Science@Cal is proud to present a series of free public science lectures on the third Saturday of every month. These talks are given by renowned UC Berkeley scientists and aimed at general audiences. Talks take place on the UC Berkeley campus at 11 am. Doors open thirty minutes before the talk and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Each talk is planned to last an hour, plus time for at least a few questions at the end.
Most of us have strong opinions about what those words mean, but scratch the surface and it becomes clear that "smart" and "dumb" are slippery, subjective constructs. What seems smart to one person may strike another as naive, arrogant, or shortsighted. Worse still, our own perception of what's smart can shift over time. Yesterday's clever decision can look like today's regrettable blunder.
Scientists have unveiled the most detailed map of the brain ever created. The fascinating chart represents almost 10 million neurons, 26 billion synapses and 86 interconnected brain regions. It was created with Fugaku, Japan's ultra-fast supercomputer, which is capable of quadrillions of calculations per second. Scientists will use their digital copy to answer questions about what happens in a disease, how brain waves shape mental focus and how seizures spread in the brain.
Around 38 percent of websites that were on the Internet in 2013 are gone now. Half of Wikipedia pages reference dead links. Information seems to be disappearing all around us, and that's nothing new. Over geological time, information loss is the norm, not the exception. Yet according to physics, information is never destroyed. In principle, a burned book is just as readable as the originalif you analyze the ashes of the fire, the smoke and the flames to re-create the incinerated words.
It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor in chief, was tasked with tackling long ago, where he was forced to look at memory, human connection and technology in a way that asked deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come into contact with our past selves. Hi, David. David Ewalt: Hi, it's nice to join you.
Roxbury puddingstone, the mottled rock quarried nearby and used for much of the old church masonry in Boston, formed 600 million years ago in violent submarine landslides off the coast of a barren volcanic microcontinent that rifted off Africa. This is so long ago thatin the course of the perpetual wander of continentsthe whole thing happened somewhere near the south pole.
First off, birds really like sitting on elevated lines, whether those are power lines, telecommunication wires or cable lines. The high wires provide an excellent vantage point for surveying the area, giving them a bird's eye view of the territory. From there, they can look around for food and watch out for predators. The lines are also a convenient spot for taking a rest and as there are other birds on the line, a chance to converse.
The Leonid meteor shower is peaking this week, potentially bringing hundreds of long-tailed meteors with it. This annual fall display is an excellent opportunity to spot fireballs in the night sky. Meteor showers are the beautiful result of Earth moving through the trail of debris streaming from comets and asteroids as they make their own way around the sun. As these chunks of space rock enter our atmosphere, they burn up as shooting stars. And if they land, they become meteorites.
During a downright bizarre conversation, Marcus says: 'I think there is still very good evidence that suggests the world is flat.' When asked by another housemate for said evidence, he replies: 'Well if you actually look at the horizon, it's a straight line.' Marcus then claims all pictures from space are 'obviously' fake made by AI and that humans have never been to the moon.
Get out and walk! I mean, maybe not through the outback, but if you're in any of the cities, walk. I do that wherever I go. And I love to just go off and explore without knowing where I'm going, without a map or any preconceived ideas. I think it's the best way to discover a place, and it has the great virtue that if you turn a corner say in Sydney and there's suddenly the Harbour Bridge, you feel as if you've discovered it.
When ultra-runners prepare for races that span hundreds of miles and last for days, they are not only challenging their determination and physical power. They are also exploring how far human physiology can be pushed. In a study published October 20 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology, researchers reported that even elite endurance athletes cannot consistently exceed an average "metabolic ceiling" equal to 2.5 times their basal metabolic rate (BMR) in daily energy use.
To glean a country's, territory's, region's or an institution's contribution to an article, and to ensure that they are not counted more than once, the Nature Index uses Share, a fractional count that takes into account the share of authorship on each article. The total Share available per article is 1, which is shared among all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally.
Seven-year-old Project Kuiper, Amazon's foray into the low-earth orbit (LEO) sector, has changed its name to Amazon Leo. It's a more down-to-earth name for two reasons. First, it includes the LEO technology it is hoping to harness. Second, the original name was taken from the Kuiper Belt, a ring of asteroids in the far reaches of the solar system. The Amazon post announcing the name change also provided an update on the progress the company says it has made so far.
Arizona-based amateur astronomer Andrew McCarthy shared the now-viral image on Reddit, calling it the "most preposterously fake-looking real photo I've ever captured." The gorgeous image, fittingly titled "The Fall of Icarus" - and which you can buy as a print to support McCarthy right here - shows "my friend transiting an active region on the Sun in freefall," he wrote in the caption.
Ever since it was disclosed that financier Leon Black had paid Jeffrey Epstein over $150 million for tax and estate planning in 2014, six years after the latter pleaded guilty to child prostitution charges, I have been fascinated by the notion that the disgraced sex offender, who made little outward intellectual contribution to the world, had all these highly valuable forms of expertise. Many powerful people have claimed that Epstein was some sort of charismatic polymath.
However, that decision has now left the crew of Shenzhou-21, astronauts Zhang Lu, Wu Fei, and Zhang Hongzhang without a vessel to return to Earth in case of another space emergency. On Friday, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) announced that the Shenzhou-22 spacecraft will be launched 'at an appropriate time in the future,' with the likely goal of bringing replacements for the Shenzhou-21 team.
In the version of the article initially published, in Extended Data Fig. 10e, the immunohistochemistry staining for FOSL1 on the treated sample (Trametinib) contained incorrect data that were identical to those shown in Fig. 3d but acquired at different magnification. This mistake was due to an error in saving the image under the wrong name following its microscopic acquisition. Figure 1 in the Supplementary Information accompanying this amendment shows the original and corrected Extended Data Fig. 10e.
About 170 Starshield satellites built by SpaceX for the US government's National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) have been sending signals in the wrong direction, a satellite researcher found. The SpaceX-built spy satellites are helping the NRO greatly expand its satellite surveillance capabilities, but the purpose of these signals is unknown. The signals are sent from space to Earth in a frequency band that's allocated internationally for Earth-to-space and space-to-space transmissions. There have been no public complaints of interference caused by the surprising Starshield emissions.
