Science

Young men are particularly liable to become fanatics. Every dictator, every guru, every religious leader, knows this. Fanatics have an overwhelming sense of identity based on a cause (a religion) or a community (gang, team), and a tight and exclusive bond with other members of that group. They will risk injury, loss or even death for the sake of their group. They regard everyone else as outsiders, or even enemies. But why are so many of them young males? — via Aeon

After 69 years living among us, The Man Who Fell To Earth has returned home to space.

Belgian astronomers have paid tribute to late music legend David Bowie, giving him a seven-star constellation in the shape of the iconic lightning bolt seen across his face on the cover of his Aladdin Sane album.

Bowie died last week aged 69, after an 18-month battle with cancer.

The homage to Bowie, whose hits include Starman, Life on Mars and Space Oddity, sits — appropriately — in the vicinity of Mars — via redwolf.newsvine.com

In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter anti-cigarette forces”.

In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.

This revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who started delving into the practices of tobacco firms and how they had spread confusion about whether smoking caused cancer.

Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.

It comes from agnosis, the neoclassical Greek word for ignorance or not knowing, and ontology, the branch of metaphysics which deals with the nature of being. Agnotology is the study of wilful acts to spread confusion and deceit, usually to sell a product or win favour — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Researchers at Flinders University have accidentally discovered a way to remove mercury from water using a material made from industrial waste and orange peel.

Mercury is a dangerous pollutant that can damage food and water supplies, affect the human nervous systems and is especially poisonous for children.

Synthetic chemist Dr Justin Chalker said his team initially set out to make a useful type of plastic or polymer made from something widely available.

We ended up settling on sulphur because it’s produced in 70 million tonnes per year by the petroleum industry as a by-product, so there are not very many uses for it, and limonene is produced in 70,000 tonnes per year and so it’s relatively cheap, he said.

It literally grows on trees.

The plastic-like substance they created is made entirely from sulphur and limonene, industrial waste products that are widely available but unused around the world — via redwolf.newsvine.com

British neurologist Oliver Sacks has died at the age of 82, it has been confirmed.

The acclaimed author, whose book Awakenings inspired an Oscar nominated film of the same name, reportedly died of cancer at his home in New York.

In February he wrote about his illness — and being face to face with dying.

His publicist Jacqui Graham paid tribute to Dr Sacks, saying he was unlike anybody I have ever met, while JK Rowling said he was inspirational — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Any fan of Patricia Cornwell’s crime fiction novel The Body Farm will have a reasonably good idea of what goes on in one.

For those in the dark, a body farm is a large expanse of bushland where donated human bodies are buried for the purposes of scientific study. There are several in the United States, but up until now there haven’t been any in Australia.

Some of them may be placed on the surface, some may be placed in burials, there may be other concealed environments that we’ll mimic and then we’ll just start studying the decomposition process. Shari Forbes, Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research

The country’s first body farm, the Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research is due to officially open early next year. It’s come about after an exhaustive search for the right patch of land and the right partners.

It has to be a remote location but still accessible to police, to forensic investigators. It also needs the support of a university with a body donation program, says Shari Forbes, a forensic chemist and the farm’s coordinator.

Forbes can’t reveal the exact location but can say that it’s at the base of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney — via redwolf.newsvine.com

I’ve spent much of the past year digging into the evidence. Here’s what I’ve learned. First, it’s true that the issue is complicated. But the deeper you dig, the more fraud you find in the case against GMOs. It’s full of errors, fallacies, misconceptions, misrepresentations, and lies. The people who tell you that Monsanto is hiding the truth are themselves hiding evidence that their own allegations about GMOs are false. They’re counting on you to feel overwhelmed by the science and to accept, as a gut presumption, their message of distrust.

Second, the central argument of the anti-GMO movement — that prudence and caution are reasons to avoid genetically engineered, or GE, food—is a sham. Activists who tell you to play it safe around GMOs take no such care in evaluating the alternatives. They denounce proteins in GE crops as toxic, even as they defend drugs, pesticides, and non-GMO crops that are loaded with the same proteins. They portray genetic engineering as chaotic and unpredictable, even when studies indicate that other crop improvement methods, including those favored by the same activists, are more disruptive to plant genomes.

Third, there are valid concerns about some aspects of GE agriculture, such as herbicides, monocultures, and patents. But none of these concerns is fundamentally about genetic engineering. Genetic engineering isn’t a thing. It’s a process that can be used in different ways to create different things. To think clearly about GMOs, you have to distinguish among the applications and focus on the substance of each case. If you’re concerned about pesticides and transparency, you need to know about the toxins to which your food has been exposed. A GMO label won’t tell you that. And it can lull you into buying a non-GMO product even when the GE alternative is safer.

If you’re like me, you don’t really want to wade into this issue. It’s too big, technical, and confusing. But come with me, just this once. I want to take you backstage, behind those blanket assurances about the safety of genetic engineering. I want to take you down into the details of four GMO fights, because that’s where you’ll find truth. You’ll come to the last curtain, the one that hides the reality of the anti-GMO movement. And you’ll see what’s behind it — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The mystery behind radio signals that have baffled scientists at Australia’s most famous radio telescope for 17 years has finally been solved.

The signals’ source? A microwave oven in the kitchen at the Parkes observatory used by staff members to heat up their lunch.

Simon Johnston, head of astrophysics at the CSIRO, the national science agency, said astronomers first detected the signals, called perytons, in 1998. The signals were reasonably local, say within 5km of the telescope.

Originally researchers assumed the signals — which appeared only once or twice a year — were coming from the atmosphere, possibly linked to lightning strikes.

Then on 1 January this year they installed a new receiver which monitored interference, and detected strong signals at 2.4 GHz, the signature of a microwave oven.

Immediate testing of the facility microwave oven did not show up with perytons. Until, that is, they opened the oven door before it had finished heating. If you set it to heat and pull it open to have a look, it generates interference, Johnston said.

Astronomers generally operate the telescope remotely and do not reside at Parkes. There were, however, a number of operational staff members who maintained the facility and used the microwave oven to heat their coffee or lunch.

Johnston said the suspicious perytons were only detected during the daytime and as they now knew, not during the evening when all the staff had finished their shift.

The signals were rare because the interference only occurred when the telescope was pointed in the direction of the microwave oven. And “when you only find a few it’s hard to pin them down”, Johnston said.

The findings have been reported in a scientific paper — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Imagine a glass window that’s tough like armor, a camera lens that doesn’t get scratched in a sand storm, or a smart phone that doesn’t break when dropped. Except it’s not glass, it’s a special ceramic called spinel {spin-ELL} that the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has been researching over the last 10 years.

Spinel is actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate, says Dr Jas Sanghera, who leads the research. The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments — so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.

As a more durable material, a thinner layer of spinel can give better performance than glass. For weight-sensitive platforms-UAVs [unmanned autonomous vehicles], head-mounted face shields—it’s a game-changing technology.

NRL invented a new way of making transparent spinel, using a hot press, called sintering. It’s a low-temperature process, and the size of the pieces is limited only by the size of the press. Ultimately, we’re going to hand it over to industry, says Sanghera, so it has to be a scalable process. In the lab, they made pieces eight inches in diameter. Then we licensed the technology to a company who was able then to scale that up to much larger plates, about 30-inches wide.

The sintering method also allows NRL to make optics in a number of shapes, conformal with the surface of an airplane or UAV wing, depending on the shape of the press — via redwolf.newsvine.com