Science – rgbFilter

Saturday Morning Science 15

June 18, 2011June 29, 2011 Pete Chapman Life, Saturday Morning Science, Science0 comment

Arsenic and Old Life– I grew up reading science fiction and was introduced at a young age to the idea that life might have a different chemical basis than the standard arrangement based on carbon. Silicon based life was already a cliché long before I saw the old classic Star Trek episode The Devil in the Dark wherein a Federation mining colony is terrorised by a life-form that could ingest rock and move through solid matter as if it were swimming in water. I remember asking my father, a chemical…

Featured Science Zombies

Saturday Morning Science 012

May 21, 2011May 24, 2011 Pete Chapman Apocalypse, Outer Limits, Roswell, Saturday Morning Science, Science, Stalin, Zombies1 Comment

The future’s uncertain and the end is always near. Roadhouse Blues- The Doors The silly season is well under way. Today the world is going to end. Joe Stalin engineered the Roswell saucer crash. The Centre for Disease Control went viral with a zombie attack piece. And don’t get me started about Lars Von Trier, his silly “worlds in collision” movie or his public airing of his private Fuhrerbunker. I’m glad this is a science column. I could just walk away and say none of this is on my beat….

Featured Science

Saturday Morning Science 011

May 14, 2011May 15, 2011 Pete Chapman Neanderthals, Radiolab, Saturday Morning Science, Science0 comment

Caveman Blues -I’ve been working up a piece about Neanderthals, collecting links on current research and rereading older theories about our enigmatic, long lost relatives. The problem is; we just keep finding stuff and it keeps getting written up as somehow conclusive or definitive when it’s really just cumulative. Take for example two findings from this week, I’ll cite the Science Digest articles, not because the folks at that site are doing anything wrong (in fact they are getting tighter on their writing and presentation) but because even the good…

Science

Saturday Morning Science 010

May 7, 2011May 15, 2011 Pete Chapman relativity, Saturday Morning Science, Science, space1 Comment

Saturday Morning Science is back!!! I wish I could say that something ground breaking, phase changing or paradigm shifting had happened since the last instalment. Something that had eluded detection by the entire world and could just now be revealed to rgbFilter readers as an exclusive article. But no, science doesn’t work that way and beware of anyone that claims it does. The biggest story this week involves an experiment that took a year to run, decades to implement and proved a theory that is nearing its centenary. Gravity Probe…

Computing Science

Saturday Morning Science 004

February 26, 2011March 5, 2011 Pete Chapman ADHD, Saturday Morning Science, Science0 comment

The problem is a simple one, despite being the storehouse for the knowledge of an entire planet sometimes the Internet can be a bore. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter present us with a world of ideas, tiny ideas, iterations of personal data, statements, hopes, curses and bleats amounting to a wall of cozy noise; full of sound and fury. Here are five sites on the web, five oasis in the sometime wasteland, five challenging places that reward the time spent with them. Feynman’s Robb Lectures– Anyone with an internet connection can…

Computing Science

Saturday Morning Science 002

February 12, 2011February 19, 2011 Pete Chapman quantum mechanics, quarks, S. Jay Olson, Science, Stardust-NEXT, Vikings0 comment

The quantum world got weirder, a respected scientist got weirder, the Vikings may have used polarized light to navigate and there’s a comet flyby for Valentine’s Day. Spooky Action in Time– “The greatest significance of our result is almost certainly in some application that is yet to be imagined.” In an interview with PhysOrg, S. Jay Olson of the University of Queensland summed up the implications of his paper with fellow physicist Timothy C. Ralph, “Extraction of Timelike Entanglement from the Quantum Vacuum“. Just as some of us are trying…

Zombie Ants – Threat, Myth or Just Another Weird Thing?

August 27, 2010August 28, 2010 Pete Chapman humor, humour, nature.com, paleobotany, Science, zombie ants9 Comments

At rgbFilter there is standing policy on providing accurate and up-to-the-minute information on one of the major cultural memes of our times; Zombies. Yes, for other news outlets the Zombie thing is like so ’07 but here at rgbFilter we know that the undead never sleep and vigilance must never tire. Towards this end we present not just the cultural manifestations of the Zombie Menace but probable vectors of infestation from current research in various fields of science. It started innocently enough these things always do. This reporter was scanning…

Artificial Walking Gel Created

April 28, 2009July 25, 2009 Doug Groves Science, terminator8 Comments

The above video demonstrates a chemical gel created in a lab at Waseda University in Tokyo. It’s a purely chemical reation that allows it to move in a fashion similar to an inch worm. The 600 um scale is just over half a millimetre, so there’s no fear of it killing loved ones and taking their forms yet… From The New Scientist, a great place to keep tabs on all the latest advances of SkyNet.