Daily Science Dose

Finally, some scientific evidence that waking up early is just not that good for you.

As a life-long night owl that continues to try and switch her clock around to join the rest of the world on that early morning commute to school, work, or whatever it is we humans do early in the morning, I have to say it’s difficult for me. I find that when I do change my sleep schedule, and start rising at say 8 or 9 in the morning, but the time it rolls around to 11pm, I am falling asleep in my chair. Nothing stops it — caffeine, sugar, slaps to the face.

Not that that is all that strange, right? If I fall asleep at 11 or 12 at night, I will have ample time for 7 to 8 hours of sleep. However, a research team at the University of Liège in Belgium has found that those early risers are less alert later in the day that those that rise late and stay up throughout the night.

Um, duh. I could have told you that without the grant money.

No, but seriously, the experiment is not as simple as I just made it. Actually, what the researchers did was test both early risers and night owls at similar times throughout the day according to how long they have been awake. So testing was a few hours after waking, a few hours after that, and you get the point. And according to the data, the night owls stay more alert later into their day as compared to the early-to-bed-early-to-rise crowd.

Could this be the evidence I need to insist that I really do need to sleep in until 11am?

Unfortunately, it’s a man’s world, and men must be early risers. Because despite the late-risers superior alertness, this whole society seems to value getting an early start to the work day. I know that it all stems from our agrarian roots, but come on, we are not all farmers. What if we as a society just push the start of the work day back a few hours? Could we then evolve over time into a race of super-alert accountants, doctors and nuclear technicians?

Maybe I’ll just move to Spain.

sleep, night owls, early birds, sleep study, University of Liege

I was happy with the “talk the talk, but does he walk the walk” comment.

Thank you, CBS, for covering this charade foisted on the American Public for far-too-long. I can bitch and bitch about coal, but when it comes right down to it, nothing is going to change anytime soon.

What I don’t get is this fanatical need for the US Energy Kings to push the “grow the economy” paradigm. Maybe our economy is built on the same inflated values of Wall Street. It’s like we just found this cheap energy trough, and like pigs, we are stuffing ourselves with no thought to the consequences (like why is the farmer fattening us up in the first place?).

I am seeing the same scary consumptive trend in anything eco- or green or earth-friendly. Earth friendly would mean cutting back on all that sh*t you buy every day. If we all go out and replace our entire wardrobes with organic cotton and bamboo, we are still creating a waste stream that undermines our efforts to live lightly. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it. That’s as eco- as you can get, but then that doesn’t “grow our economy,” does it?

Back to 60 Minutes…it’s about time that a major news organization calls our the Emperor’s nudity. Will it make a difference? Ah, heck no. Seriously, I hate to be pessimistic here, but we are doomed. Like I mentioned yesterday, we are not all going to die, but it’s going to be bad.

Here’s my great idea, and you heard it here first. Use carbon dioxide in fission-style reactions and capture the energy released while producing oxygen and carbon monoxide, which can then be converted into liquid fuels. Oh, crap, someone beat me to it.

First, let me begin by saying that yes, I do believe that anthropogenic activity is creating a dangerous imbalance in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. But do I think that everything can be chalked up to global warming or that we are all going to die from global warming, then the answer is no.

Global warming is not going to kill us all, but it will kill some and it will make life on this planet a heck of a lot more difficult for many, many others. But the most important thing is that any imbalance creates further imbalance in other systems, and by continuing to pump more and more GHG into our air, we are mucking up the system, which will lead to other systems going out of whack. If there were only a few of us living on this planet, then we would be able to migrate to other areas when our homes get flooded from rising seas or pull up stakes and leave an arable agricultural area turned desert from a shift in ocean currents (Australia anyone?)

Well, it seems that researchers are alarmed at the extent of the solar minimum going on. And with less sun activity, that means that less of the sun’s heat is hitting the planet. It’s true that the sun goes through cycles, but this is an unusually long minima, which scientists call a grand minima if it’s long enough.

The disappearance of sunspots happens every few years, but this time it’s gone on far longer than anyone expected – and there is no sign of the Sun waking up. “This is the lowest we’ve ever seen. We thought we’d be out of it by now, but we’re not,” says Marc Hairston of the University of Texas. And it’s not just the sunspots that are causing concern. There is also the so-called solar wind – streams of particles the Sun pours out – that is at its weakest since records began. In addition, the Sun’s magnetic axis is tilted to an unusual degree. “This is the quietest Sun we’ve seen in almost a century,” says NASA solar scientist David Hathaway. But this is not just a scientific curiosity. It could affect everyone on Earth and force what for many is the unthinkable: a reappraisal of the science behind recent global warming. –The Independent

Here’s the kicker. The last solar maximum ended right around the end of the last century. And some researchers are showing data that shows that the Earth’s temperature has tapered off since that time, so if the current solar minimum is holding global temps in check, then maybe, just maybe this whole global warming thing is false alarm.

I foresee this solar minimum issue becoming the next talking points for the climate sceptics on their next round on the talkshow circuit.

Ok, I’m going out on a limb here. Let’s say that yes, the Sun is going into a cooling period and we can buy some time before the full effects of the Carbon Crisis are felt. That might just be our only chance to ensure that we can curb our reliance on living fat of the oily and gaseous land, and start reversing some of the damage we have inflicted on our closed-ecosystem. Global warming may be held off, but for how long? For every Minimum, there is a Maximum. And if when that next Maximum hits, will we be worse off due to inaction and inertia, or could we be ready for it?

Just sayin’ is all.

global warming, research, climate change, climate sceptics, sunspots, solar, minimum, maximum, minima, solar activity, greenhouse gases, carbon, emissions, ecosystem, ocean currents

I find it ironic that just a few weeks after watching the finale of the great space soap opera known as Battlestar Galactica, a tale of technology running amok and former-slave-labor-robots evolving on their own to exact revenge on humankind, that we get news that scientists have developed robots or software programs that can think for themselves in terms of science experimentation and theorizing.

But does that robot look like this?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

But back to the news…

Aberystwyth University in Wales has a robotics department that has built ADAM. The head of the ADAM team, Ross King, says that ADAM carries out experiments and uses reason to theorize and plan for additional experiments.

It is the world’s first example of a machine that has made an independent scientific discovery — in this case, new facts about the genetic make-up of baker’s yeast.

“On its own it can think of hypotheses and then do the experiments, and we’ve checked that it’s got the results correct,” King said in an interview. –Reuters

And yes, EVE is being built next.

Around the same time, another team working on artificial intelligence has announced that they have developed a program that can independently reason its way through Newtonian physics.

…Hod Lipson and Michael Schmidt of Cornell University in New York, who have developed a computer program capable of working out the fundamental physical laws behind a swinging double pendulum.

Just by crunching the numbers — and without any prior instruction in physics — the Cornell machine was able to decipher Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and other properties. — Reuters again

My only fear with these AI “sci-lons” is what will happen when they figure out the only way to solve the climate crisis, the food crisis, the extinction crisis, the water crisis, etc would be to kill all humans?

robots, robotics, software, programs, computers, reason, artificial intelligence, AI, science, experiments