Science

World Economic Forum:

Tideglusib works by stimulating stem cells in the pulp of teeth, the source of new dentine. Dentine is the mineralized substance beneath tooth enamel that gets eaten away by tooth decay.

And:

The team inserted small, biodegradable sponges made of collagen soaked in Tideglusib into cavities. The sponges triggered dentine growth and within six weeks, the damage was repaired. The collagen structure of the sponges melted away, leaving only the intact tooth.

Hell yes.

[Via The Overspill]

I’m on an email list that caters to the geeky and to engineering. This story hit my inbox over the weekend, but was written about 15 years ago, and was given the title “Engineering Pornography”. But it’s not what you think. This is about a massive engineering problem, solved in a beautifully elegant way.

If I still have your attention, here’s a highlight to whet your appetite:

Several days ago a very large number of trucks and men from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power descended on my neighborhood. They removed large sections of Pershing drive to a depth of 15 feet or so over a stretch of about a city block. I assumed they had a problem with a water main or something.

When they started building semi-permanent structures over the holes I knew something really big was up. When the large trucks full of strange power tools, mega-welding machines, breathing equipment, and racks of test equipment came I started wondering. Driving by a couple nights ago (11 PM), I noticed that the pace hadn’t slowed – they were at it 24 hours a day.

My curiosity got the best of me yesterday when they brought in the giant tanks full of liquid nitrogen. LN-2 for the DWP? I parked my car and played the lookie loo.

Fascinating.

The Guardian:

A pair of amateur explorers in Canada have found a vast underground passage stretching hundreds of metres underneath the bustling streets of Montreal whose formation dates back more than 15,000 years ago to the Earth’s last ice age.

And:

Formed thousands of years ago by massive glaciers that ruptured the rock beneath, yellow calcite line the walls of the passage at times, adding pops of bright colour while icicle-shaped stalactites hang overhead.

I find it incredible that such a massive complex underground tunnel has been hidden for so long. An amazing find.

This will break your brain.

In February 2017, SpaceX announced a mission to head beyond the moon. They’ll take two private, paying customers to finance the trip, and they’ll launch in late 2018.

This marks the beginning of Elon Musk’s dream of populating Mars, giving Earthbound folk a second shot at coexisting on a planet all their own.

The linked document is a very readable blueprint for this dream. Will it happen? Not clear. Could it happen? Read the paper. Seems doable, with the right dreamer at the helm.

UPDATE: There’s been a lot of argument about the feasibility of a ship to Mars, mostly focused on the radiation shielding problem (a lot of radiation, and shielding is heavy/costly to propel). Here’s a good thread on the subject, and the solutions being proposed. [H/T Alex Satrapa]

From the solar eclipse simulator:

Join us in this first-of-its-kind citizen science project, gathering scientifically valuable data from the total solar eclipse that will traverse North America on August 21, 2017.

Type your zip code or town name into the search field and you’ll see (drag the slider or hit the play button) a simulation of the eclipse that will unfold on August 21st.

Melissa Wiley, Smithsonian:

While exploring Cierva Cove, a glacial bay off the peninsula, a scientist aboard Cornell’s boat became excited by one iceberg in particular. “Everything I was seeing was pretty exciting,” Cornell admits. “This particular iceberg at the time kind of blended in with all the crazy stuff we were seeing.”

But as they approached the mass, which rose about 30 feet out the water, Cornell understood his guide’s excitement. Whereas most iceberg tips are covered in snow or have been weathered by the elements, this one was free of debris, exposing glassy, aqua-green ice with water flowing through it—“almost like an ant colony,” he says.

Hard to argue with the headline. Pretty cool image. And in some ways, this is like seeing an endangered species.

Jennings Brown, Vocativ:

When Fu Gui was six, he was abducted on his way home from school in Chongqing, China. He was then trafficked to Quznahou, about 1,000 miles away, where he was sold to foster parents. Now, 27 years after he was taken from his family, he has been reunited with them. And it’s all thanks to the latest cross-age facial recognition technology from Chinese tech giant Baidu.

