science

A little while back, the internet was abuzz with the inspirational story of Mary Anning, a pioneering 19th-century paleontologist from Lyme Regis in England. Some of my favorite blogs and magazines got in on the act:…

Among people who preferred one space, reading speed was about 5 wpm higher with one space. Among people who preferred two spaces, reading speed was about 9 wpm higher with two spaces. In other words, people preferred…

The more sophisticated science becomes, the harder it is to communicate results. Papers today are longer than ever and full of jargon and symbols. They depend on chains of computer programs that generate data, and clean…

For decades, students were taught that the first people in the Americas were a group called the Clovis who walked over the Bering land bridge about 13,500 years ago. They arrived (so the narrative goes) via an ice-free…

In the new controlled, randomized trial involving 128 healthy young adults, researchers found that playing Lumosity brain-training games for 30-minute sessions, five times a week for 10 weeks resulted in participants…

In the early Nineties, roughly around 1994, a now 52-year-old man named Don ordered two copies of a brand new video for the rental store his uncle owned and he helped to run. “I had to handle the two copies we owned…

My callers fall into two very different categories. Some of them cherish the opportunity to talk to a physicist because one-to-one conversation is simply more efficient than Google. They can shoot up to 20 questions a…

Overall, it really does look like the badges help, not just with increasing sharing rates but with making sure that shared data is helpful to the research community. Of all the 2,478 articles used in the study, those…

Poaching is a threat to the survival of rhinos worldwide, and anti-poaching efforts have always been one step behind. Now, park rangers in South Africa have a leg up. John Petersen from the Air Shepherd program tells…

Everyone from Chipotle to the Food Babe rails against genetically modified ingredients, and laws to label GMO foods are making progress in some states. But the laser focus on GMOs is misguided, because most of the…

MONROVIA, Liberia — The conventional wisdom among public health authorities is that the Ebola virus, which killed at least 10,000 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, was a new phenomenon, not seen in West Africa…

The reason microwaves don't cook evenly comes straight from physics. When you continuously feed waves into a space—which is what microwaves do—you'll often have some "dead" spots: In two dimensions, you get a…

Exactly how much taxpayer money did go into the now-famous shrimp treadmill? The treadmill was, in fact, made from spare parts—an old truck inner tube was used for the tread, the bearings were borrowed from a skateboard,…

A close look at chemical elements, the basic building blocks of the universe. Where do we get them, what do we use them for and how do they fit into the economy? via BBC - Podcasts and Downloads - Elements . BBC is…

I recently started listening to podcasts by the Long Now Foundation, which is their monthly recorded lecture series. They've all been really good. However, this month's talk on Massively collaborative synthetic biology…

It sounds like a remarkable story, almost unbelievable: Anders Helstrup went skydiving nearly two years ago in Hedmark, Norway and while he didn’t realize it at the time, when he reviewed the footage taken by two cameras…

The tertiary effects of actions are really hard to predict in advance. The return of apex predators here substantially revitalized the ecology of Yellowstone.

So I decided to read the tea leaves of my DNA. I reasoned that it was worth learning painful information if it might help me avert future illness. Like others, I turned to genetic testing, but I wondered if I could trust…

You know what they say about pessimists? They jump out the window and are no longer involved. James Burke James Burke is high on my list of creators, if you've never watched Connections , you should do it right away.…

If you win the Powerball jackpot today, there are a few things you should know. After beating the 1 in 175 million odds, you have an 11 in 175 million chance of being killed in your car after collecting the winnings. If…

From time to time an academic makes an argument about how math isn't all that important. Like this one in the NYTimes : A TYPICAL American school day finds some six million high school students and two million college…

Interested in how colors work? Read Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works by @ASmartBear . Bonus, this gives a pretty good explanation on how color is perceived that makes color blindness make a bit…

Now we just need to figure out how to get there .

It's a really interesting question, that isn't as obvious as you might think. It's wrapped up in the social construct of colors, and how color words emerge in languages. Radio Lab covered this recently in one of their…

"Boomerang kids: 85% of college grads move home," blared a headline on CNNMoney.com. "85% of college grads return to nest," echoed the New York Post . "Survey: 85% of New College Grads Move Back…

This wikipedia page is just great, and includes such hits as: 1 million years: Highest estimated time until the red supergiant star Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova . The explosion is expected to be easily visible in…

The tzdata update which includes the leap second for Ubuntu just came down the pipe: Version 2012b-0ubuntu0.11.10: * New upstream release 2012b: Update DST rules for Chile (LP: #948328), Armenia, Samoa, Cuba, Falkland.…

From physorg, a statistical analysis of the velocity of evolution from the fossil record, looking for an upper limit: Large evolutionary changes in body size take a very long time. A mouse-to-elephant size change would…

