- African grey parrot is first bird to comprehend
numerical concept akin to zero
- ëA Brandeis Univesity researcher has shown that an African grey parrot with
a walnut-sized brain understands a zero-like concept -- an abstract notion
that humans don't typically understand until age 3 or 4, and that can
significantly challenge learning-disabled children.û
- This is harder than one might expect -- it
took a long time for Zero to be accepted in Western mathematics. See, for
instance, The History of Zero: Exploring Our
Place-Value Number System, or The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of
Zero.
- Brandeis University & the Alex Foundation
; Journal of
Comparative Psychology ;
via EurekAlert and
World Science News and Primidi ;
and also Science
Daily, and Google
News
- Is my red your red?
- ëDoes society determine the way you see a rainbow? New
findings are re-igniting an old controversy.û
- Nice comparitive 2d color map in the linked
summary. This debate has been running for 35 years -- interestingly, Paul Kay
is cited as the original
in color Relativism, so could be significant that he's a
co-author in the non-relativist paper, but his 1969 title was "Basic Color
Terms: Their Universality and Evolution", so maybe the relativists
took him out of context?
Debi
Roberson (University of Essex in Colchester, U.K), J. Davidoff, I.R.
Davies, L.R. Shapiro, 2005.
Color
categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis.
Cognitive Psychology. 50, 378-411.
Terry Regier (U.Chicago), Paul Kay (ICSI), R.S. Cook,
2005.
Focal colors are
universal after all. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 102, 8386-91.
-
ICSI's World Color Survey.
- Why Is The
Sky Blue, and Not Violet?
- ëThe hues that we see in the sky are not only determined by the laws of
physics, but are also colored by the human visual system, shows a new paper in
the American Journal of Physics. On a clear day when the sun is well above the
horizon, the analysis demonstrates, we perceive the complex spectrum of colors
in the sky as a mixture of white light and pure blue. When sunlight enters the
earth's atmosphere, it scatters (ricochets) mainly from oxygen and nitrogen
molecules that make up most of our air. What scatters the most is the light
with the shortest wavelengths, towards the blue end of the spectrum, so more
of that light will reach our eyes than other colors. But according to the
19th-century physics equations introduced by Lord Rayleigh, as well as actual
measurements, our eyes get hit with peak amounts of energy in violet as well
as blue. [...]
The sky's complex multichromatic rainbow of colors
tickles our eye's cones in the same way as does a specific mixture of pure
blue and white light. This is similar to how the human visual system will
perceive the right mixture of pure red and pure green as being equivalent to
pure yellow. The cones that allow us to see color cannot identify the actual
wavelengths that hit them, but if they are stimulated by the right combination
of wavelengths, then it will appear the same to our eyes as a single pure
color, or a mixture of a pure color and white light. û
-
- Interesting.
- American Journal of Physics, July 2005, via AIP Physics News Update
- Scientists get a real 'rise' out of breakthroughs
in how we understand changes in sea level
- ëFor the first time, researchers have the tools and expertise
to understand the rate at which sea level is changing and the mechanisms
that drive that change. ...
ââ¬ÅWeââ¬â¢ve found
that the largest likely factor for sea level rise is changes in the amount of
ice that covers Earth. Three-fourths of the planetââ¬â¢s freshwater is stored in
glaciers and ice sheets, or about 220 feet of sea level." ...
The latest
sea level research conducted by Dr. Steve Nerem, Associate Professor, Colorado
Center for Astrodynamics Research at the University of Colorado in Boulder,
and his colleagues, published in a 2004 issue of Marine Geodesy Journal, has
found that recent TOPEX/Poseidon and Jason satellite observations show an
average increase in global mean sea level of three millimeters a year from
1993-2005. This rate is more than 50 percent greater than the average rate of
the last 50 years. û
- Comment
- NASA/Goddard
Space Flight Center--EOS Project Science Office via EurekAlert
- NASA
offers a real-time 3-D look at the inside of hurricanes
- ëSeeing how rain falls from top to bottom and how heavy the rain falls
throughout parts of a tropical cyclone is very important to hurricane
forecasters. NASA has sped up the process of getting this data within three
hours, and making it appear in 3-D. The new process now gives information
quickly enough for forecasters to use.û
- Tropical Rainfall Measuring
Mission or TRMM provided some astonishing view of H.Bonnie last year. They're
providing similar views in near-real-time to tropical forecasters now.
- NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center--EOS
Project Science Office ( http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov/ ) via EurekAlert
- NRL study finds shuttle exhaust is source of
mysterious clouds in Antarctica
- ëA new study, funded in part by the Naval Research
Laboratory (NRL) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
reports that exhaust from the space shuttle can create high-altitude clouds
over Antarctica mere days following launch, providing valuable insight to
global transport processes in the lower thermosphere. The same study also
finds that the shuttle's main engine exhaust plume carries small quantities of
iron that can be observed from the ground, half a world away.û
- Days before the next Shuttle launch,
they're still getting new science from the ill-fated Columbia.
"Antarctic polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs)" or Noctilucent clouds form over the antarctic only days later,
showing pretty rapid transport in the thermosphere, and bloomed later in
the year.
- Naval Research
Laboratory, NASA , Geophysical Research Letters,
via EurekAlert
- Experts Explore Science's Unanswered
Questions
- ëFour AAAS symposia tackle overpopulation, string
theory, the causes of disease, and what makes us human û
- Science Magazine has full discussion of 25 top questions and 100 more listed.
-
AAAS Science magazine
- Simplifying a Nutty Problem
-- The Brazil-Nut Problem.
- ë
Swirling marbles may give clues to why larger nuts
tend to float to the top of the can. û
- Includes do-it-yourself
experiment link!
-
via AAAS Science magazine
- A Coulomb Experiment for the Weak Nuclear
Force
- ëPhysicists at the SLAC accelerator have measured,
with much greater precision than ever before, the variation in the weak
nuclear force, one of the four known physical forces, over an enormous size
scale (a distance of more than ten proton diameters) for so feeble a force.
Although the results were not surprising (the weak force diminished with
distance as expected) this new quantitative study of the weak force helps to
cement physicistsââ¬â¢ view of the sub-nuclear world. ... The SLAC work is,
in effect, a 21st century analog of the landmark 18th experiments in which the
intrinsic strength of the electromagnetic and gravitational forces were
measured (by Charles Coulomb and Henry Cavendish, respectively) through
careful observation of test objects causing a torsion balance to swing around.
The weak force, in the modern way of thinking, is a cousin of the
electromagnetic (EM) force; both of them are considered as different aspects
of a single ââ¬Åelectroweakââ¬Â force. û
- Reuse of a classic
experimental design to measure a radically expression of a related force.
This experiment indirectly measures the weak force by measuring a parity
violation.
- Slac, via AIP Physics News Update
