Accuracy and precision are important to the sciences, mathematics, and engineering because different scenarios require precision and/or accuracy.

bloodredorion:

Accuracy is how close a value is to the true value.

Precision is how close values are to each other.

A real life example of accuracy is when you hit a bulls-eye, or when you get the correct answer on a test. It’s being right on, what the answer is and not close to it.

A real life example of precision is when you aim and throw something, if you are able to throw another thing in the same area as the first thing then you are precise.It’s the act of the next answer being close in range of the first.

This person is accurate.

This person is precise.

Here’s a real life scenario: You are an engineer and you are asked by your employer to make estimate just how much it is going to cost to create a building on an area of land. You have to consider how much the materials will cost, if the soil is stable or if it isn’t and just how much it will cost to dig a hole and possibly cement that area, you also have to consider the pay of your workers if you hired any. Other factors you have to consider may be human error, you never know if something is going to go wrong, if you or your workers forgot something- and that will cost additional money. Creating a new building can be unpredictable, so your estimate will have precision- it will have a range of one number to another number- of about what it will cost; in this scenario you can not be accurate.

A lot of real life scenarios are going to be precise, and not accurate due to external factors, because you never know what will happen.

However you can be accurate on what you will pay your workers, but time is a dependent variable so if something goes wrong with the construction your workers will have to fix it and you will have to pay your workers more than you anticipated.

(via bloodredorion)

I would like to turn everyone’s attention to something.

munkeyhurkey:

kittlishkat:

Nasa’s last rover Curiosity is landing on Mars, August 5th 1:23 AM (Eastern). There will be LIVE FOOTAGE (well, you know, live as they can get 23 minutes later) hosted on Nasa’s site. ( http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/ )

I don’t know about you guys, but that makes me awfully excited. >u<

Oh my God, I CANT WAIT 8 DAYS.

(Source: missgigglefits, via bloodredorion)

bloodredorion:

Nuclear transplantation involves  moving a cell nucleus and its genetic material from one cell to another. In early nuclear transplantation experiments(those experiments directly or indirectly involved to cloning), the frog was the most frequently used animal.

There was a reason for this. 
For one, the reproductive biology of the frog, and it’s anatomy were already well known. Two, their eggs were more easily accessible; they fertilize their eggs outside of their body, and although the frog doesn’t have eggs all the time, all one really had to do was give the frog hormonal treatment, and squeeze the frog’s abdomin carefully. Three, the size and diameter of the frog egg was larger, so it was easier to enucleate, transfer nucleus of another cell in it, etc.    

What does this mean? 
Since the frog had the most well understood reproductive system, behavior, and nuclear transplantation experiments, that meant that the frog was the first animal to be successfully cloned. 

To be the first successfully cloned animal, it had to be determined whether these guidelines were met. 

One, all genetic material had to be removed. The genetic material from the egg had to be removed, and there was to be no fertilization through sperm. There is also always the chance that the scientists didn’t remove all the genetic material, and that’s the reason for the second rule.
Two, there should be a genetic marker to make sure that it was really cloned. Example, maybe there is a mutant gene in a certain group of animals within a species that the mother (of the egg) didn’t have. If the cloned frog has this mutant expression, then we know the frog came from the inserted nucleus and not from the mother’s genes.
Three, did it really work, or not? Some frog clones do grow up into tadpoles, but die at a very young age before they become frogs. This is obviously the sign of an unsuccessful clone.

So, when it was clear that the scientist had followed all of these guidelines, and other scientists were able to do the same, we knew that the frog was the first successfully cloned animal.

Cloning can help us with the medical field. It can tell us about diseases, cancer, and ourselves. How could we better understand ourselves, than to recreate the situation, and eliminate different possibilities in order to tell us something we want to understand? This is why cloning is a big deal, forget the fictional cloning nonsense. 

jtotheizzoe:

How to Count Infinity

“Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.” - Hazel Grace Lancaster

Are there really more numbers between 0 and 1 than there are integers? MinutePhysics explores, in typically wonderful fashion.

(by minutephysics)

(via bloodredorion)

trulydiscombobulated:

subatomiconsciousness:

Ernest Rutherford publishes his atomic theory describing the atom as having a central positive nucleus surrounded by negative orbiting electrons. This model suggested that most of the mass of the atom was contained in the small nucleus, and that the rest of the atom was mostly empty space. Rutherford came to this conclusion following the results of his famous gold foil experiment. This experiment involved the firing of radioactive particles through minutely thin metal foils (notably gold) and detecting them using screens coated with zinc sulfide (a scintillator). Rutherford found that although the vast majority of particles passed straight through the foil approximately 1 in 8000 were deflected leading him to his theory that most of the atom was made up of ‘empty space’

here

I think the Rutherford experiment should be common knowledge.

