Moldable Solar Cells

In the new technology frontiers, a company in California is claiming a new pour-able solar cell. They're called Innovalight, and while their website is very light on the details, they claim to have just secured $28 million for development, so someone's buying into their research.

Basically, the actual solar cell is made up of a "silicon nanocrystalline ink" in a solvent which can be poured into any shape or form required, dried of the solvent, and used just as any conventional solar panel.

Even beyond that, they're projecting costs of 50% less than conventional solar panels, and efficiencies approaching, or surpassing, current thin film technology.

There doesn't seem to be much more than that out there at this point, but if it works out as well as reported, the

Pyramids in Europe

I ran across an interesting lecture that Philip Coppens gave at the Nexus Conference 2007 in Brisbane about pyramids in Europe. The article he's posted has pictures of each site he discusses which go a long way toward showing the similarities and differences between the sites.

He does a really nice job of discussing some of the known pyramids in Europe, while leaving open the idea that there's more to discover. As odd as that seems, that a pyramid could go "undiscovered" it does seem to be the case quite often.

For instance, he gives a lot of time to the remarkable discoveries of apparent pyramids in Bosnia. As large as they are, and as apparent as they seem in photos, no one seems to have thought about them being anything more than freaks of nature until a few years ago. The base of the largest is 365 meters on each side forming a perfect square, and it stands 220 meters high. This, according to the research team, would make it the largest pyramid on Earth.

The reason seems to simply be that no one believed that pyramids that large could exist in Europe, and, therefore, they must be very strange natural occurrences. However, upon further research, evidence seems to be growing by the day that these are, in fact, man made pyramids.



The evidence to support that hypothesis is mostly structural, in the fact that large blocks have been found in place, reminiscent of the size of the blocks used in the Giza Plateau, a floor seems to be in place made of rectangular stones much like modern paving stones, and it's a well known fact in the local community that a "cement" exists on and around the pyramid, approximately 1 meter underground, which locals have been unable to dig through for wells or basements. Beyond that, the corners of the pyramid line up the the cardinal points, and tunnels also seem to travel in many locations underneath and around the sites of the pyramids.

In fact, just about 6 weeks ago a research team of Egyptian archaeologists and pyramid experts released a statement based on their first hand look at the Bosnian pyramids, which read, in part:

...the Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun is the largest pyramid ever witnessed; it is an amazing structure of a great importance for the entire world.

It seems as though they're sold on the idea that at least the largest of the Bosnian pyramids is man-made.

Obviously, with these pyramids in Bosnia being fairly new discoveries, research is currently ongoing, and more is bound to come out about them along the way. Much of the archaeological excavation is slow work and time consuming, and many of the tunnels have been sealed by the locals over the years, probably for safety's sake. Stalagtites found in one of the tunnels, though, has already yielded a minimum growing time that pushes the creation date into the BC era, and as with any study of ancient history, it's almost certainly likely to be pushed back further as the research develops.

Beyond the fascinating story of the Bosnian Pyramids, Phillip explores pyramids in France, Spain, Italy and Greece. None are as impressive or large as the Bosnian or Egyptian pyramids, but each has a fascinating story to go with them. One of the things that stood out to me reading about each one was the lack of research that's gone into them. Each is largely unexplored, or has much exploration left to go, so the stories that each holds are bound to come out over the years.

For instance, at a pyramid site in France it took almost one hundred years from discovery until exploration, and even then tunnels were located which were not explored extensively at the time. When the lead researcher came back three years later he found the tunnels sealed, and it seems they likely still are to this day.

Perhaps the stigma of saying that there's pyramids outside of Egypt and other well known locations is wearing off, and serious research will continue, and in some cases begin, giving us more answers about our shared history. I think the story that will eventually come out of this will continue to tie various ancient cultures from around the world together in ways we never realized before.

I saw a headline today about a new materials science discovery that really seemed too good to be true. Apparently it was first reported over a week ago, but I'm just hearing about it now.

Scientists at the University of Michigan are reporting a new nano-layered plastic with some amazing properties. It's transparent, strong as steel, thin as paper, biodegradable, non-toxic, cheap and requires very little energy to produce.

Almost sounds too good to be true, but I think we're at a time in which materials science is going to be able to do some pretty amazing things. While they've only made pieces about as large as one meter by one meter at this point, they say that it might be ready for commercialization within a couple of years, so keep your eye out for it.

