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It’s Science! Carolyn Uses Anastasia’s Lip Balm Kit

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My friend Anastasia gave me a home-made lip-balm kit for my 10yo daughter. A blizzard the day after Christmas was the perfect opportunity to stay home and try it out. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption {
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Amusing | Education | Modding | PopCult | Science

I’d Pay to See This

Fan Video Win

Education | Essays | Science | Writing

At Age 11, I Named the Curiosity Rover

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Wonderful story!

I still remember that chilly December day, sitting in science class. I’d finished a worksheet early and decided to get a TIME for Kids magazine off of Mrs. Estevez’s bookshelf. It was the 2008 Invention Issue, but that wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye. In the magazine, there was an [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Games | Science

Monsters are People Too

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Study used D & D characters to test how subjects responded to eyegaze in human, humanoid, and monster characters.

Observers were presented with images selected from the popular fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D; figure 1a). The images could be of humans, creatures with eyes in the centre of the face (humanoids), [...]

Academia | Culture | Drama | Humanities | Literature | Science

Mathematics and What It Means to Be Human

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A humanities faculty member and a math faculty member collaborate on a course about the meaning of math.

“Don’t worry;” I told them. “You can’t find this more frightening than I do.”

Academia | Culture | Health | Journalism | Media | Rhetoric | Science

Sad Doggy Says: People Who Confuse Correlation and Causation Are More Likely to Accept Schlocky Science Journalism

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Somehow I don’t expect to find this story hyped up on TV news shows… but if a similar study proposed any sort of connection that made video games look bad, that would be another story.

NYT Sad Doggy Illustrates Story Unrelated to Sad Doggies (Made you look!)

Using complex actuarial tables and adjusting for [...]

Business | Culture | Journalism | Media | Rhetoric | Science | Writing

North Sea cod: Is it true there are only 100 left?

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A spokesperson for the Sunday Times told the BBC: “The headline and the first sentence of the article over-simplified a complicated issue, which we regret. However, the rest of the story made clear that we were referring to cod over the age of 13 and the figures cited were accurate.”

And what of that other [...]

Modding | PopCult | Science | SciFi

DNA has a 521-year half-life

By comparing the specimens’ ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; [...]

Design | Education | Psychology | Science

Kids Play the Way Scientists Work

Toddlers, multiple experiments have shown, can test hypotheses about how machines work—for example, they can figure out which blocks made a machine play when some but not all blocks trigger the toy.

We have to be careful, though. This exploratory, quasi-scientific approach to the world doesn’t last if adults teach kids to do something [...]

Amusing | Culture | Literacy | Science | Writing

Grammar Girl : How Do You Tell If Something Is True? :: Quick and Dirty Tips ™

Thanks for the link, Karissa.

The article begins, “It used to be we thought that people who went around correcting other people’s grammar were just plain annoying. Now there’s evidence they are actually ill, suffering from a type of obsessive-compulsive disorder/oppositional defiant disorder (OCD/ODD). Researchers are calling it Grammatical Pedantry Syndrome, or GPS.”

The Hallmarks [...]