Beirut Science Club

09/03/2019

https://bekaa.com/2019/03/09/wadih-daher/

خاص Bekaa.com ما الذي يدفع برجل أعمال ناجح في الخارج الى العودة والعمل في لبنان؟ سؤال يبدو كلاسيكيا ولكن جوابه ليس فقط الرواية المعروفة عن توسيع الإستثمار أو الحنين إلى ....

26/11/2018

اغلب البشر لا يعرفون شيئا فهم يعيشون حالة واحدة من حالات الحياة: الحالة التافهة: اكل شرب ضحك وخرى. هم لا يعرفون الماضي ولا المستقبل بل ينخدعون بامور الحاضر فقط. الحيا....

01/10/2015

Everyone has been talking about liquid water on Mars. But why isn't Nasa sending its Curiosity rover to investigate it? Here is why: Fear of contaminating the water with Earth life.

This week, NASA scientists announced that they had found chemical evidence of liquid water on the surface of Mars . While they make a compelling case, the existence of seasonal rivers of briney water will never be 100 percent confirmed until we can...

21/01/2015

Must watch: A movie about Stephen Hawking's life

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Salz7uGp72c

The Official Trailer for The Theory of Everything In Cinemas New Year's Day, 2015 http://www.thetheoryofeverythingmovie.co.uk Subscribe to our channel - http...

19/06/2014

bionic pancreas

Original Article from The New England Journal of Medicine — Outpatient Glycemic Control with a Bionic Pancreas in Type 1 Diabetes

24/05/2014

Questions and Answers 17:

Q: I always hear that "a cure for cancer" is misleading, because cancer consists of a variety of different disorders, with no single cure. That being the case, are there any individual cancers that have been effectively "cured"?

A: The most dramatic gains have been made in childhood cancers. This includes acute lymphoblastic leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia, testicular cancer, hodgkin's lymphoma, and many others. Here is a graph: http://i.imgur.com/vqQbHd9.jpg demonstrating the gains in survival rates for lots of common childhood cancers.
More recently, chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) is essentially cured in children and adults with imatnib (gleevec). wiki link[2] .
I'm sure there are many other success stories.
The effect of other cancers has been severely diminished through prevention. Stomach cancer was very common in 1950's US, but is fairly rare now because we identify and treat h. pylori infection. Cervical cancer is on the decline in the US, mostly as a result of PAP smears and other types of screening. HPV vaccination should reduce this even further. (As an aside, we are only now starting to notice that HPV-induced mouth/throat cancer is going to be a major health impact. The number of HPV head and neck cancers is following the same trajectory as the number of HPV cervical cancers before the widespread use of PAPs)
Lung cancer is declining in American men, due to the dropoff in smoking rates. Lung cancer in American women is expected to show a similar decline this decade.

23/05/2014

The mechanisms of evolution explained in one video. The theory of evolution explains how the enormous variety of life could come into existence. How it is po...

23/05/2014

Questions and Answers 16:

Q: If I were to send a tree to mars with sufficient nutritients and water(everything it would need to grow on earth), would it be able to grow and produce oxygen?

A: Nasa, among other groups with space exploration in mind, are asking that question themselves:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/25feb_greenhouses/[1]
It seems the biggest problem to overcome is the low atmospheric pressure, which sucks the already rare water out of plants. Nutrients don't seem to be a problem.

23/05/2014

17/05/2014

Questions and Answers 15:

Q: will it ever be possible to 'zoom in' on a distant planet and take a google earth quality picture?

A: Yes, if you use the Sun as a gravitational lens. Massive objects bend starlight. In fact, the bending of starlight by the Sun was the first verification of Relativity theory in 1919. If you stand far enough back from the Sun, the bending from all sides comes to a focus. In order to block the Sun itself, you need to be about 800 times the Earth's distance (800 AU), opposite the direction of the object you want to examine.
The diameter of the lens is then about 2 million km, which produces a theoretical resolution of 1.2 meters per light year of distance of the object. The practical resolution you will get is unknown, but astronomers are pretty good at squeezing out the best views from their telescopes.
Nobody is going to do this any time soon, because we don't have a good way to place an instrument that far from the Sun. The physics tells us some interesting things, though. This gravitational lens has a focal plane which is a sphere around the Sun, imaging the entire sky. Each pixel of resolution is 1.5 cm in size at 800 AU. So the camera would likely use a large primary optic to direct the light to the electronic sensor. To save weight they might use a long narrow mirror that rotates about the optical axis to fill in the view, rather than a full disk mirror.
Since the focal plane around the Sun is so large, you would likely send multiple sensors in different directions, and mine outer Solar System Scattered Disk objects for fuel to move the sensors around to look at different targets.

17/05/2014

Darine Hotait is an award winning writer/director based in NYC originally from Lebanon making a science fiction short film that takes place in Beirut in the year 2050 about immortality and technological advancement in the field of artificial intelligence where the human and inhuman become identical in form and heart.
Science fiction is highly underrepresented in Middle Eastern cinema so this is considered a rare production.

She launched a fundraising campaign on Zoomaal.com. She has raised so far 54% of the budget. However, She has to reach 100% otherwise She won't receive any of the funds. It's all or nothing.

Here is a link to the campaign:
http://www.zoomaal.com/projects/orb/1739?ref=1423216

Help her out :)

Orb is a Sci-Fi short film about immortality, repulsion and Beirut City in the year 2050.