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Chris Fisher

Faster-than-light neutrino result reportedly a mistake caused by loose cable - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...mistake-due-to-loose-cable.ars

neutrino ftl mistake

shared by Chris Fisher on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • a loose fiber optic cable was causing one of the atomic clocks used to time the neutrinos' flight to produce spurious results.
  • If the report is confirmed (right now, there's only one source), then it provides a simple explanation for the fascinating-yet-difficult-to-accept results.
Mars Base

Science Retractions: Top 5 Withdrawn Studies Of 2012 - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...ithdrawn-papers_n_2353421.html

scibyte76 Retraction

shared by Mars Base on 01 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Hyung-In Moon is a genius, says Hyung-In Moon
  • Korean scientist Hyung-In Moon took the concept of scientific peer review to a whole new level by reviewing his own papers under various fake names
  • Moon's research — which included a study on alcoholic liver disease and another on an anticancer plant substance — can't be trusted
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • admitted to falsifying data in some of his papers
  • , 35 of his papers have been retracted in 2012.
  • Peer review is a process in which scientific peers in the same field judge the merit of a submitted journal paper
  • editors at the Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry grew suspicious when four of his glowing reviews came back within 24 hours. Anyone who has ever submitted a paper for peer review knows that reviewers take weeks or months to reply
  • Math paper a big, fat zero
  • "In this study, a computer application was used to solve a mathematical problem"
  • Neither the one-sentence abstract
  • nor the co-author's e-mail address, ohm@budweiser.com
  • publishing this one-page gem entitled "A computer application in mathematics"
  • published in January 2010 but not retracted until April 2012, despite silly sentences such as "Computer magnification is a Universal computer phenomenon" and "This is a problematic problem."
  • retracted the paper because it "contains no scientific content." The editors chalked it up to "an administrative error
  • Maybe his failure doesn't feel better than success
  • The Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel
  • has found that,
  • failure sometimes feels better than success
  • The only problem is that his research appears to be either mostly or completely fabricated
  • work has appeared in top journals
  • his good looks and clever research topics made him a media darling
  • So far, 31 papers have been retracted
  • meat eaters are absolved: One of Stapel's studies, now suspected to be fabricated, found that meat eaters are more selfish and less social than vegetarians
  • Studies proposing a link between cellphone use and cancer often rely on weak statistics. This one just used fudged data
  • in 2008, scientists published a paper
  • stating that cellphones in standby mode lowered the sperm count and caused other adverse changes in the testicles of rabbits
  • although small and published in a rather obscure journal, made the news rounds.
  • In March 2012, the authors retracted the paper
  • the lead author didn't get permission from his two co-authors and, according to the retraction notice, there was a "lack of evidence to justify the accuracy of the data presented in the article."
  • Stem-cell cure for heart disease likely faked
  • biologist Shinya Yamanaka had just won the 2012 Nobel Prize for his discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), which are adult cells that can be reprogrammed to their "embryonic" stage
  • claimed at a New York Stem Cell Foundation meeting in early October to have advanced this technology to cure a person with terminal heart failure
  • Two institutions listed as collaborating on Moriguchi's related papers
  • denied that any of Moriguchi's procedures took place there
  • origuchi has admitted only to making some "procedural" mistakes
  • He is sticking to his story, however, that one patient was cured … at a Boston hospital not yet named
Mars Base

How the Air Force and SpaceX Saved Dragon from Doom - 0 views

www.universetoday.com/...-spacex-saved-dragon-from-doom

scibyte89 dragon

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Barely 11 minutes after I witnessed the spectacular March 1 blastoff of the Dragon atop the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida
  • contact had been lost
  • Right after spacecraft separation in low Earth orbit , a sudden and unexpected failure of the Dragon’s critical thrust pods had prevented three out of four from initializing and firing
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • The oxidizer pressure was low in three tanks. And the propulsion system is required to orient the craft for two way communication and to propel the Dragon to the orbiting lab complex
  • The problem was a very tiny change to the check valves that serve the oxidizer tanks
  • Three of the check valves were actually different from the prior check valves that had flown – in a very tiny way. Because of the tiny change they got stuck
  • able to write some new software in real time and upload that to Dragon to build pressure upstream of the check valves and then released that pressure- to give it a kind of a kick
  • that got the valves unstuck and then they worked well
  • difficulty communicating with the spacecraft because it was in free drift in orbit
  • worked closely with the Air Force to get higher intensity, more powerful dishes to communicate with the spacecraft and upload the software
  • there had been a small design change to the check valves by the supplier
  • supplier had made mistakes that we didn’t catch
  • You would need a magnifying glass to see the difference
  • SpaceX had run the new check valves through a series of low pressurization systems tests and they worked well and didn’t get stuck. But SpaceX had failed to run the functional tests at higher pressures
  • SpaceX will revert to the old check valves and run tests to make sure this failure doesn’t happen again
Mars Base

