On the Republican candidates

The candidates for the 2012 Republican Presidential nomination are abysmal... All 3 of the front runners are young-Earth creationists and anti-science. The worst two are Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry, the former against vaccinations for cervical cancer, the latter publicly praying for rain to alleviate drought and both avid deniers of human caused climate change.

It's actually so bad that Nobel Prize winning Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, wrote an editorial on the issue in this week's New Scientist. This is why politics should have more room for scientific discourse, the public needs to be swayed by actual evidence on issues like climate policy and science education as opposed to rhetoric as is so often the case.

So true about funding

With all the cuts by the conservative government, I've had to defend science funding before. Phil Moriarty, from Sixty Symbols at Nottingham University, puts up a good case way more eloquently than I ever could.

Richard Dawkin's new book

Richard Dawkins has a new book announced for the 4th of October, and this excited me because he is one of my favourite authors. He has a rare talent of being able to communicate complicated scientific ideas in an easily understandable and interesting way.

It's called "The Magic of Reality", and marks a significant departure from his usual works. Namely it's for kids, and from the sound of it it seems fantastic.

I think stuff like this is so important, most lovers of science were captivated by the wonder of science as children. It was the "Horrible Science" series that caught me. I got the one about bugs when I was 8, and loved science ever since. Hopefully "The Magic of Reality" will captivate a new generation like Horrible Science and Carl Sagan's Cosmos did before it.

New Symphony of Science release

It's about the quantum world this time! Featuring Brian Cox, Michio Kaku, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynmann and, oddly, Morgan Freeman. Frank Close appears briefly too, exciting for me because I've read some of his stuff. It's good.

Diamond planet discovered

I just saw this and thought it was awesome, something I've only ever seen in science fiction. Astronomers have found a planet essentially made of diamond.

Oddly, it orbits around it's star really closely despite being really heavy. Closer than earth, but heavier than Jupiter.

Because of its immense density it's probably crystalline and contains heavier common elements. Like carbon. What's crystalline carbon?

That's right. diamond. A whole planet, 5 times the size of the earth, largely made of diamond.

Exam system

Well, I got my grades, A*AAA. These may or may not get me into medicine at QUB, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about how awful the exam system is, in particular the grades.

If you look at university courses they are sometimes gruesomely over subscribed. From my own experience applying for medicine, almost every course I considered had 10x applicants to places. As such I didn't get in.

It is unreasonable and unfair to think we could reduce the number of applicants, however we can say we could reduce the waiting time. People spend months on end waiting for a decision, time better spent getting the grades. So instead I propose a new system.

Instead of dispensing letters as grades, give out a numbered rank, 5-6 significant figures. These are based on your total scaled uniform marks. So, someone with ABB might get 75.66. From this he could see was in the 75th best division of candidates, and ranked 66 within them. Whereas someone with A*A*AA might get 8.34. A numerical grade system along those lines.

Why do this? It provides massive differentiation between candidates. With this, applications can start on results day, and you could apply to as many courses as you liked. At the end of each day of this until the beginning of term, courses could take the candidates based on their grades. Now, instead of there being 6 classes of grades, there are several thousand. Day by day the courses fill up by candidates based purely on academic merit, no need for the bullshit subjectivity of interviews and personal statements.

Anyway, just an idea!

De Grasse on telescope

PZ Myers linked this today, it is so true.

The telescope is so important but for largely for reasons people don't realise. This scares me, science won't get the funding for the projects like the LHC or Hubble in the future unless the public understands, even if vague and unfounded, what questions these things answer and why.

It would be great if there were scientists and engineers in the American Congress, instead of just lawyers and businessmen...

The Selfish Gene, the musical!

I didn't believe this at first, but someone has actually turned Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene into a musical. Don't believe me?

The book itself is about the idea of selection of genes and not necessarily individuals or species, as well as the evolution of altruism through "selfish" genes. In the musical, an Oxford professor teaches this to the audience by using the Adamson Family's daily struggles as an example.

I am soooooo happy about this, science needs more representation in the arts. Brian Cox does a good lecture on the subject. It is a fantastic book, and hopefully stuff like this can fight the general ignorance towards evolution.

Beautiful picture

Brian Cox tweeted this, taken by the docked Atlantis crew. I thought it was just beautiful, and wanted to share it.

You can see the green sheen of cosmic rays on the atmosphere, in the far distance the stars just make out the vague image of a galactic spiral arm and it's all framed by the International Space Station, scientific advancement through international cooperation. Just beautiful.

Water on Mars?

