1

New Theories / Re: New Theory: Spin

« on: Today at 19:38:09 »

What a load of meaningless piffle.

2

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Is it possible to have a satellite fixed?

« on: Today at 19:34:22 »

I am looking for a satellite that is in a fixed point in the universe that it is in a FIXED distance and coordinates from the center of the earth.

Is that possible?

Obviously not. You can have a geostationary satellite, but the earth is moving so it can't be at a fixed point in the universe.

3

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: How can I find the amount of water in a capillary that won't drop?

« on: Today at 09:53:33 »

Suck it and see - literally! As mentioned in another thread, there are so many variables that a general equation is worthless.

4

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does mobile phone tower radiation pose health problems?PS

« on: Today at 09:39:44 »

 

The Ramazzini study exposed 2448 Sprague-Dawley rats from prenatal life until their natural death to “environmental” cell tower radiation for 19 hours per day (1.8 GHz GSM radiofrequency radiation (RFR) of 5, 25 and 50 V/m). RI exposures mimicked base station emissions like those from cell tower antennas, and exposure levels were far less than those used in the NTP studies of cell phone radiation.

so we can ignore the NTP study on the basis that cooking a rat will certainly kill it - no surprise - and boiling it in utero is not a good start in life.

So how reliable is Ramazzini?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/splenda-testing/

[The problem hanging over the Splenda finding is that which hangs over the Ramazzini Institute in general: Quality control. No matter what substance the Institute tests for cancer, the results always seem to be positive, whereas other laboratories testing the same substances repeatedly fail to come up with the same findings. […] All of this has made the Ramazzini Institute something of a joke in European and American science. But, of course, there’s nothing to laugh about when you use a charity conference on childhood cancer to promote an international cancer panic.

PS:

A 1972 study compared neoplasms in Sprague Dawley rats from six different commercial suppliers and found highly significant differences in the incidences of endocrine and mammary tumors. There were even significant variations in the incidences of adrenal medulla tumors among rats from the same source raised in different laboratories. All but one of the testicular tumors occurred in the rats from a single supplier. The researchers found that the incidence of tumors in Sprague-Dawley rats from different commercial sources varied as much from each other as from the other strains of rats. The authors of the study "stressed the need for extreme caution in evaluation of carcinogenicity studies conducted at different laboratories and/or on rats from different sources."

So you need to do your epidemiology carefully even with rats!

 

5

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does mobile phone tower radiation pose health problems?

« on: Yesterday at 13:10:21 »

He was getting sick during the week and recovering on the weekend. He concluded something at work was making him ill. He started working in different offices, and finally got relief in the basement. He worked out that there was no WiFi in the basement. The neurologist agreed with his conclusion.

Me too.

We see the same problem with pagers. WiFi, pager, email....all reduces your control over your work flow, imposes other people's productivity cycles on your own, increases stress, induces all sorts of cerebral problems, including early onset of dementia caused by stress->muscle tension-> atlo-axial vertebra displacement -> interruption of cerebrospinal fluid drainage -> nerve sheath damage. Also presents as "asthma" due to muscular tension in the thoracic spine region.

I like

I have challenged the industry to put forward executives to volunteer to be exposed to the radiation I have in my home for 3 months.

  Had a rep offer me an intracavitary dosemeter some years ago, with a bias voltage of about 1000V inside an insulated but rather thin sheath. "Absolutely safe" he said. "Fine", says I. "Shove it up your backside and switch it on, and I'll buy it."  Never saw him again.

6

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: What is a Spin

« on: Yesterday at 11:39:15 »

As with all things quantum mechanical, you can't assume macroscopic properties from the name. We know an electron behaves in a magnetic field "as if" it were indeed spinning, but the fact that its "spin" is quantised tells us that it isn't really like a classical spinning top.

Beware of "charm" and "strangeness"!

7

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does mobile phone tower radiation pose health problems?

« on: Yesterday at 10:54:13 »

I'll admit to not having read many recent studies, but I have an interest in cancer clusters and I did chair a conference on the subject of EM health effects some years ago. None of the papers was sponsored by any industrial interest. Here's what I took away.

Lots of things can modify or disrupt cell transport and DNA in vitro. Petrol/air mixture can explode. Both phenomena are a long way from the clinical expression of cancer in vivo, or a working motor car.

The epidemiology of rare diseases cannot be usefully correlated with common  potential causes.  The example given in this thread of four boys contracting an unusual cancer demands more detailed investigation: why no girls, and why only four in a school that was fairly uniformly irradiated (even if it wasn''t, schoolkids move around during the day).

