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Margaret Koyal

The Koyal Group InfoMag News Doubts Shroud Big Bang Discovery - 2 views

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    Perhaps it was too good to be true. Two months ago, a team of cosmologists reported that it had spotted the first direct evidence that the newborn universe underwent a mind-boggling exponential growth spurt known as inflation. But last week a new analysis suggested the signal, a subtle pattern in the afterglow of the big bang, or cosmic microwave background (CMB), could be an artifact produced by dust within our own galaxy. "We're certainly not retracting our result," says John Kovac, a cosmologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and co-leader of the team, which used a specialized telescope at the South Pole known as BICEP2. Others say the BICEP team has already lost its case. "At this time, I think the fair thing to say is that you cannot claim detection-period," says Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University. From 2010 through 2012, BICEP2 peered at a small patch of the CMB to measure the polarization of the microwaves as it varies from point to point. On 17 March, BICEP researchers announced at a press conference in Cambridge that they had spotted ultrafaint pinwheel-like swirls in the sky. Those swirls, or B modes, are most likely traces of gravitational waves rippling through space and time during the 10-32 seconds that inflation lasted, the BICEP team says, and they fulfill a key prediction of the theory of inflation. Many cosmologists hailed the detection as a smoking gun for that theory.
volkier luft

The Koyal Group Info Mag: How turning science into a game rouses more public interest - 0 views

Chris Lintott first met Kevin Schawinski in the summer of 2007 at the astrophysics department of the University of Oxford. Lintott had just finished a PhD at the University College of London on sta...

The Koyal Group Info Mag How turning science into a game rouses more public interest

started by volkier luft on 17 Nov 14 no follow-up yet
Daniel Hoffman

The Koyal Group Info Mag: How A Failed Experiment On Rats Sparked A Billion-Dollar Infa... - 1 views

WASHINGTON -- At a research lab at Duke University Department of Pharmacology in 1979, a group of scientists sparked a major breakthrough in infant care from a failed experiment on rats. At the tim...

The Koyal Group Info Mag Failed Experiment Rats Sparked Billion-Dollar Infant-Care Breakthrough

started by Daniel Hoffman on 12 Nov 14 no follow-up yet
Madeline Souver

Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang's Smoking Gun - 3 views

Astronomers have found evidence to support the theory of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. R...

Science Discoveries Koyal Group Info Mag Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang's Smoking Gun

started by Madeline Souver on 20 Mar 14 no follow-up yet
zoey meer and Lewis Sean liked it
Danna Reid

The Koyal Group Journals: Darwin in the Dock - 1 views

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    Darwin in the Dock: C.S. Lewis's Limited Acceptance of Common Descent Common descent is the claim that all organisms currently living have descended from one or a few original ancestors through a process Darwin called "descent with modification." According to this idea, not only humans and apes share an ancestor, but so do humans, clams, and fungi. Common descent is a hallowed dogma among today's evolution proponents, held with quasi-religious fervor. C.S. Lewis clearly believed that Christians can accept evolution as common descent without doing violence to their faith. This is what Lewis was getting at when he wrote to evolution critic Bernard Acworth, "I believe that Christianity can still be believed, even if evolution is true."18 In Lewis's view, whether God used common descent to create the first human beings was irrelevant to the truth of Christianity. As he wrote to one correspondent late in his life, "I don't mind whether God made man out of earth or whether 'earth' merely means 'previous millennia of ancestral organisms.' If the fossils make it probable that man's physical ancestors 'evolved,' no matter."19 In The Problem of Pain (1940), Lewis even offers a possible evolutionary account of the development of human beings, although he makes clear he is offering speculation, not history: "[I]f it is legitimate to guess," he writes, "I offer the following picture -- a 'myth' in the Socratic sense," which he defines as "a not unlikely tale," or "an account of what may have been the historical fact" (emphasis in the original). Lewis then suggests that "[f]or long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the vehicle of humanity and the image of himself... The creature may have existed for ages... before it became man."20 Elsewhere, Lewis seemed smitten by the idea of embryonic recapitulation, the discredited evolutionary idea that human beings replay the history of their evolution from lower animals in their womb. And in a letter to his f
Margaret Koyal

The Koyal Group InfoMag News: SA contributes to science breakthrough - 1 views

South African scientists contributed significantly towards the knowledge base that helped an international experiment make a breakthrough in proving a particle discovered in July 2012 is a type of ...