Today NASA and the University of Arizona published an article in Science about their new findings from the Martian Reconnaissance Orbiter. These streaks in the image are on the southern hemisphere of Mars and supposedly left by flowing water.

The greatest evidence is that they disappear in the winter and reappear in summer, as one would expect with temperature fluctuations. They have an official announcement tonight, apparently to include fantastic images of the streaks changing with the seasons.

Why is this important? The proven presence of flowing water would hugely increase the chances of life on Mars. Though even if life was found, I'd be far from impressed.

I mean, unless it's radically different then it's probably from Earth. Bacteria could easily be exchanged between the two planets from celestial collisions. It'd be interesting, but only ground breaking if two separate abiogenesises occurred in the same Solar System.

Here's hoping for life on Titan.

New Scientist Existential Issue

This week's New Scientist issue is simply fantastic. I got it last Tuesday and have read its cover feature twice. Amazing stuff.

It essentially addresses the greatest questions: is there a God? What happened before the Big Bang? How will humanity end? Besides being simply interesting, it contains loads of simple stock arguments for an atheist that are good to be aware of. It answers loads of the questions put to me by theists, such as how everything came from nothing. The articles are contributed to by big names like Daniel Dennett and Stephen Hawking.

Most of the articles are linked too here. Just click on the articles starting with "existence".

Largest water deposit found

Scientists discovered the largest deposit of water ever observed yesterday, bigger than than all the oceans on earth put together and multiplied by a 140 trillion.

This HUGE collection was found in a cloud of the stuff orbiting a quasar 12 billion light years away, with the rather appealing name APM 08279+5255. It just rolls off the tongue.

APM 08279+5255

Studying the radiation from the water orbiting the quasar will be useful in studying how black holes heat up their surroundings, and is also just quite interesting that we've found an intergalactic ocean 10,00 times heavier than the sun.

But Conservapedia have already shat all over this. You know the way in Genesis there was only darkness and water before god waved his magic wand? According to these guys it's evidence that before creation there was only water.

But it gets worse! They go on to say Genesis postulates water as the most abundant substance in the universe, which is of course ridiculous. Despite the fact that this is an isolated vapour cloud and therefore lends no statistical significance, the quasar it orbits must be heavier than it, or it be the other way around. And this quasar is by default made of collapsed clouds of hydrogen! Not water!

"Quantum Jumping"

When I saw this I raged. So hard. I struggled to remember something more bullshit than this.

Behold, Quantum Jumping.

Yes, what you just read is an actual product. People not only believe this, they pay for it too.

This Burt Goldman is nothing more than a conman. Or a deluded individual. I'm not sure which.

He claims that the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum theory is true beyond reasonable doubt and that you can contact the infinite number of "yous" in these universes. Apparently, you can do it because your mind can manipulate matter and energy which he claims are manifestations of thought. He goes on to say you can extract mindsets and skills from another self. For example, if you want to be rich then talk to an alternative "you" whom is better at saving money.

This is of course complete and utter nonsense. The multiple worlds interpretation is not proven beyond reasonable doubt, it's not even the likeliest to be correct. That title goes to the Copenhagen interpretation.

And even if we did assume it to be correct it is still madness to claim all mass and energy to be manifestations of "thought". This Goldman asshole even has the nerve to quote Max Plank on this, using the great scientist to justify his bullshit.

"German physicist and one of the founding fathers of Quantum Theory, Max Planck, said that “all matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration which holds the atom together. We must assume behind this force is the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.“

In other words, the substance of the universe, of your reality, may be nothing more than consciousness or thought. Consciousness forms the building blocks of the universe and everywhere that consciousness explores, with the expectation that something will be there, it also creates. If Quantum Theory is correct, it implies that to change your current reality, all you need to do is change the frequency of your thoughts."

Planck was using a deistic metaphor to describe the nature of the quantum world being able to be expressed through matrix mathematics, that's all. He was in no way postulating that mass and energy was thought and it is in no way possible to extract from this that your mind influences quantum reality.

How could the frequency of thought, the rate of ion flow in neurons, possibly punch a hole to an alternate universe? I can thick of no conceivable physical mechanism, bullshit or otherwise.

I fucking hate it when people take genuine scientific thought and twist it to make some ridiculous idea seem credible. This is the very manifestation of the dangers if scientific illiteracy.

Ugh... rant over.

...

Quantum Jumping, REALLY?

LHC found something?

For those of you like me who have been following the LHC since it turned on in 2008, hoping for it to deliver with something ground-breaking might just be done waiting.