Can life be created in a laboratory from scratch? It seems as though we're embarking on the age of science in which this question will be definitively answered.

A US genetic scientist has apparently been able to create what he is calling "artificial life" from lab made chemicals. Craig Venter and his team of 20 top genetic scientists are apparently set to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

The new species is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium, and they've dubbed their new creation Mycoplasma laboratorium.

Of course, this brings about another question. Are we ready for a world in which new species can be readily created in the lab?

As Mr. Venter said to the guardian, this breakthrough is "a very important philosophical step in the history of our species. We are going from reading our genetic code to the ability to write it. That gives us the hypothetical ability to do things never contemplated before".

Some people are, understandably, worried about the discovery. Pat Mooney, the director of a Canadian bioethics organization, the ETC group, says it's basically a "chassis on which you could build almost anything. It could be a contribution to humanity such as new drugs or a huge threat to humanity such as bio-weapons".

I guess in my mind there's really no such thing as a scientific discovery that can't be used to do something bad in the end. We can't really give up, and say that we're fine where we are and we don't need to learn anything new anymore. So what do we do? We keep moving on, hoping that each new discovery will be used with the best intentions, and not just to make a new bio-weapon. Hopefully this work will lead to a whole new generation of breakthroughs which really help the world.

Someone else has jumped on the "Randi is a fraud" bandwagon. Add to the ever growing list Adam Blake, CEO and co-founder of Pear Cable.

For whatever reason Randi decided to take a shot at him and try to "debunk" his $7,000 stereo cables. I'm not exactly lining up to buy $7,000 cables, but it seems as though there's a market for them, and Pear Cable has published frequency response plots detailing exactly how their cables work and why they think they're worth that price. Why Randi feels the need to try to make him prove it in his bogus million (non-existent) dollar challenge I just don't know. However, I found parts of the response from Pear Cable amusing, and, of course, right on:

Yes, by now we have heard about this challenge (although we were never contacted directly). Unfortunately, like most offers of $1 million this one is a hoax. While James Randi is claiming to offer a $1 million dollar prize to differentiate between these speaker cables, by reading the official rules of the challenge, it becomes immediately clear that the offer is not valid. One must be able to "demonstrate any psychic, supernatural or paranormal ability" in order to qualify. Since there is a wealth of scientific information explaining the differences between speaker cables, the offer is not a valid one (and James Randi knows it).

...

In addition, according to the editor of Stereophile magazine John Atkinson, James Randi has completely fabricated the statements about Atkinson made in this "challenge". Furthermore, another audiophile who goes by the moniker "Wellfed" on the AudioAsylum forums, says he tried to take the challenge twice for what I consider a more dubious audio tweak (the GSIC chip), but was denied the opportunity and was lied to by the Randi Foundation. Finally, according to these forum posts: http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/...es/719041.html at least one person has tried to take the "challenge" previously to show that they could differentiate between loudspeaker cables and they were denied by Randi who said "Wire is not wire. I accept that".

So, at the end of the day we have claims made by a high school educated retired magician, which are refuted by independent studies and publications conducted by experts. Most importantly, James Randi's "challenge" is backed by nothing.

At times I think it would be nice if Randi just gave up on his completely fake crusade, but, then who would I get to make fun of on a regular basis? The fact of the matter is, I've known more people who didn't believe in the paranormal to begin with who decided to give it an open minded look after watching Randi make an ass of himself than there will ever be people who are convinced by his new magic act.

This story's a retelling of a story that broke a while back, but I saw a newspaper report on it recently and it's been in the back of my mind.

The California Aggie recently reported on a statistical study done on a previous US government remote viewing study. In short, the US government spent funding research into remote viewing and other paranormal subjects, and had a pile of data which they wanted statistically analyzed. They tapped the American Institutes for Research to find people to do the analysis. In the end, they settled on Jessica Utts, a respected statistician from UC Davis, and Ray Hyman, a skeptic professor of psychology from the University of Oregon.

The results of this study were actually quite convincing, and they more or less told this to congress, in writing, when asked to do so. Utts, for instance, reported that in 966 cases logged by the government research of attempted remote viewing, the correct target was identified 34% of the time. That's far beyond the probability of that occurring by chance, which Utts calculated at 0.000000000043.

