General science thread

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Renowned surrealist Salvador Dali had an unusual method of getting inspired. When he decided to take a nap on his chair after a long day of thinking about liquid watches and swans reflected in elephants (themes in his paintings) he would take a bunch of keys in his hand, place it on the edge of his chair and nod off in a light sleep. There was a metal tray on the floor and when he would really fall asleep, the keys would fall out of his hand, hit the tray with a loud noise and wake him up.

Like American inventor Thomas Edison, who used the same technique, Dali believed that sleeping this way gave him a creative boost. As soon as the object hit the tray, he would wake up and return to work. Many people think he was talented, but researchers only recently tested whether this technique will work even on people who aren’t similarly gifted.

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In a study published in Science Advances, the research team said that they distributed mathematical problems to participants, each of which had a hidden rule that if found could solve the problem "almost immediately.”

After failing to solve the problems, participants were divided into three groups before trying again to solve the problem: people who stayed awake, people who were allowed to sink into a shallow sleep phase of non-rapid eye movements (known as N1) for more than 30 seconds and those who were permitted to drift deeper into sleep for at least 30 seconds.

Participants again tried to solve the problems to try to find the hidden rule.

Researchers found that participants who spent at least 15 seconds in N1 tripled their chances of finding the hidden rule, implying increased creative thinking, than those who remained awake during the break. Eighty-three percent of people who entered the N1 sleep cycle were able to identify the rule compared to only 30% of the awake group.

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However, if they reached deeper sleep levels known as N2, monitored experimentally using an electroencephalogram, the effect passed.

The authors added that these results show that an incubation period, which is a short period of N1, has a significant effect on insight. But the beneficial effect disappears when people fall into a deeper sleep.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/salvador-dali-s-bizarre-sleep-technique-increases-creativity-study/ar-AAS8AAb?ocid=msedgntp

James Webb updates.

Other than the obvious info, at the bottom of the video stream, you'll see a timeline and the day where things will happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh-inlQrjak

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In a 2017 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers surveyed thousands of people who sometimes paid other people to perform tasks they didn’t enjoy or didn’t want to do. Like mowing the lawn. Or cleaning the house. Or running errands. Stuff they needed to do, but didn’t particularly want to do.

Unsurprisingly, people who were willing to spend a little money to buy a little time were happier and felt greater overall life satisfaction than those who did not.
Correlation isn’t always causation, though. Maybe the people who spend money to buy time are happier simply because they have the money to buy time?

Nope. While relatively wealthy people who spent money to buy a little time were happier than relatively wealthy people who did not, people at the bottom end of the economic spectrum who spent money to buy a little time were happier than those at the bottom end of the economic spectrum who did not.

almost made another thread, but, nah

I was going to title it "the problem with Science Girl", or something similar. Should we have a problem with this project [and its ilk]?

I'm going to put an asterisk by every comment I make where it has to be confessed I'm speculating. I'm willing to bet I'm right, but I won't be able to prove it. I'll also use the asterisk for heavily bigoted opinions I'd only be willing to defend, well, here probably. 

So Youtube suggests to me a video by this group based on previous interest in similar ones. Check it out. She launches into current thoughts about the expanding universe. She's very good with the history of our knowledge of such. I liked the segment on the expanding bread with raisins, hadn't heard that explanation in quite a while. There's a segment claiming current theory about the Singularity  preceding the Big Bang dismisses the idea of a single point, but I think the explanation is fumbled ... to the point that you might conclude there was no Singularity. I doubt that this is what was meant. No big deal. The content was OK, good even, but unremarkable except for one aspect: Girl. I mean Girl. Girly. Giggly Girly. 

Looking into her background, Dianna Cowern was a bright student from Hawaii who went on to MIT, getting a bachelor's degree. She has had parents and other backers from the beginning encouraging the interest in science she had. Stopping with the bachelor's degree, it would seem she just didn't want to pursue advanced degree.* Probably she found the math at MIT involved in that pursuit was daunting* just like 99.9%* of other college students would. On the other hand, her interest all along was "communicating science" per her Wikipedia page, so I'm not sure what courses you take for that. Her backers were still on board* and her career as just that was launched. I am quite confident that the idea is that she will be great at 'getting girls interested' in science,* important since as we know the failure to do that is an existential threat to our nation... according to these backers* and their ilk.

Let's examine the product, at least as we can see from this video.  She is wearing a ridiculous hat, which I guess makes the statement "girls invited" but by all other standards, all other, makes the statement "this is not a serious anything". Sorry, but girls are not impressed either.* She is really alternating between serious and silly. And the giggling! It's as if not a single proponent from other camps advocating taking women seriously had any input. 

I'm sorry but this is very, very flawed if indeed it's important to get more women into the STEM careers. 

I didn't subscribe to 'Science Girl' but youtube is still sending me suggested videos from the channel

they have a way of catching one's interest. Now I ask you ... well, let me preface that by saying there may be more girls that would be interested in this video than boys today [wouldn't have been true in my day] ... but would the kind of giggly girl they seem to be trying to reach be interested in a video about seeing something that is moving faster than the speed of light? would they stick with this complicated explanation?

btw one thing I have noticed in the two videos i've seen is she is touching on topics where you would at least mention dark energy, that not only are the objects moving away from us faster and faster as you go out, but that whole process is actually accelerating ... odd that they are avoiding that subject

I watch Dr. Becky. She got real excited at the launch and first pic from James Web telescope. Waiting to see her first analysis of the first focused pictures from Webb



There's another astronomy related channel with a guy I click on when I see it in the side bar, but I'm not even sure who it is.

An asteroid the size of a stadium is passing 15 times closer to Earth than last time it came by. It's traveling around 30,000 mph. It's on the list of one of ones our Space Defense Agency is keeping track of. It last passed by in 2013.

I've looked to see if there is an actual scientific basis to the idea that a repeating near-earth object is expected to eventually be captured [this would be collision of course], even if the time scale on that is way out there and hard to predict.

Exceptions might be if other planets also interact with it, but otherwise I suspect this is true. Didn't find confirmation on the internet, might be the sort of thing you'd have to ask an astronomer directly.

Small study shows more evidence even dim lighting disturbs sleep.

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The results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month, show several clear differences between the two groups.

Unlike those who spent both nights in the dark, the group exposed to the light had elevated heart rates throughout the night. They also had increased insulin resistance in the morning, meaning they had more trouble getting their blood sugar into a normal range.

https://www.capeandislands.org/2022-04-01/sleeping-with-even-a-little-bit-of-light-isnt-good-for-your-health-study-shows

Looks like we'll be able to launch payloads into low Earth orbit with electricity, but no fuel onboard.

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SpinLaunch/

it’s a novel approach to launching small payloads into orbit. The idea of a kinetic launch system translates to spinning a payload in a centrifuge to over 1,000 miles an hour.

The test was the eighth major test of the centrifuge, which is officially called the “suborbital mass accelerator,” and the ten-foot-long projectile which this time had an “optical payload” (camera) on board to capture the launch from the projectile’s point of view.

The video shows the projectile spinning violently as it erupts from the mass accelerator to a maximum test altitude of 25,000 feet (7,620 meters)

https://petapixel.com/2022/05/07/camera-films-itself-getting-launched-out-of-a-centrifuge-at-1000mph/