participants of the experiment group in the network. Both of these schemes have disadvantages and advantages. In this paper we implement architecture under Linux for real-time multiplayer game application based on XCAST especially for the cases where there exist numerous small collaborative groups. We had provided extension to the Linux kernel and XCAST and show that formation of numerous simultaneous groups, where each group would collaborate for a separate game, is possible. The system proposed is robust in consistently providing group formation and collaboration activities in real time, back-up route or priority queuing, and on time packet delivery with minimum delay in network in the presence of continuous node arrival and departure in the entire game playing procedure. We also show that for data packets of low size, the use of XCAST in the network layer decreases the stress at the sender in each group whereas due to the increased header size of the XCAST packets. Our implementation has shown significant improvements to meet the demands of some real-time game applications.

Slate magazine has a special on mind development, brains, neuroscience, neurotheology and other brain-related issues appropriately named Brains! Lots of good articles on the latest developments in brain science. You should probably start with 5 biggest neuroscience developments of the year, which cross-links some other Slate articles compiled for this special. Train Your Brain is another article that describes how the humanity over the past century went from the idea of never-changing brain to an elastic brain that can be trained and improved with exercise.

Associated Press profiles NeuroSky, a company that started selling a brain activity sensor and an algorithm library to analyze it. The current application is better video games, where a golfer incapable of concentrating on the game would make an inferior move, or a scared Grand Theft Auto player would lose the precision in his aim. An EE Times article from 2005 says the company hired the top neuroscience experts from Moscow and licensed their inventions in order to produce a device that is capable of recognizing and interpreting brain activity.

Earlier this year some German scientists used brain surveillance techniques to determine whether the test participants decided to add or subtract a number, and reached 71% rate.

Even if you spent a single day in an Economics class, you’re probably familiar with a concept of supply and demand, where the price for a product has an impact on the demand and subsequent sales of it.

Associated Press runs an article on retailers employing mathematical models for price optimization, where some products are priced higher to generate higher margins, and some are discounted to generate larger volumes even at the expense of per-product margins. DemandTec, Oracle and SAP are some of the companies producing those mathematical models for retailers around the country, with AP listing some of the pricing optimizations employed currently.

Most of the time, according to the article, the calculations are not made in vacuum, but in comparison with existing sales and current product selection. So three power drills selling for $90, $120 and $130, all generate certain among of profit for the retailer. The higher the price, the higher the profit, as markup is universal among all the models. High-end consumers go for the $130, while bargain hunters think there’s nothing wrong with $90 drill. Result? $120 drill doesn’t sell that well. Pricing optimization places the second drill at $110, where it’s suddenly affordable for those who used to buy $90 drills. After all, it’s only additional $20.

There’s an older article in CFO Magazine justifying the cost of price optimization systems for CFOs.

Ever since my doctor alerted me to the high levels of cholesterol, I started paying attention not only to the diet, but also to the technology and science surrounding cardiovascular system. MIT Technology Review now runs a story of Imaging Cholesterol Buildup in the Heart, where Mount Sinai researchers have finally figured out a way to monitor cholesterol buildup in blood vessels - something that was virtually impossible previously:

Directly labeling the plaque inside blood vessels with a marker that
can be detected by MRI, known as a contrast agent, could provide a
better picture. But getting these molecules across the vessel lining
has been a challenge. New research shows that contrast agents that
mimic a natural molecule–high-density lipoprotein (HDL), or “good”
cholesterol–could do the trick. Normally, HDL passes through arteries
and attaches to low-density lipoprotein (LDL), or “bad” cholesterol,
carrying it out of arteries to the liver.

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