(via spockandsex)

For those of you that follow bloodredorion AND bloodredorion-science, most of my science rants/lectures will be here from now on. 

Science is in a different time now.

bloodredorion:

We live in a different time now than we did decades ago. How people approach science, the ethics behind science, and the public opinion of science, has all changed. You can’t just go in your garage and build something revolutionary. I mean, sure, you can… But if something goes wrong, not only will they take all of the things you built, and the documents that you’ve written; but they may also criminalize you. 

There’s always been a topic that brings hesitance in every decade involving science. Like when the church continued to state that the sun rotates around the Earth and we’re at the center of the universe. When people were (and some still are) against stem cell research despite it’s revolutionary discoveries to health and medicine. When they started building the LHC, and some people were claiming the LHC would bring the end of the world, and scientists were getting death threats from opposers. And now, even though nanotechnology was technically created around 50 years ago, it’s become a controversial topic; like, will the toxins affect the Earth? Will it’s research change our world too much when people aren’t ready for it? Will transhumanism happen sooner than we thought?

So you always have to be a bit cautious when you’re coming up with new ideas ( or what you may think is a new idea), or when you’re working on something you need to take some steps to make sure you’re not going to be doing something dangerous. And yet, sometimes when you’re trying something new you can’t make a guess when something is going to be dangerous. And you might be criminalized just due to your research.

I also need to consider this when I consider taking something apart, or trying to make something.

This hesitance isn’t limited to hypothesis, research, creation, testing, etc. The hesitance also reaches to data from climate change. We live in a time where global warming is an opinion, not a fact. Imagine that. We’re reaching many peaks in science and technology, just around the corner from scientific discoveries that will revolutionize our perspective, change our ethics, and the possible structure of society… And topics as simple as evolution and global warming are opinions. 

We also live in a time where NASA is no longer important, no longer funded. We were making plans to travel to mars, there were plans to have space tourism, there were plans to possibly terraform mars! (Even though it was just a thought, and would take much time and effort. ) I can’t think of anything more important than expanding our horizons, expanding what we call our home, and making travel to other areas besides our own planet, Earth. And yet… We don’t fund it.

And this isn’t just happening in the U.S., this step away from science is happening in Canada too. But I can’t speak much for what’s going on in Canada, because I don’t live there.  But it’s happening around the world. Money is being taken away from science and being put into sports, music, television, and movies; that’s what people care about these days. 

Science is in a hard time. And if we want this to change, it’s going to have to make some leaps with the limited funds it has; and we will have to popularize it; and we will have to hope that we can continue progressing and not going backwards in our progress to improve ourselves.

eutektiks:

UCSD Electronic Wireless Tattoo Receives Grant from the Gates Foundation

Described as an electronic “tattoo”, the device is a wearable patch of circuits, sensors, and wireless transmitters that sticks to the skin like a temporary tattoo and is able to stretch and flex with the skin. The researchers hope that the final product will continuously measure and monitor uterine contractions, fetal heart rate and oxygen, and maternal heart rate and body temperature.

The nice aspects of this device includes its ability to continuously monitor the status of the fetus within the womb in a noninvasive manner and to transmit the data wirelessly to physicians. Aside from its usage of monitoring fetal health, be prepared to notice the varying usage of the electric “tattoo” concept. In fact, one of its usages has been explored in this blog a while back as a food monitor.

(via bloodredorion)

futurescope:

DARPA plans to place diagnostic nanochip in soldiers

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has announced plans to create and implant nanochips in soldiers that will monitor their health. As you might have guessed, this plan has raised a little bit of controversy with the fear that this could turn the Earth into Total Recall.

The chips would monitor soldiers’ health, especially in terms of illness in the field.

Though it seems like a simple and efficient way to keep soldiers alive and healthy, a number of opponents have come out the woodwork claiming this could be the beginning of computer chips for everyone.

Katherine Albrecht, co-author of Spychips says, “It’s never going to happen that the government at gunpoint says, ‘You’re going to have a tracking chip. It’s always in incremental steps. If you can put a microchip in someone that doesn’t track them … everybody looks and says, ‘Come on, it’ll be interesting seeing where we go.’”

But DARPA said the implants are a “truly disruptive innovation,” since most medical evacuations are the result of ordinary illness, not injuries. The chips will report to doctors and reportedly aren’t to be used for tracking.

[via] [image credit: Amal Graafstra]

(via bloodredorion)