The WOW Science Thread

[dtaai-maai]

Thanks for the heads up on that and the link, pharvey. I watched it in class with my students, who were clapping and cheering and high-fiving along with "mission control"!

The background info video on the "7 minutes of terror" on the NASA website was also very interesting. All pretty dramatic stuff. Clever chaps, those boffins.

[pharvey]

Thanks for the heads up on that and the link, pharvey. I watched it in class with my students, who were clapping and cheering and high-fiving along with "mission control"!

The background info video on the "7 minutes of terror" on the NASA website was also very interesting. All pretty dramatic stuff. Clever chaps, those boffins.

Totally pi**ed off I missed it myself, but fair play to you DM - these kids will remember it forever..... maybe not the moon landing, but it is a great step!!

Congrats to all involved!!

[STEVE G]

Here is an interesting snippet about the Curiousity Lander, it carries a 1909 Lincoln penny that is used to help calibrate cameras:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/m ... 15284.html

[pharvey]

Here is an interesting snippet about the Curiousity Lander, it carries a 1909 Lincoln penny that is used to help calibrate cameras:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/m ... 15284.html

Saw that myself Steve - some really interesting (and bizarre) info. to be found on the Nasa site!!

[PeteC]

A slide show of 30 photos, about half of which are from the planet surface. Pete

http://news.yahoo.com/photos/nasa-s-new ... 49243.html

[sandman67]

Just a quick reminder for skywatchers and wish makers that the Perseid Meteor Shower reaches its peak tonight, and the moon is at its nadir so that should help make the display more visible.

Dunno how visible they are here down on the N Tropic, and especially in HH where it always seems theres a lot of light pollution n the sky, but up in the USA and Europe they should be visible clearly.

Look to the stars my chums for tonight a lot of them are falling

[sandman67]

interesting article from the BBC and Nature about a potential new human predecessor .... maybe the flat face shows that they were the ones that fell out of the trees

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-envir ... um=twitter

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 11322.html

Especially interesting is the chart on the BBC article that shows all the different branches of "humanity" we stem from .... seems like my favorite va va voom character from Star Trek we are One Of Nine

[PeteC]

English language 'originated in Turkey'
By Jonathan Ball BBC News

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19368988

Modern Indo-European languages - which include English - originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago, researchers say.

Their findings differ from conventional theory that these languages originated 5,000 years ago in south-west Russia.

The New Zealand researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose.

Their study is reported in Science.

A language family is a group of languages that arose from a common ancestor, known as the proto-language.

Linguists identify these families by trawling through modern languages for words of similar sound that often describe the same thing, like water and wasser (German). These shared words - or cognates - represent our language inheritance.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote

Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner”

Prof Mark Pagel FRS University of Reading

According to the Ethnologue database, more than 100 language families exist.

The Indo-European family is one of the largest families - more than 400 languages spoken in at least 60 countries - and its origins are unclear.

The Steppes, or Kurgan, theorists hold that the proto-language originated in the Steppes of Russia, north of the Caspian Sea, about 5,000 years ago.

The Anatolia hypothesis - first proposed in the late 1980s by Prof Colin Renfrew (now Lord Renfrew) - suggests an origin in the Anatolian region of Turkey about 3,000 years earlier.

To determine which competing theory was the most likely, Dr Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland and his team interrogated language evolution using phylogenetic analyses - more usually used to trace virus epidemics.
Fundamentals of life

Phylogenetics reveals relatedness by assessing how much of the information stored in DNA is shared between organisms.
Influenza virus The researchers used methods developed for tracing virus epidemics

Chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor and share about 98% of their DNA. Because of this shared ancestry, they cluster together on phylogenetic - or family - trees.

Like DNA, language is passed down, generation to generation.

Although language changes and evolves, some linguists have argued that cognates describing the fundamentals of life - kinship (mother, father), body parts (eye, hand), the natural world (fire, water) and basic verbs (to walk, to run) - resist change.

These conserved cognates are strongly linked to the proto-language of old.

Dr Atkinson and his team built a database containing 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo‐European languages, which included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.

Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages - the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree.

The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated.

Looking back into the depths of the tree, Dr Atkinson and his colleagues were able to confirm the Anatolian origin.

To test if the alternative hypothesis - of a Russian origin several years later - was possible, the team used competing models of evolution to pitch Steppes and Anatolian theory against each other.
Speech Cognate words represent our language inheritance

In repeated tests, the Anatolian theory always came out on top.

Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: "This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution - the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages.

"This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there."

Commenting on the inclusion of ancient languages in the analyses, he added: "The use of a number of known calibration points from 'fossil' languages greatly strengthens the conclusions."

However, the findings have not found universal acceptance. Prof Petri Kallio from the University of Helsinki suggests that several cognate words describing technological inventions - such as the wheel - are evident across different languages.

He argues that the Indo-European proto-language diversified after the invention of the wheel, about 5,000 years ago.

On the phylogenetic methods used to date the proto-language, Prof Kallio added: "So why do I still remain sceptical? Unlike archaeological radiocarbon dating based on the fixed rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope, there is simply no fixed rate of decay of basic vocabulary, which would allow us to date ancestral proto-languages.

"Instead of the quantity of the words, therefore, the trained Indo-Europeanists concentrate on the quality of the words."

Prof Pagel is less convinced by the counter-argument: "Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner."

[sandman67]

wowzer indeed... now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York....

archaeologists working at the historic site of the Battle of Bosworth may just have found the lost remains of King Richard III

read all about it here

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/ ... s-bosworth

would be excellent if it were him, and more popular support for archaeology and properly preserving our history before sodding developers build flats all over it.

I love the bit that echoes the decline of Blackadder from prince and king to common working class prole during the series:

Among means available are swabs taken from a London furniture-maker, 55-year-old Michael Ibsen, whose late mother was identified some years ago as a 16th-generation descendant of the king by John Ashdown-Hill, a historian, genealogist and biographer of Richard III who is also part of the Leicester project.

[pharvey]

This was actually very strange, so was too good to put in Foo or else..... Well, I thought so anyway!

Read the following statement, and count the number of "F's"...... be honest before scrolling down...


"Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years...."


HOW MANY ?


























Guess 3?

WRONG!!

[EDIT] Oh Bugger, were you expecting the answer.....

[Dannie Boy]

This was actually very strange, so was too good to put in Foo or else..... Well, I thought so anyway!

Read the following statement, and count the number of "F's"...... be honest before scrolling down...


"Finished files are the result of years of scientific study combined with the experience of years...."


HOW MANY ?

I had to read it four times to find the 4th F!!!
























Guess 3?

WRONG!!

[pharvey]

Yep Danny..... 3 is wrong

[Dannie Boy]

Yep Danny..... 3 is wrong

Ok 6!!!

[STEVE G]

Yes, I've seen this sort of thing before and it's something to do with the fact that you don't read the letters in short common words like of,the, and, it etc., your brain recognises it from the shape of the word and the context of the sentence without having to actually look at the letters and skims over it to the next word.

[PeteC]

Yes, I've seen this sort of thing before and it's something to do with the fact that you don't read the letters in short common words like of,the, and, it etc., your brain recognises it from the shape of the word and the context of the sentence without having to actually look at the letters and skims over it to the next word.

There's a thread on here somewhere where a few paragraphs were posted with letters missing or out of correct order in almost every word but it was easy to read correctly, probably for the same reason Steve states above. Pete