biohacker

Test Flight of the World’s Smallest Helicopter

Dmitri — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:50:20 +0000

A major milestone towards making the smallest helicopter in the world was recently reached by a Norwegian company Prox Dynamics. A prototype was able to demonstrate take off, forward and turning flight, and landings during a successful test flight. The Hornet-1 prototype, weighing less than 15 grams with a rotor diameter of 100 mm, has the same dimensions and weight as the production version, but with a much simpler avionics package. A two-bladed single rotor provides some inherent stability and is controlled by the smallest and lightest in the world servos that weigh less than 0.5 grams.

Science In Islamic Countries

Dmitri — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:06:48 +0000

Physics Today published a thought-provoking article on the status of and prospects for science in Islamic countries. The author, a Pakistani physicist, posits that ‘Internal causes led to the decline of Islam’s scientific greatness long before the era of mercantile imperialism. To contribute once again, Muslims must be introspective and ask what went wrong.’ The author makes a few strong conclusions, many of which are relevant to the general debate between science and religion.

Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

Science finds every soil barren in which miracles are taken literally and seriously and revelation is considered to provide authentic knowledge of the physical world. If the scientific method is trashed, no amount of resources or loud declarations of intent to develop science can compensate. In those circumstances, scientific research becomes, at best, a kind of cataloging or ‘butterfly-collecting’ activity. It cannot be a creative process of genuine inquiry in which bold hypotheses are made and checked.

Update: over a 1000 comments in Slashdot discussion of this article.

Future Technologies

Dmitri — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 02:57:47 +0000

PC World looks into The Future of Technology and offers 100 Fearless Forecasts. Although better user interfaces are one of the future predictions, for now using the ‘print view’ is the most convenient way to read individual sections of the sprawling article. A persevering reader will find, however, an interesting overview of various emerging technologies including information about existing examples and prototypes. Briefly: Web will be fast, seamless, and targeted, OS won’t matter, PCs will be modular and specialized, every appliance will be smart, and privacy will become non-existent (according to a privacy expert from UC-Berkeley ‘If you simply drive your car into the parking lot of Sports Authority, the company might argue that you have a business relationship’).

Creating a GooglePage

Dmitri — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 14:00:25 +0000

Update (Feb 2, 2011): GooglePages service has beed closed by Google last year, so the original information in this post is no longer relevant and has been removed.

US Census Records Online

Dmitri — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 05:43:49 +0000

Researching one's own (or anyone else's) family history has just gotten easier.

Ancestry.com has built a database of "every name in every publicly available [US] federal census taken from 1790 to 1930" (the cutoff date is due to a 72 year delay before the US government releases original census documents). According to an AP story, the database contains 5 billion searchable names linked to 13 million images of original census pages. The searches can reveal such odd bits of historical trivia as Mary Lincoln aging only 7 years between the 1850 and the 1860 census. The site also includes Flash-animated tools to look at historical snapshots of the US every decade from 1790 to 1930.

For those not serious enough about researching their ancestry to shell out a yearly or a monthly fee, there is even a convenient 14-day free trial.

Indexing the Hottest Topics in Physics

Dmitri — Sun, 07 May 2006 07:29:08 +0000

There is finally a scientific way to determine the hottest scientific topics. Michael Banks, a PhD student at the MPI-Stuttgart, in a recent paper extended the Hirsch Index for ranking research topics in Physics. The h-b index is based on the number of published papers and citations for a given topic. The second metric, m, normalizes the h-b by the the number of years that papers on the topic have been published. An m>3 means that a topic is hot. Moreover, a large m number combined with an h-b>100 represents a topic that was popular in the past and still is today. Finally, a small m but large h-b reflects an older topic that was popular for many years but is now less so. The following is a list of the 10 hottest topics in Physics, based on a larger dataset from the original paper.

Topic	h-b	m
carbon nanotubes	167	12.85
nanowires	105	8.75
quantum dots	149	7.84
fullerenes	140	7.78
giant magnetoresistance	116	6.82
M-theory	79	6.58
quantum computation	73	5.21
teleportation	61	5.08
superstrings	99	3.96
heavy fermion	97	3.73

The original Hirsch's h-index is based on the number of times that papers by a particular scientist are cited. A scientist with a h-index of 10, will have published at least 10 papers that have received at least 10 citations each. Similarly, a topic with an h-b index of 10 means that there are at least 10 papers on that topic, each of which has been cited at least 10 times. Some topics have been around longer than others, so the second metric, m, normalizes the h-b by the the number of years that papers on the topic have been published. The resulting m number indicates how important a particular topic is today. Like the original h-index, the h-b index is calculated by searching the ISI Web of Science database for the topic and then sorting the results by the number of citations.

Search Options for Research Papers

Dmitri — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 21:46:55 +0000

A few personal favorites from the list of alternatives to the popular Web of Science (WoS) index reviewed by Dana L. Roth (for details, see the RMIMR post or the full PDF file). In accordance with my personal research interests, these are the tools useful for literature and citation searches in Physics and Chemistry.

Web of Science
WoS and other databases from Thomson Scientific like ISI Web of Knowledge and the ISI journal impact factor are the tools that I personally use the most. One feature in WoS that I find increasingly useful is the system of citation alerts, whereby I am notified (by e-mail) every time a particular paper has been cited. By selectively “tagging” in this manner several important and specialized papers in a given field (e.g., immobilization of DNA on surfaces), the resulting alerts effectively notify me about most of the new papers on the subject. WoS also happens to provide the easiest way I know to check somebody’s Hirsch index.