For comparison's sake, she did an analysis of aspirin treatment for prevention of heart disease. Those results showed that there was likely to have been prevention is about 25% of cases, with the probability of that occurring by chance at about 0.0003.

As Utts puts it, it's really quite convincing:

"The evidence for [remote viewing] is much stronger than [aspirin preventing heart attacks] and yet we have people taking aspirin everyday to try to prevent heart attacks," Utts said. "People aren't willing to either look at this evidence or aren't willing to believe it when they see it."

She put in her report to congress the following:

"Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of similar magnitude have been replicated at a number of laboratories across the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud."

So, I guess this brings up the age old question, which I hate to bring up being a scientist, of why doesn't mainstream science recognize this kind of work? I will actually put forward that it's not actually science that won't accept it, although part of the problem lies there. It's really society as a whole that won't, which, obviously, trickles down into the scientific community. I think we probably need to stop asking why science won't accept the results, when there's scientists doing the actual research and then verifying it, and start asking why society won't accept it.

National Geographic is reporting the discovery of stone tools in Minnesota that might be 13,000 years old, dating them to the late Ice Age. While they've only been dated by the layer in which they were found at this point, the discovery hints at the continual pushing back of the date at which humans are believed to inhabited North America. If confirmed, the tools would push back known habitation in Minnesota at least 4,000 years.

Scientists have recently been able to measure the results of quantum effects on larger objects than ever before. There have been many hints over the years that not everything in large-scale life could be described purely in classical terms, and this seems to confirm that belief through thermodynamic measurements of materials that include high-temperature superconductors and quantum magnets at least in clusters up to billions of atoms in size.

(NIAID/Handout/Reuters)


This amazing image is crystallographic data of the AIDS virus actually attacking an immune cell, and they hope that the data will help them create an anti-AIDS vaccine. In studying the data the scientists believe that they may have found a spot on the outside of the disease which may be vulnerable to antibodies that would block it from even attacking human cells to begin with. While there are a couple of vaccines currently in human trials, the researchers believe that this might be their best hope at making a vaccine that would work for everyone.

Recently I posted an article about Randi's Million Dollar Challenge and how the money might not even be real and got a comment from JaneDoughnut(who has a pretty cool blog) which mirrors something that I've heard countless times over the years. Namely, that the JREF challenge does a good job helping prove that most paranormal phenomena are definitively not real.

So, I thought I'd post a link to, and some excerpts from, a multiple part, quite thorough, investigation into the challenge and how it's virtually impossible to even enter, much less win the(possibly non-existent) million dollar prize from author Michael Prescott. All of the quoted material below comes directly from Randi's own FAQ on the challenge, and are some of my personal favorites from a pretty ridiculous piece of writing, in my humble opinion.

Possibly the main reason that no one has even managed to win the prize is that you can't enter if your phenomenon is among many of the most common types of paranormal phenomenon:

There are some claims that are far too implausible to warrant any serious examination, such as the "Breatharian" claims in which the applicant states that he can survive without food or water. Science conclusively tells us all we need to know about such matters, and the JREF feels no obligation to engage applicants in such delusions....

Other claims, such as "Crop Circles" and UFO's are rejected because they have been definitively proven to be the result of hoaxes or mass hysteria. Claims involving "Cloud-Busting", for example, are rejected because Science (along with keen observation) tells us conclusively that clouds will move and disperse despite the efforts of humankind to move them according to their wishes. The phenomenon behind Oujia boards, for example, is attributed to ideomotor reflexes, and not to anything paranormal.

....

Claims of psychic healing border on the miraculous, and the JREF declines to investigate them...

....

Of course, when confronted with a particularly incredible claim like "remote viewing" (the current version of "clairvoyance") we can easily stop short and ask ourselves just why we are involved with such obvious nonsense.

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The JREF will also not waste its time (or jeopardize the applicant's safety and well being) with claims from applicants who exhibit clear signs of paranoid delusions, schizophrenia or other mental illness, feeling strongly that it is their moral responsibility to avoid the furthering of such delusions in the minds of those who may be in need of immediate psychiatric attention. What this means is that it is OK for you to be deluded, as the JREF feels many applicants may well be, but it is not OK for the JREF to support your illness.

...

While you may be neither mistaken nor a cheater, the JREF will always assume that you are one or the other.