The question of uniform irradiation is important. Urban environments have higher concentrations of radio masts than rural areas, and higher concentrations of people. And in the UK there is a strong geographical correlation with social class (poor people tend to live in the east of cities (due to the prevailing west wind), at high density, and to have shorter life expectancies for all sorts of reasons, whilst the rich live longer and inhabit the west side of the city or leafy suburbs and rural estates)  so you need to review all statistics in view of such geographical nonuniformity.

There is also a question of reporting bias. The incidence of reported disease always increases when a new cause is suspected, when a new diagnostic is available, and most of all when a new treatment is marketed. Plus some causes of death are not fashionable: the low incidence of fatal heart disease in France is not borne out by post-mortem but by the reluctance of general practitioners to request a post-mortem or report an avoidable condition on a death certificate - "natural causes" is far more common than in the UK.

And of incidence bias. As we eliminate physical trauma (better roads, safer industries) and infectious disease (better drains and refuse collection) so engineers give way to doctors and all that is left to kill people is heart disease and cancer.  So the incidence of fatal cancer increases every year because people live long enough express it.

Hence a degree of scepticism or at least caution when dealing with new epidemiologies.   

8

The Environment / Re: Which scientists say we've just 18 months to "save planet from climate change"?

« on: 16/08/2019 08:07:41 »

What has the world come to, when even the courts confuse nationality with race?

The bloke in the picture looks distinctly Caucasian, probably descended inter alia from prehistoric immigrants from the Caucasus. He was complaining about those more recent immigrants from the same area who call themselves Poles or Romanians rather than Brits, but, like Brits, may or may not be of Caucasian descent.

Trump is an idiot.

Never mind! Your wish may come true, with Caretaker Comrade Corbyn leading the country back to bankruptcy and servitude and deporting the Jews back to....er...Middlesex, actually. Heck, as a Surrey supporter I even fail the cricket test!
   

9

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does mobile phone tower radiation pose health problems?

« on: 16/08/2019 07:50:49 »

I would add that the argument that non-ionizing radiation cannot cause cancer because it cannot break DNA double bonds, has been disproven by the acceptance that the lower energy ultra-violet light can, with time, cause skin cancer.

That's not the argument at all. DNA double bonds are not the point of failure.

The principal mechanism for radiogenic tumorgenesis is the production of free radicals in the cell cytoplasm, which distort the hydrogen bonds between the strands of reforming DNA during mitosis, leading to incorrect crosslinking and local distortion of the daughter molecule. This is the underlying mechanism of stochastic effects at low dose rates. Since the trigger event occurs in a single cell, there is no threshold dose and a significant latency period between exposure and clinical symptoms.

At high dose rates or in the presence of chemical rather than physical agents, the mechanism appears to be a matter of faulty or failed repair of direct thermal or chemical damage to an organ, resulting in deterministic effects. There is a threshold dose (the fairly sharp line between the protective response of sun tan and the repair failure of sun burn) and a very rapid onset of necrosis or carcinogenesis.
 
PS you can't arbitrarily add the field amplitudes of EM  radiation at different frequencies.

10

General Science / Re: How to calculate the height of a liquid in a capillary due to surface tension?

« on: 16/08/2019 07:34:11 »

That's a whole can of worms, because it is extremely sensitive to surface contamination, temperature, pressure, history, and just about every physical and chemical variable you can think of. It can even be negative (mercury in glass is a common example).

The general approach is to build your system and use the measured capillary rise to estimate contact angle!

11

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: Do we go round in circles?

« on: 15/08/2019 21:26:48 »

If the Universe is infinite, and contains (an) infinite (number of) galaxies; could there be other galaxies, that are not included in this? 

That depends on your definition of universe. To most people, it means "everything", or, if you like, "every thing", so there can't be any things that are not members of the universe.

If you are just counting galaxies as "things", then an infinite universe consists of a denumberable infinity of galaxies, which as Cantor pointed out, is one of the smaller infinities - possibly the smallest, but now I'm scraping the barrel of my memory!

12

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does mobile phone tower radiation pose health problems?

« on: 15/08/2019 06:47:02 »

I repeat: have you measured the field strength in your home?

Physics is about numbers.

13

The Environment / Re: Which scientists say we've just 18 months to "save planet from climate change"?

« on: 15/08/2019 06:44:03 »

they won't realise that Africa, China and India are not part of the EU.

citation needed.

Here's the story so far.

