voluntaryXchange

Odd Science: A Microbial Map of Your Skin

I think this a map of the flora on your skin is potentially really useful, but it also leads to lines like this:

… Your mouth is more like my mouth than it is like your armpit …

One conclusion of the exercise was that the oils on your skin deter microbial colonization and growth. Do you think this means staying moisturized can keep you healthy?

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Cool Science: Bad Driving Is Genetic

FuturePundit reports that up to 30% of the population has a genetic variant that makes them worse drivers:

"These people make more errors from the get-go, and they forget more of what they learned after time away," said Dr. Steven Cramer, neurology associate professor and senior author of the study published recently in the journal Cerebral Cortex.

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Galapagos

An interactive map of the Galapagos from National Geographic.

We had just watched slides of my wife’s 1992 trip there last night – so it was cool to watch video snippets of some of the places this morning.

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Our Oldest Ancestor?

New Scientist summarizes some research that argues that life began as a rock.

Chemists have argued this for a long time, and now the microbiological and evolutionary evidence is starting to pile up.

In short, 4 billion years ago the ocean was more acidic and oxygen poor. In that environment, alkaline vents – hypothesized long ago but only recently discovered – lead to the formation and circulation of sophisticated proteins and lipids in spherical chambers. Further, the energy source was simpler and more automatic. Essentially, all the building blocks for life were there in one place, and all that had to evolve was a membrane to contain them.

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Pawprint, Tireprint and Footprint

Kiwi researchers estimate that the carbon footprint of a big dog is about twice that of an SUV.

Now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, but don’t expect environmentalists to notice.

Here goes: I’d guess a reasonably green human’s footprint is probably twice that of a big dog, or about 4 times that of an SUV. If a typical soccer-Mom family has perhaps 4 people and a dog, this means that about 5% of its carbon footprint comes from its SUV.

Then, why all the fuss about cars? Huge reductions in the carbon tireprint will do almost nothing to the overall carbon footprint of the family.

Further, given basal metabolism, even huge decreases in stuff like eating and breathing don’t do much to reduce the footprint of a human.

If what we’re focused on changing can’t make much difference, what’s the motivation? My guess is a deep-seated belief that automobile and oil companies are filled with bad people who need to wear hairshirts to make environmentalists feel better about themselves.

This is coming from someone who actually has a pretty small carbon footprint and doesn’t find it cost effective to worry about making it smaller.

As George Carlin used to say: “Do you know people who are worried about … everything?”

Technorati Tags: carbon,footprint,dog,suv

Duh – Tetris Is Good for Your Brain

I suppose that it had to be confirmed with experimental evidence that Tetris is good for you, but I’ve thought for about 20 years that games like this helped me clear my head.

There’ve been quite a few over the years that I’d add to this list: minesweeper (on a small board), Mah Jongg puzzles, Freecell, Train Dispatcher, and Rail Baron.

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New Theory of Multiple Sclerosis

Having an insufficient ability to circulate blood out of your brain has been associated with a 43-fold increase in your chances of having MS.

Technorati Tags: multiple,schlerosis,blood,flow

Cool Science: Compressing Light

Think about this one:

1. Send a packet of light pulses (of the same wavelength) down a fiber optic cable carrying digital information.
2. Convert each element of the packet into a pulse of a different wavelength.
3. Take advantage of the fact that “redder” pulses travel more slowly outside of a vacuum; so make the earlier pulses redder and the later pulses progressively “bluer” so that they close the distances.
4. Reverse the process at the end.

If you can do # 2 and # 4 fast enough, you can compress more packets into the same fiber optic cable: 27 times as much in experiments. Way cool.

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Would You Go to Mars … One-Way?

Lawrence Krauss thinks someone might.

One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand.

Read the whole thing.

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Your Future: Recreating Events in 3D

Two memes to combine here.

1. Sameer Agarwal, a computer scientist at the University of Washington can produce 3D visual reconstructions of cities based on the thousands of freely available two dimensional JPEG files available on the internet.
2. I’ve been going through my late father’s photos and slides. You know the drill: decades old scenes filled with people you don’t know. My wife is doing her late mother’s 8 mm movies too.

Here’s a prediction. In a few years you’ll be able to input a bunch of photos, slides, or films - of that picnic from 1957, or birthday party from 1974 - into software that will be able to produce a 3D simulation of the event that you can “fly” through, rotate, and so on.

Via New Scientist.

Technorati Tags: 3D,photo,rome,venice,dubrovnik,simulation