It was announced on Friday evening a blip was found in recent data. Detected by both CMS and ATLAS, this blip occured around 120-140 GeV (gigaelectronvolts). This indicates an unusually high occurrence of W boson pairs, the weak nuclear force carriers. Similar patterns were found for corresponding photons and Z bosons.

This is exciting because these particles could be due to the decay of Higgs particles of masses around 120-140 GeV, and if this is verified then the evidence for the Higgs field (our best theory as to why things have mass) would be stronger.

Of course we can't get ahead of ourselves. The scientists at CERN still head to look into this more thoroughly. Back in April it was thought Higgs evidence was found too and it turned out to be a false alarm.

Personally, I'm hopeful. Unlike the last blip this one was announced by CERN, not leaked. I think this indicates the professionals are considering backing this. It'd be really cool to have Higgs evidence by the end of the summer.

Atlantis ends final mission

Whenever I was little I was obsessed with outer space. I used to go to the library and take all the books on space I could find. It was a Sagan-esque fascination, awed by the sheer scale of the universe and the science explaining it.

Which is why it makes me sad that NASA has ended its 30 year space shuttle program. Today, for the last time, shuttle Atlantis touched down at the Kennedy Space Centre after delivering a replacement waste removal system and vital supplies to the ISS.

The project put the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit and allowed construction of the ISS to be possible. I was at the Kennedy Space Centre last year and saw this shuttle, so for me it feels like an end of an era I've always been so enarmoured with. Especially since Congress is planning to cancel the James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor.

But that's not to say the future of human space flight is in jeopardy! Obama has outlined America's plans for the future, handing pioneering space exploration to private companies. They want private craft to dock at the ISS and as an incentive the last Atlantis crew left the first flight's flag on board to be taken back by the first to get there.

It's kind of like capture the flag. In the mean time, NASA astronauts will have to rely on their Russian partners to get into orbit and back.

So yeah, no more NASA shuttles for a while and Mars is even longer off. But, commercial interest might just speed up the process and now, through science, international relations can only improve. Overall I think I'm ok with this.

First synthetic organ transplant

Yay! First post with actual content! I felt this was worth sharing.

Surgeons in Sweden have just confirmed the first successful transplant of a lab-grown human organ. The organ in question was a trachea (the windpipe leading to your lungs).

Scientists from London literally sculpted trachea tissue into an exact copy of the patient's from 3D scans, with two more airways budding off it. Once it reached Sweden it was bathed in the patients' stem cells.

And that is what made it so brilliant, the trachea was transformed by the stem cells into the patient's own tissue! No donor and no risk of rejection! Reportedly, the patient is recovering well and there weren't any post-surgery complications.

This is pioneering work, just think of all the good that could come from work like this. Need a kidney? A safe one gets grown for you. Lost loads of blood? No problem, we have whole vats of O negative.

Now if only religious folk would back off from stem cell research with their half-baked world views. I've meet people opposed to the idea of such research at all, regardless of where the cells are sourced. It's just too taboo, apparently. Don't they know most research currently involves animal cells? I was unaware the rights of an unborn rat was more important than human welfare.

And so ends my first real blog entry. I suppose I'm now one of those pretentious internet twats now, right?

About me and my blog

Welcome to The Lonely Genome, my opinion-ridden corner of the internet. I'm Adam Henry, a nerdy wannabe scientist with more opinions than is healthy. I'm an atheist, liberal and gay. Essentially, I'm as stereotypically left as you can be.

I just left secondary school and by October I'll be studying genetics at Queens University Belfast. Hopefully by the end of it I'll be heading into a career in scientific research fully armed with a doctorate.

I'm from Northern Ireland, which I always felt to be about a few decades behind the rest of the western world (but that's for another time). I'm nestled pretty deep in the "Bible Belt" and had a fairly normal christian upbringing, which if anything catalysed my conversion to secularism.

I love to write, mostly my thoughts on things and sci-fi stories (I have a fictional universe in my head, how nerdy is that?), but I had no productive avenue for what I was writing. Hence, The Lonely Genome was created with the first free blogging service on Google.

In theory this blog will be filled with my day to day thoughts on current events, personal developments and other stuff I'm into (typical nerdy stuff like science, video games, books, technology and what have you). I'll probably post some musings on the goings-on of the atheist and gay movements, too.

The name is fairly meaningful. A friend of mine noted how me wanting to be a geneticist was ironic, because as a homosexual I'll probably never pass on my own genes (especially since I'm opposed to IVF and surrogate pregnancy). And so my blog is named in reference to this incongruity. My genome is doomed to never have the companionship of other gametes.

Anyway, I hope anyone who ever reads my blog enjoys it. I'm sure as hell looking forward to writing it.