This is a great infographic on the kinds of planets we now know exist, and an idea of how much of the galaxy we can actually look at to find these. Very cool to be living at a time when the discovery of planets around…

Great post at American Scientist about how Freakonomics has gone off the rails . In our analysis of the Freakonomics approach, we encountered a range of avoidable mistakes, from back-of-the-envelope analyses gone wrong…

Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite speakers. I've gone on Tyson binges on youtube before, watching one video after another of talks that he's given. You only end up smarter for doing so. And now there is a brand…

🔗💀 Daily Show video embed The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes , Political Humor & Satire Blog , The Daily Show on Facebook You people, and your quest for evidence, where has that ever…

When I was wandering around the DC Zoo this summer, I was thinking how cool it would be to have a "you are here" map of speciation for each critter you were looking at. So I find it very cool that in the latest…

One of these years I'm going to actually need to get to a TAM. [TAM Panel - Our Future in Space](/30742999) from [JREF](/jref) on [Vimeo](/).

The Ig Nobel award ceremony was last night, and is fully recorded on line if you want to see it. The Ig Nobel's are given from the Journal of Improbably Research, whose moto is "First it makes you laugh, then it…

From Today's XKCD . Anyone interested in the news story, should read Phil Plait's blog post that puts it in perspective.

XKCD: insightful, concise, and funny.

I've generally had mixed feelings over my GoogleTV since I got it in the fall. It's a promise unfulfilled, largely for 2 reasons. #1, every Big Media company with streaming video on their website specifically blocked the…

I was recently reading a NY Times article about the new gold rush going on in Silicon Valley which included the following statement: "Nationwide unemployment among computer scientists and programmers is higher than…

The folks at Next Big Future did an analysis of deaths per unit energy produced back in 2008, which was republished recently due to the media's focus on the Japan reactor. (There is also a many eyes visualization of the…

Thanks to XKCD for making this Radiation Chart available on the web . This will help you visualize and understand the various levels of radiation. Simple things to know, you get 3x the amount of radiation by living 50…

I think the thing we've definitely learned about this is having one of the top 10 earthquakes ever recorded is a really bad thing. -Chad Orzel As we discussed many things post the Mid Hudson Astronomy meeting on Tuesday,…

You don’t have to look far for instances of people lying to themselves. Whether it’s a drug-addled actor or an almost-toppled dictator , some people seem to have an endless capacity for rationalising what they did, no…

The 480 students have studied under two dozen scientists recruited from across the country for the program. Using lab equipment, computer modeling and classroom discussions, they have explored all aspects of disease,…

Ars Technica has a very good article on the role of placeholders in science : The comments appear like clockwork every time there's a discussion of the Universe's dark side, for both dark matter and dark energy. At least…

I never thought I'd find another popular book about science that played on the same level as A Short History of Nearly Everything , but The 4% Universe seems to be on par. I'm only 3 chapters in, but the story is told in…

From Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics:

Given that I've told half a dozen people to go listen to this in the last week, it's probably worthy of posting. Our friends at Radio Lab had a great piece a couple months back where they look at the Bible story where 7…

Ok, it's time, gentle readers, to go directly to Youtube and start watching James Burke's Connections . This is brilliant stuff, wonderfully written, and something everyone should watch. The first series is by far the…

Kevin Drum has a good post on what he calls Statistical Zombies , 10 of the top mistakes people make when using statistics. I particularly love #2: What’s the survey error? Statistical sampling error in opinion polls is…

Bob Nystrom has an interesting post on the expanse of software as analogous to the expanding realms of science. Assembly programming as mathematics, C as physics, OOP as Chemistry, and dynamic language programming as…

I wasn't yet following Fred's blog at slacktivist when he made this original post. It came out after the Gallup Poll on science attitudes in which only 40% of US respondents said they believed in evolution. I think Fred…

I'm anti TSA back scatter scanner, but it's not because of the radiation, which is actually quite small. Coming in at a measure of 0.005 mrem , it's about 1/2 of what you get by eating a banana . If you live in a brick…

That's the somewhat provocative question asked by Radio Lab this past week . Want is really a stronger term here than is used, because this is really about the fact that ideas and technology evolve in much the same way…

I love the fact that we live in a day and age where a regular person with a little engineering knowledge can get video from Space. Really worth watching.