Game on! Researchers use online crowd-sourcing to diagnose malaria - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...ne-crowd-sourcing-malaria.html

scibyte45 crowdsourcing medical

shared by Mars Base on 03 May 12 - No Cached
  • Online crowd-sourcing — in which a task is presented to the public, who respond, for free, with various solutions and suggestions — has been used to evaluate potential consumer products, develop software algorithms and solve vexing research-and-development challenges. But diagnosing infectious diseases
  • crowd-sourced online gaming system in which players distinguish malaria-infected red blood cells from healthy ones by viewing digital images obtained from microscopes.
  • recognize infectious diseases with the accuracy of trained pathologists
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science
  • Working on the assumption that large groups of public non-experts can be trained to recognize infectious diseases with the accuracy of trained pathologists
  • School of Medicine at UCLA
  • found that a small group of non-experts playing the game (mostly undergraduate student volunteers) was collectively able to diagnosis malaria-infected red blood cells with an accuracy that was within 1.25 percent of the diagnostic decisions made by a trained medical professional.
  • The game, which can be accessed on cell phones and personal computers, can be played by anyone around the world, including children
  • if you carefully combine the decisions of people — even non-experts — they become very competitive
  • if you just look at one person's response, it may be OK, but that one person will inevitably make some mistakes. But if you combine 10 to 20, maybe 50 non-expert gamers together, you improve your accuracy greatly in terms of analysis
  • could potentially help overcome limitations in the diagnosis of malaria
  • current gold standard for malaria diagnosis involves a trained pathologist using a conventional light microscope to view images of cells and count the number of malaria-causing parasites
  • process is very time-consuming, and given the large number of cases in resource-poor countries, the sheer volume presents a big challenge
  • significant portion of cases reported in sub-Sahara Africa are actually false positives, leading to unnecessary and costly treatments and hospitalizations
  • t the same platform could be applied to combine the decisions of minimally trained health care workers to significantly boost the accuracy of diagnosis, which is especially promising for telepathology, among other telemedicine field
  • By training hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of members of the public to identify malaria through UCLA's crowd-sourced game, a much greater number of diagnoses could be made more quickly — at no cost and with a high degree of collective accurac
  • research group created an automated algorithm for diagnosing the same images using computer vision, as well as a novel hybrid platform for combining human and machine resources toward efficient, accurate and remote diagnosis of malaria.
  • Before playing the game, each player is given a brief online tutorial and an explanation of what malaria-infected red blood cells typically look like using sample images
  • one of the major challenges will be the skepticism of traditional microscopists, pathologists and clinical laboratory personnel, not to mention malaria experts, who will initially view with suspicion a gaming approach in malaria diagnostics
Mars Base

James Cameron Corrects Astronomy Mistake in 'Titanic' | Neil deGrasse Tyson | Space.com - 0 views

www.space.com/anic-astronomy-correction.html

scibyte41 cameron Titantic

shared by Mars Base on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Cameron has addressed Tyson's criticism that the incorrect star field was used during one of the film's most famous scenes.
  • when Rose (Kate Winslet) is lying on the piece of driftwood and staring up at the stars, that is not the star field she would have seen,"
  • There is only one sky she should have been looking at ... and it was the wrong sky! Worse than that, it was not only the wrong sky; the left-half of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right-half of the sky
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • send me the right stars for that exact time and I'll put it in the movie
  • Tyson did just that and the correct star field has been included in the re-release.
Mars Base

Drug's 'double hit' overcomes leukaemia resistance - 0 views

medicalxpress.com/...drug-leukaemia-resistance.html

Cancer GrabBag

shared by Mars Base on 13 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • drug that uses a unique ‘double hit’ to kill leukaemia cells could be a potential new treatment for patients with acute myeloid leukaemia
  • 30 per cent of patients with AML have faults in the FLT3 gene
  • linked to more aggressive leukaemias and poor survival
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • drugs that target these faults are available, the disease eventually builds resistance, leaving treatments ineffective.
  • researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London
  • developed a unique drug that targets AML cells in a “double hit”.
  • blocks the protein made by the faulty FLT3 gene along with another key protein – called Aurora kinase – which are both involved in driving cancer growth
  • healthy blood cells, FLT3 sends a signal to the cells telling them when to proliferate, while Aurora kinase plays a role in cell division
  • Leukaemia cells with faulty FLT3 can proliferate out of control
  • many cancer cells have higher levels of Aurora kinase, causing errors during cell division
  • drug is also unique because it can destroy cells even if they develop new faults in the FLT3 genes that would make them resistant to other inhibitors
  • There has been great interest in using FLT3 drugs to treat AML
  • effectiveness has been limited because leukaemia cells gain new mistakes in the FLT3 gene, causing resistance.
  • new drug has the potential to overcome this and has a range of possible uses in AML
  • those over 60 who don’t tolerate chemotherapy well, and also to treat  leukaemia patients who have relapsed
  • We’re excited about the potential of our new ‘double hit’ drug and are now planning to take it into clinical trials to see if it is effective in patients
  • faults that occur in the FLT3 gene cause rapid cell division
  • Each year around 2,380 people are diagnosed with AML in the UK
  • creating cells in the lab that mimic how drug resistance develops in AML the researchers were able to show that their new drug delivers a ‘double hit’ to halt cancer cells in their tracks
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