Google Scholar
In a previous post I already mentioned the updated recent articles option, which attempts to enhance the relevance of the search results. Also very useful are direct links to PDF files of the papers hosted on authors’ websites, in addition to the publishers’ versions, of course.

Search results are displayed according to relevance based on the full text of each article, the article’s author, the publication source and how often it has been cited. Google Scholar also automatically analyses and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online.

Chemical Abstracts/SciFinder/SciFinder Scholar
Many chemists prefer SciFinder over WoS for searches in Chemistry journals, which is not surprising, because SciFinder is based on Chemical Abstracts (CA). On several occasions, SciFinder indeed helped me to find useful references on topics not covered by WoS, but in general the features are very similar between these two major subscription-based services.

[The 'Get Citing References'] feature is similar to the ‘Times Cited’ link appearing on the full record for individual articles in WoS, which retrieves ‘exact’ citation matches but not citations with minor errors. There are some examples (J. Chem. Soc. Chem. Commun./Chem. Commun.) where citations in CA are algorithmically corrected. In contrast with CA, WoS also indexes articles from journals published in non-Roman alphabets which, by definition, are excluded from the CAplus file.

Scopus and Scirus
Scopus is a comprehensive subscription-based indexing service from Elsevier, which directly competes against SciFinder and WoS. Scirus, is the often-overlooked free version of the same index. Perhaps the most unique functionality of Scirus is an automatically-generated list of suggested search refinements, based on keyword frequency in the current set of results. This is a very convenient option for initial broad searches on an unfamiliar topic, because it helps to quickly identify the relevant search terms. Oddly enough, this option is only offered in Scirus, but not in Scopus. Update: see a more extended discussion of the differences between Scopus and Scirus in the comments to this post.

Scopus is a ‘work in progress’ that is based on a variety of sources which result in some interesting retrievals. A ‘Basic’ search for Marcus, R. A. as an author retrieves 56 items including an article authored by Marcus A. R. Several articles are listed twice, suggesting incomplete editing of overlapping sources for the article references. The results list displays the article title, authors source and the number of ‘cited by’ references in the
Scopus database.

CiteSeer
CiteSeer is, perhaps, the most Web 2.0 tool from the list, with a lot of useful features, like citation analysis and direct links to PDFs. Unfortunately, it only indexes computer and information science literature. So for now I can only hope that a similar index will be created for other sciences, or at least some of the features will be adopted by the existing indices.

Google Ranking for Scientific Papers

Dmitri — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 00:52:28 +0000

A recent paper on “Finding Scientific Gems with Google” tested the application of “the Google PageRank algorithm to assess the relative importance of all publications in the Physical Review family of journals from 1893–2003″. The results, highlighted on IoP’s physicsweb, indicate that in general highly cited papers also have high Google rank numbers, but the algorithm also found a few exceptional papers that have anomalously high Google rank numbers compared with their citation rank. Such anomalies can occur when several derivative follow-up papers, written at a more accessible level, capture most of the subsequent citations. Google Scholar is implementing similar ranking ideas via the new ‘recent articles’ option, which promises to rank papers based on factors like the number of citations and “the prominence of the author’s and journal’s previous papers”.

The updated Google Scholar conveniently includes links to PDF versions of papers from the authors’ websites (when available), which can be a much faster download option than browsing through the subscription-based publishers’ sites. By contrast, Academic search on Windows Live only links to published or arXiv versions of the papers. Both services, however, are not yet as complete as the traditional citation search databases and, in some cases, have trouble identifying multiple links to the same paper, when respective sources contain typos or use different formats for citations.

Neutrino Mass on Slashdot

Dmitri — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 15:35:03 +0000

Follow-up links on neutrino mass story that I submitted to Slashdot, courtesy of the Slashdot discussion thereof.

MINOS experiment homepage

Richard Feynman lectures on particle physics (math-lite version)

UCI page with a short explanation of neutrino oscillations

Last but not least, a glimpse of the insider’s prospective, from a post by one of the MINOS collaborators:

It’s been a pretty exciting 10 years. The push to get everything together this last month has been exhausting. But after presenting the results on Thursday do we physicists take a well deserved break and party like 1999? Well, noooo. We spend Friday, Saturday and Sunday IN MEETINGS! Today (Saturday) we were there from 8:30am to 7:00pm discussing how further to proceed. We’ve got 50% more data “in the can” that we didn’t yet present (cross checks to perform, fits to perform). Plus plans for more data taking after the accelerator comes up again in June. Plus other physics results we’re still trying to extract. Plus more improved simulations to do in order to yield improved limits. Such is the life of a physicist.

Neutrino Masses Confirmed

Dmitri — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 23:00:40 +0000

MINOS experiment confirmed that neutrinos have mass. The BBC News story does a good job explaining why masses of particles, that are almost impossible to observe, matter so much. “Light shed on mysterious particle” title though seems like a bad pun, since neutrinos do not have much to do with light. If anything, on those rare occasions when they interact with matter, light is emitted, not absorbed. The Register article about vanishing neutrinos is titled more appropriately, but is actually less informative. And just to round up today’s high-energy physics and cosmology reading list – the Why Files summary of the Big Bang mysteries offers a few insightful soundbites on the current theories about the past and the future of the Universe.

April 1 Update. OMG!!! Story accepted on Slashdot!!!

PINK PONIES day rules!!!