Quoted in the entirety from the LA Times because it is short, and important: Maybe Study Number Ten will suffice to reassure the one in four parents who have come to fear vaccinating their babies that doing so will not…

It's an oldie but goodie, and good as a mantra when things like Galileowaswrong.com pop up on the internet (no, I'm not making that a hot link, that level of ignorance shouldn't get the google rankings). If after 400…

From Brian Dunning's The Myers-Briggs Personality Test : From the perspective of statistical analysis, the MBTI's fundamental premise is flawed. According to Myers & Briggs, each person is either an introvert or an…

We used to think Pluto was all on it's lonesome out in it's far away orbit. It turns out, we just got lucky in finding it, and it's part of a class of objects, now called Trans Neptunian objects . As more and more…

http://www.eso.org/public/archives/djangoplicity/shadowbox3/libraries/mediaplayer-licensed/player-licensed.swf This is way too cool . The European Southern Observatory just released a press release with data for a exo…

There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced…

These are brilliant : It seems a bit strange to me that the media carefully warn about and label any content that involves sex, violence or strong language — but there's no similar labelling system for, say, sloppy…

First, this is a really good piece of information, which I don't want to be buried by the "wha.. wha.. WHA!" moment: The truth is that when it comes to weight loss, what you drink may be even more important…

From Ars Technica : White Nose Syndrome, a fungal infection that kills bats by interfering with their hibernation cycle, was first spotted in a cave in New York in 2006. In just four years, it has spread over 1,200 km…

... they were just immature torosaurus : DINOSAURS were shape-shifters. Their skulls underwent extreme changes throughout their lives, growing larger, sprouting horns then reabsorbing them, and changing shape so…

Glass is not a high- viscosity liquid at room temperature: it is an amorphous solid , although it does have some chemical properties normally associated with liquids. Panes of stained glass windows often have thicker…

A good question came in from a friend today about what is the difference between Mostly Cloudy and Partly Sunny. While I had a general sense that it had to do with cloud percentages, I didn't actually know the details.…

The newest issue of the journal Intelligence has the largest review ever of research on the so-called Mozart Effect, the popular idea that listening to classical music can enhance the intelligence of people in general…

Last year, high school science teacher Ron Dantowitz of Brookline, Mass., played a clever trick on three of his best students. He asked them to plan a hypothetical mission to fly onboard a NASA DC-8 aircraft and observe…

Recently a bunch of 7th graders were asked to describe and draw scientists before and after a trip to fermilab . The results are fascinating: It's really worth checking out all the pictures and statements from the kids.…

NYTimes has an decent article on some of the data sharing rules around science in general, and the Kepler mission in specific . The Kepler team wants an extra 6 month embargo on data sharing because there were some…

Glenn Rock, New Jersey did an inspired thing, and added Engineering into their kindergarden program : They plan multiday projects, often built around classic and popular stories like the Three Little Pigs , and take…

This is a point that you've started to see resonating recently among both economics and science folks, Thomas Friedman is famous for it as well. Science illiteracy is the biggest threat to the future of this nation,…

Actually, the amount of refraction changes with air temperature, pressure, and the elevation of the observer (see Chapter 16). A change of temperature from winter to summer can shift the times of sunrise and sunset by…

While the [magnets and why questions](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM&feature=related) video tends to get more internet play, this one is short (4 minutes) and makes you realize something very important:…

Via Bruce Schneier, there is this quite good write up on risk assessment in the government . Apparently, most government agencies actually have explicit risk metrics when allocating resources based on the chance of…

When a blog post starts with the following: Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first…

From Wired's Why We Should Learn the Language of Data : Statistics is hard. But that’s not just an issue of individual understanding; it’s also becoming one of the nation’s biggest political problems. We live in a world…

You can see it in the dust up over climate change or vaccines, most people just don't understand what science is, how it works, and how it's different from anecdotal evidence. This translates to some very real world…

Flights are still grounded in Europe due to the Eyjafjallajokull volcano , echoing back to the 3 days of air space closure in the United States after September 11, 2001. But unlike that event, relaunching the planes…

Rafe over at rc3.org provides a very important bit of fact checking to the fast food infographic that is circulating. I thought 3800 seemed really high, but I didn't bother with digging deeper. He did. I'm coopting his…

Via Bruce Schneier : Air marshals are being arrested faster than air marshals are making arrests. Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals than that story reported, quite a few for felony…

NEW YORK – Patents on genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer are invalid, ruled a New York federal court today. The precedent-setting ruling marks the first time a court has found patents on genes…

Robert Wright provides a nice analysis on the current Toyota recall: Let’s do the math. My back-of-the-envelope calculations (explained in a footnote below) suggest that if you drive one of the Toyotas recalled for…

In findings sure to gladden the heart of anyone who’s ever wondered whether tiny acts of kindness have larger consequences, researchers have shown that generosity is contagious. Goodness spurs goodness, they found: A…

This theme can be found all over the web, especially among security folks . Anyone that can do basic math can work out for themselves their chance of death from terrorists vs. their morning commute, for instance. And…

Listening to the sine-wave speech sound again produces a very different percept of a fully intelligible spoken sentence. This dramatic change in perception is an example of "perceptual insight" or pop-out. We…

There is a good posting on the Real Climate blog about the IPCC AR4 blow back that is happening. I think this gets to the heart of it: To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current media discussion…

I've never seen a more striking demonstration of gravitational lensing than this image: Those 4 bright points aren't in that galaxy at all. The galaxy is acting as a lens for a quasar some distance behind it. The…

Via The Onion : SILVER SPRING, MD—Frustrated by continued demands from viewers for more awesome and extreme programming, Science Channel president Clark Bunting told reporters Tuesday that his cable network was…

Also, polls that add up to more than 100% are right out, especially if your news casters don't even notice.