The Koyal Group InfoMag News SA contributes to science breakthrough

started by Margaret Koyal on 25 Jun 14 no follow-up yet
Margaret Koyal

The Koyal Group InfoMag News│This summer, NASA will begin keeping an eye on y... - 1 views

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    When you're working in the yard this summer, take a look up: Using a satellite, NASA scientists are paying attention to how healthy your lawn and garden are. Next month, the agency plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Its primary aim is to create a global map of carbon sources and carbon sinks. The OCO-2 mission will provide the most detailed map of photosynthetic fluorescence - that is to say, of how plants glow - ever created. Using this data, scientists should be able to estimate how quickly the world's plants are absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. The applications of the project are wide-ranging, but the science is easy enough to understand. During photosynthesis, a plant absorbs light, then immediately re-emits it at a different wavelength. This is known as fluorescence. In a laboratory setting, botanists can measure the intensity of fluorescence to estimate how actively a plant is photosynthesizing. A satellite could, in theory, detect the light emitted by the world's plants to estimate how much carbon the plants are absorbing. But there has always been a big, fiery problem: the sun.Continue here More discoveries you might want to know about
Annie Ruiz

Koyal Group Info Mag - Scientists honour biggest name in evolutionary biology since Darwin - 3 views

William Donald Hamilton's name may not be as widely recognized as Charles Darwin's, but Hamilton's work in evolutionary biology has managed to explain nature's oddities in a way that Darwin couldn'...

Science Discoveries Koyal Group Info Mag Scientists honour 'altruistic' theories of the biggest name in evolutionary biology since Darwin

started by Annie Ruiz on 29 Mar 14 no follow-up yet
zoey meer and Colton Blake liked it
Lewis Sean

The Koyal Group Info Mag Nasa is Funding Research on Deep Sleep for Transporting Astron... - 0 views

Putting space travelers into a state of deep sleep has been a staple of interstellar science fiction for quite some time, but despite originating as a far-fetched concept, the idea of using suspend...

The Koyal Group Info Mag Nasa is Funding Research on Deep Sleep for Transporting Astronauts to Mars

started by Lewis Sean on 05 Nov 14 no follow-up yet
Lewis Sean

The Koyal Group Info Mag Nasa is Funding Research on Deep Sleep for Transporting Astron... - 0 views

  Putting space travelers into a state of deep sleep has been a staple of interstellar science fiction for quite some time, but despite originating as a far-fetched concept, the idea of using...

The Koyal Group Info Mag Nasa is Funding Research on Deep Sleep for Transporting Astronauts to Mars

started by Lewis Sean on 05 Nov 14 no follow-up yet
Jhudeza Muhammad

The future is disappearing: How humanity is falling short of its grand technological pr... - 1 views

What I find most interesting about typical visions of the future isn't all the fanciful and borderline magical technology that hasn't been invented yet, but rather how much of it actually already e...

The Koyal Group Info Mag

started by Jhudeza Muhammad on 05 Nov 14 no follow-up yet
Margaret Koyal

The Scientific Method: Science Research and Human Knowledge by The Koyal Group Info Mag - 1 views

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    Science research is a rich mine of valuable knowledge if one knows how to go about it with care and precision. As in all scientific endeavours, there is a system to follow whether one is trying to solve a simple problem such as how to kill garden weeds or improving on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Even before the advent of the Internet and the unlimited amount of knowledge and information we have available in a matter of seconds, research has generally been misunderstood as a simple process of going to the library (Googling, for most of us today) and getting the data one needs to make a report or "thesis". Unfortunately, this is nothing but a single step in the whole process of scientific research. Academics will call this data-gathering or collating observations. The purpose of scientific research is to observe physical phenomena and to describe them in their operation or functions. The essential question is WHY. Why do things behave as they do? We can predict some things because it is how things are supposed to behave; but we want to know the causes of such phenomena. Discovering the causes through our research, we can then explain these things and use the knowledge to our advantage in many practical ways. That is, we can then build ships that can carry as many people as we can or explain that the moon, like the apple, is falling into the Earth because it is subject to the force of gravitation. Why it never crashes into the Earth is another question which Newton, fortunately, had to settle for us. Science research or what others would call the Scientific Method requires several steps to be considered one. Let us look at them with simple examples for the beginner: 1. Basic or general questions about a phenomenon Sometimes, it all starts with a casual observation followed by a curious question. W
Chris Blake

The Koyal Group Info Mag News: Some Creepy and other Not-so-Believable Science Research... - 1 views

Have you ever imagined what the future would be like? Here is a hint as to what the latest discoveries will unfold within our lifetime. Unfortunately, we also found some unlikely stories about the ...

The Koyal Group Info Mag News Some Creepy and other Not-so-Believable Science Research Discoveries

started by Chris Blake on 22 Oct 14 no follow-up yet
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