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Saturday, July 25, 2009

Whats new in science? { inventions and discoveries}

Tricycling Robot Goes for Guinness Record on Endurance Racing Circuit





Sports cars have long tested their 24-hour endurance on the Le Mans racing circuit in France. Now a Panasonic robot named Mr. Evolta will try to claim the distance record for a remote-controlled car, pedaling along furiously at 1.3 kilometers per hour (0.8 mph).

The tricycling robot should manage about six laps of the 4-kilometer (2.5 mile) Le Mans circuit during the required day-long period, when it makes the attempt next Wednesday. It will navigate the winding course by following an infrared beam emitted by a lead buggy that travels ahead.

Surf Anywhere, Inside a Giant Wheel


Ever feel ripped off that you can only surf or snowboard in the confines of the ocean or on a snowy mountain? The new In-Loop design concept hopes to allow you to shred out of those constraints. Looking like a surf-/snow-/skateboard hybrid attached to tw o gigantic hoop wheels, the In-Loop promises radical movement just about anywhere, dude. The In-Loop is still only a concept at this point, based upon the often-theorized, rarely used, huge overhead hoop wheel. In the wild 1920s and '30s, Popular Science had a mania for predicting revolutionary transport concepts that incorporated similar wheels.

Scientists Create Mice from Reprogrammed Skin

Cells

Chinese scientists have created live mice from mature skin cells that had reverted to an embryonic-like state. The scientific success could further defuse controversy over harvesting embryonic stem cells, but also raises new ethical issues about potentially making clones selected for specific traits.

First Ever Nanoscale Mass Spectrometer


When I was taking chemistry in college, the mass spectrometer was a desk-mounted machine about twice the size of a PC. Oh, how times do change. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have created the first nanoscale mass spectrometer. Only four micrometers across, the device can measure the mass of single molecules in an entirely novel way.


Rover to Retrace Apollo's Footsteps


Boiling noons and cryogenic nights will prove two of the hells inflicted upon a sun-fueled rover when it retraces Neil Armstrong’s first steps across the moon in 2011, beaming home high-definition footage along the way.

Does Baseball's Future Lie In These Cold, Robotic Hands?



What is Science?

If you want to understand, if you want to come to a picture of what science is, what knowledge is, it could be a good start to try to become clear about the general content of the concept.
Many activities are today characterized as "Science!", while other activities are just as definitely characterized as "Pseudoscience!", maybe without the one making the judgment always having made it clear to himself what he really means with the words he is using. Especially when you try to come closer to an understanding of what "an anthroposophically fertilized art of healing" could mean, but also "anthroposophical natural science" in general, it becomes important to become clear about the different aspects of the concept and the problems with which it is connected.

Science is a continuing effort to discover and increase human knowledge and understanding through disciplined research. Using controlled methods, scientists collect
observable evidence of natural or social phenomena, record measurable data relating to the observations, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work. The methods of scientific research include the generation of hypotheses about how phenomena work, and experimentation that tests these hypotheses under controlled conditions. Scientists are also expected to publish their information so other scientists can do similar experiments to double-check their conclusions. The results of this process enable better understanding of past events, and better ability to predict future events of the same kind as those that have been tested.