I've gotten asked a few times since I took up Astronomy whether or not I believed in UFOs. While I may have had a wishy washy negative in the past, after getting into amateur astronomy that became a definitive no. Once…

Sounding "Truthy" doesn't make it True.

I read about this in the local paper this week, and it's pretty inspiring. Irvin Miller is a local retired IBMer that has decided to throw his efforts in a big way into getting more children interested in science. He's…

Via rc3.org , this great post about the mechanics of getting altitude out of GPS. The amount of astrophysics needed to make the system work is quite impressive.

According to an Associated Press report , a state legislator from Maine has introduced a bill that would attach a warning label to cell phones. The proposed warnings would feature bold red text warning of the danger of…

Sometimes, even as a person pisses you off, they make a point that you can't ignore. In a recent forum discussion that I was involved in, scientists were accused of making pronouncements from on high. The argument was…

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to…

One of the reasons that many people have a misunderstanding of evidence in science has to do with the differences in terminology used by scientists and by the general public. The biggest misunderstanding is around the…

I missed the whole balloon boy thing, it was a busy day, and happily none of the people I follow on twitter seemed to get wrapped up in it. So it wasn't until later that night, once local news rolled on after network tv,…

I've been listening to Bill Bryson's " A Short History of Nearly Everything " for the last couple of weeks, and this book is amazing. Bill Bryson, most known for various humorous travel books, turned his eyes…

Last night I learned quite a bit about super massive black holes at the Mid Hudson Astronomy Association month meeting in a great presentation by Dr Barry McKernan. His overwhelming theme of the evening was that…

Thanks to the folks over at cocktail party physics , I finally now understand why soap actually works. The blog post is really worth a gander, especially to think how much of your daily life is really complex chemistry…

The Daily Show did a great bit on the LHC last night with John Oliver. And, yes, they interview the guy that is suing to shut it down. It's amazing that after all the media coverage he got it took the daily show to ask…

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This is off the National Science Foundation website. It speaks for itself more than I can speak for it.

The Galaxy Zoo that is. Granted, a bunch of what you'll see are round fuzy blobs, but those classify out pretty quickly. In the hour I've spent classifying I've actually come across 2 galaxy collisions already. Spend an…

Damn, why isn't this available as a poster.

I finally decided to find the base zoneinfo files that all timezone data in computing is computed from. It turns out that the uncompiled files have an incredible amount of history embedded in them, including a number of…

So very awesome.

I really enjoyed Freakonomics, as it provided a much more interesting look at the world. But I'm quite sad that Dubner posted this Chewbacca argument on local foods. Some how, the fact that he can't make sherbert…

The pictures above are from a CNET article on Extreme Tree Houses. At $1875 per square meter, it isn't actually as ridiculously priced as one might think. Just imagine drinking your morning coffee up in the tree tops.…

It's Monarch season. No, not the dreaded form of government , but those butterflies that manage to migrate from the north east to Mexico every year. Because Susan has both milkweed and butterfly bushes in or garden,…

Just listening to NPR (I'll link in the story later once it is in the archive), where they were discussing people not drinking enough and getting dehydrated. Towards the end of the piece it said that while drinking…

This article on the myth of the million dollar space pen is really quite good. The short: NASA never spent a million dollars to build a pen, read the article for the whole story.

The latest book on my audio book list, is The Salmon of Doubt, by Douglas Adams. I'm about 1/2 way through after listening to it mostly on the plane back and forth to Madison this past weekend. While I've always been a…

I came across this on Science Blogs . A question from yesterday's final exam, paraphrased slightly: Element X decays into Element Y with a half-life of 30 minutes. You are given a sample containing three times as many…

A new planet has been discovered , and it turns out that "these icy super-Earths are pretty common. Roughly 35 percent of all stars have them." Wow! 1/3 of all stars have super earths. I still remember the…

I've been continually annoyed by the fact that current culture has seemed to replace science with technology in many aspects of life. If you stroll into an airport magazine, for instance, you'll find lots and lots of…

Just noticed this buried in the middle of a Groklaw entry. 100 things we didn't know this time last year is the year end almanac of BBC's 10 things we didn't know last week. Among the best include: 12. Until the 1940s…