...

Many people who claim to have paranormal powers are, sadly, suffering from an advanced state of delusion. That isn't to say that you are, but it's a hypothesis that may be raised during the application process. So, be prepared for this in advance, especially if your claim is extremely remote by reasonable standards.

It goes on and on from there. It's not hard to pull amusing quotes from it. Until I read his FAQ last year I would have never thought that a former magician was qualified to diagnose people with schizophrenia, for instance, but, apparently he is. I think what this investigation, the lack of a real, tangible prize, and the quotes above from Randi's own FAQ prove is that the challenge is, in fact, just an excuse to debunk phenomena which may or may not be real without even raising so much as a finger.

It seems to me, in the end, all of the time and energy spent investigating Randi is far more than he's put into investigating the paranormal...and one of those certainly seems to be fake to me. Given a choice between Randi and his challenge and the paranormal, guess which one I think is more real?

In an article titled "Fossils: myths, mystery and magic" Steve Connor explores the history of fossils, their discoveries throughout history, and some of the myths which unfolded from early discoveries of strange looking fossils. Some of the stories show quite clearly how certain stories may have been propagated, and most I'd never actually heard of. For instance:

Fossil trees and giant serpents

The fossil Lepidodendron is an extinct genus of a tree-like plant related to club mosses. They could sometimes grow to heights of 30 metres and have trunks a metre thick, and thrived during the Carboniferous period (360 to 300 million years ago).

Lepidodendrons had tall, thick trunks that rarely branched and were topped with a crown of branches bearing leaves. The leaf scars on their trunks and stems looked like tyre tracks or alligator skin.

The folklore Lepidodendrons' rotted and compacted remains formed the coal seams exploited in Britain. After their leaves had fallen off, their trunks became covered with diamond-shaped scars, which resembled the scales of a reptile. As late as 1851 a specimen of this fossil tree was exhibited in Neath as a gigantic fossilised serpent. Visitors could view the 8ft-long specimen for the sum of one shilling (tradesmen six pence and working classes three pence).

Lepidodendrons are now known as scale trees.

I can imagine that fossil would look quite strange to an uneducated observer!

Back in November I wrote about PEAR closing down. Unfortunately, I guess it's time for them to shut down the laboratory now.

Dean Radin has a nice closing statement on some of the things that PEAR accomplished.

Science a Go Go has a really good article(broken up into Part I and Part II) about physicist Peter Lynds' new paper on the idea of a cyclic universe. Well, not quite a cyclic universe as has been discussed by many previous models in which the universe continually expands in the Big Bang and then contracts to a singularity, but a model in which time has no relevance, and rather than ending in a singularity which then explodes back out in the Big Bang, there's a reversal of time in which the second law of thermodynamics isn't violated.

It is this reasoning that has given rise to Lynds' conclusion that no singularity can ever be reached, as events would be reversed before the second law could be breached. The implication of this, if you haven't already guessed, is that the reversing of events at the first available opportunity would represent the big bang, with the added implication that this process not only leads the universe toward the big bang, but also causes it. Following from this, he says, is the expansion and development of a universe identical in every way to the last one. But even more important, according to Lynds, is the realization that what we are really saying is that the big crunch caused the big bang, as well as being equally true to say that the big bang caused the big crunch. Voila! Our contrived notions of past and present become redundant. "One is now faced with a universe that has neither a beginning nor end in time," contends Lynds, "but yet is also finite and needs no beginning. The finite versus infinite universe paradox of Kant completely disappears." Lynds model also shows that time travel is not possible.

Confused yet? Well, honestly, if philosophical/scientific discussions on the beginning of the universe and where we go from here is your thing, then this is a great article. If it's not, well, move on down the page to the rest of my posts today. This article is certainly not too complicated to understand, but it is a little bit complicated at times.

As a scientist sometimes I feel a little silly pointing out all the things that we don't know. However, unfortunately, so many times I get into a discussion with someone over the unknown and they just refuse to believe because "science has explained everything" by this point. It's just simply not true, and here's an article from Wired that covers 42 of the biggest questions in science.

Some really sad news today. PEAR, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, is shutting down. PEAR has done a lot of really great research, illuminated quite a few strange occurrences, and really published some terrific papers. Their research will really be missed in the paranormal/parascience realm.