More than half of the electorate had lived all their lives under the status quo.
A government committed to  remain had been elected with an increased majority and had negotiated improvements in the status quo.
Neither major political party took an overt stand on the matter to the extent of mandating MPs, but they spent five times as much on remain publicity than on leave.
The meeja published scare stories about  leaving (including substituting "crashing out" and "cliff edge" for "WTO"),
the EU issued all sorts of dire warnings,
and anyone caught thinking about leaving was dubbed a stupid racist.

and the majority voted to leave.  This suggests to me that the status quo was just a bit unsatisfactory.

Being magnanimous in victory, I will say no more. Perhaps others will learn the complementary British virtue of being gracious in defeat. I think an important cricket match is about to begin.

14

The Environment / Re: Which scientists say we've just 18 months to "save planet from climate change"?

« on: 14/08/2019 23:55:13 »

From the Electoral Commission

One hundred and twenty-three organisations and individuals registered with as campaigners at the referendum. Altogether, the 123 campaigners reported spending £32,642,158 on campaigning at the referendum.
Remain: £19,309,588
Leave: £13,332,569

1.45:1 in favour of remain. Interestingly, political parties spent nearly 5 times as much on "remain" as on "leave". This suggests that they really were out of touch with public sentiment.

I noticed that academics are a very small fraction of the population.

Not round here, nor on the  telly or in the papers. Or in positions of direct influence on the young. And since more than half of the population now go to "uni", it's clearly an aspirational class. 

15

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Does mobile phone tower radiation pose health problems?

« on: 14/08/2019 23:39:56 »

So you suggest an electric field of around 10 V/m might stimulate some response within a cell. Have you measured the field strength in your home?

16

The Environment / Re: Which scientists say we've just 18 months to "save planet from climate change"?

« on: 14/08/2019 20:08:03 »

Why do they spend so much money on it then?

For the same reason that the remain side did. It's public money, so spend it.

sort of supported by the split of remain/ leave vs level of education

. I noticed that those academics on EU -funded projects tended to support "remain" until it was pointed out that only 60% of the money the UK contributes to EU science actually returns as grants, the remainder being lost in the byzantine accounts. Among my educated friends, those not in receipt of EU funding were generally sceptical of its value.

Have you forgotten the focus on Calais etc?

No. I am quite aware of the blatant failure of the EU to apply the United Nations ruling on the treatment of refugees. The only government that did what is actually required by international law was that of the UK, as proudly stated by the Rt Hon David Cameron, MA (Oxon).

17

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Is drinking water infused with hho better for me?

« on: 14/08/2019 19:58:48 »

and the British Empire has  fallen apart since the rum ration was abolished.

https://xkcd.com/552/

As an experimentalist, I merely observe and report. Others may draw conclusions.

18

Physiology & Medicine / Re: Why Is It Easier To Complete A Puzzle After A "time-out" ?

« on: 14/08/2019 18:05:34 »

In extremis, many (possibly most or nearly all) people keep repeating an action that has already proved futile. This has been the cause of several potentially survivable accidents. It seems likely to me that we can get stuck in a blind alley when solving almost any problem from Sudoku (though it baffles me why anyone even begins) to Flight 401 or living with an abusive partner.

The futility of our actions, and the more productive alternatives, are almost always obvious to accident investigators and genuine friends.

So my thinking at this trivial level is  that after pursuing any red herring for a few minutes, the brain can get locked into an obsessive/panic mode fuelled by a hint of adrenalin, and a cup of tea (or even a day in the office) just breaks the cycle: no huge insight or revelation, but just not banging your head against the wall for a few seconds.

19

The Environment / Re: Which scientists say we've just 18 months to "save planet from climate change"?

« on: 14/08/2019 15:44:00 »

Just to inject a hint of science into this wildly divergent topic:

It has become fairly commonplace to complain that those who voted to leave the EU are "racist". Now 90% of the UK population are Caucasian, and the objection to EU freedom of movement is an objection to other Caucasians entering the country, since the rest of the EU population is even more overwhelmingly Caucasian.

So what is the new definition of racism?

20

Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Re: What is the most efficient CO2 catalyst?

« on: 14/08/2019 13:37:01 »

Presumably you want to turn CO2 into something more useful than wood or food, since the most efficient hydrolysis of atmospheric CO2 to carbohydrates and hydrocarbons is to do nothing, stop farming animals, and let the forests re-grow.

Audi have a process for synthesising motor fuel from atmospheric CO2 and there are a number of published papers on the synthesis of alkanes with Fe, Mo or Cr catalysts.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/20/9693 is particularly interesting aas it takes a "whole system" approach to energetics.