And:

In 2009, nearly two decades after Gui was kidnapped after school, he uploaded the earliest photo he had of himself, taken when he was 10, adding it to the database of tens of thousands of images. In January of this year, Gui’s father uploaded a photo of Gui when he was 4.

Baidu’s AI was capable of matching the two images, taken six years apart.

This is a breathtaking application of facial recognition technology. And this tech is becoming more sophisticated, and facial data more ubiquitously available every single day.

Mallory Locklear, Ars Technica:

In 2009, Steve Jobs received a liver transplant—not in northern California where he lived, but across the country in Memphis, Tennessee. Given the general complications of both travel and a transplant, Jobs’ decision may seem like an odd choice. But it was a strategic move that almost certainly got him a liver much more quickly than if Jobs had just waited for a liver to become available in California. Eight years later, the Apple founder’s procedure continues to highlight the state of transplants in the US: when it comes to organs, we have a big math problem.

Today, there’s a much greater need than there are organs to go around. It’s a problem currently being tackled in part by mathematicians and developers, who are crafting clever algorithms that aim to make organ allocation as fair as possible. But it’s complicated math that’s done against a backdrop of sticky ethical issues, and the debates surrounding it are heated and contentious.

The article digs into the complexities of distributing organs as they become available, and the process of deciding who qualifies. This truly is life or death decision making.

[VIDEO] Daily Mail:

‘I was told that I had to undergo a surgery and there were two methods. One totally sedated or, two, to wake me up during surgery.’

But because the second option had a much greater chance of success, he decided to choose that.

My guess is, they wanted to make sure they were cutting in the right place, his ability to play the guitar was an indicator. Both oogy and fascinating. Video embedded in the main Loop post.

The concept of a perpetual motion machine brings up images of con artists and snake oil.

Since the birth of the industrial revolution, tricksters have tried to sell the world on the impossible. But this one has the blessing of physicists at Berkely and others have been able to replicate their findings.

From New Scientist:

Now, in a paper published this week, Norman Yao at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have revealed a blueprint for making a time crystal. The recipe has already been followed by two teams.

For Yao’s time crystal, an external force – like the pulse of a laser – flips the magnetic spin of one ion in a crystal, which then flips the spin of the next, and so forth, setting the system into a repeating pattern of periodic motion.

Stay skeptical, but with just a touch of hope and wonder.

NASA:

Social media users are invited to apply for credentials to attend the launch of the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon cargo spacecraft with to the International Space Station. The launch from Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is currently targeted for no earlier than February 2017. The exact launch date and time still are under review. This will be the first cargo mission launched from Kennedy’s historic Launch Complex 39A, where numerous Apollo and space shuttle missions lifted off.

If your passion is to communicate and engage the world via social media, then this is the event for you! Seize the opportunity to be on the front line to blog, tweet or Instagram everything about SpaceX’s tenth commercial resupply mission to the space station. The rocket will deliver several tons of supplies, including new science experiments and technology research.

A maximum of 50 social media users will be selected to attend this two-day event.

Yes, please!

Amazing find. Take a look at both the image at the beginning of the post, as well as the zoomed in image towards the middle. The latter gives a better sense of the surface of the meteorite. Very cool.

If you are new to music theory and have a technical bent, this is an interesting introduction, one that lays some important foundations, especially if you have any interest in songwriting. It’s written as a non-musical engineer digging in to the science behind music and discovering the mathematics that ties everything together.

Don’t let the science bog you down. Intervals, scales, and modes are the key concepts here.

Andrew Leavitt:

Are you familiar with “The Trolley Problem?” It’s an ethical thought experiment with a central moral dilemma.

An observer must decide whether to switch a trolley track when either choice will result in negative consequences for innocent bystanders. If he intervenes more lives are saved [practical] but he has then taken an active role in who lives or dies [immoral]. If he leaves the switch alone he is moral but more lives are certainly lost. There is no unequivocal “right choice” – especially as the scenario becomes more complex.

Interesting post that touches on Aasimov’s three laws of robotics and MIT’s moral machine web experiment.

I’m a math geek, so this might be more up my alley than most. A cool tweet showing how to use the Fibonacci sequence to convert miles to kilometers and back. Spooky!