A New Fleet of Spacecraft – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com
This NYT overview of the NASA craft designed to replace the space shuttle is a great example of 3D animation in a news context.
Publish in Wikipedia or perish
An interesting method of publicizing high-quality science in a form accessible to (and editable by) the general public. RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit work to a new section of the journal, to be launched later this week, that describes families of RNA molecules. The first paper scheduled is “A…
Vatican unveils ambitious solar energy plans
And then there was light — and it was powered by the sun. The Vatican on Wednesday activated a new solar energy system and announced an ambitious plan that could one day make it an alternative energy exporter. The massive roof of the “Nervi Hall” where popes hold general audiences and concerts are performed, has…
They Don't Know They're Learning Math
I heard about Bloxorz this afternoon at a meeting. This evening, I came down to the study where my kids were playing Lego Indiana Jones for the umpteenth time, and without any fuss, started playing Bloxorz on the laptop. Within thirty seconds, my six-year-old daughter was begging to play it. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old…
Nasa Mars mission declared dead
Nasa says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead. | Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth.| Phoenix, which landed on the planet’s northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold…
Fridge-sized tape recorder could crack lunar mysteries
A 1960s tape recorder the size of a household fridge could be the key to unlocking valuable information from NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon. An archiving error by NASA has meant 173 data tapes have sat in Perth for almost 40 years, holding information about lunar dust that could be vital in expanding science’s…
How To Put Out Kitchen Oil Fire
Blogging this to show to my kids later.
Paleo-Future: robots
This is from the robots category of Paleo-Future, which also has categories devoted to picturephones, jetpacks, and each decade’s collected futurism (that is, see what our future looked like to people writing in the 1880s, the 1930s, or the 1980s). Try as it might the robot could not make its desired turn. Its little broken wheel…
Official Site of the Governor of Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia announces plans for a free, open-source physics textbook. The Virginia Physics “Flexbook” project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to…
Important work can be done while daydreaming
Because the children were rarely bored – at least, when a television was nearby – they never learned how to use their own imagination as a form of entertainment. “The capacity to daydream enables a person to fill empty time with an enjoyable activity that can be carried on anywhere,” Belton says. “But that’s a…
Ithakas 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education
From a recent study of university libraries. There’s plenty in this report on digital scholarship, print journals, and comparative approaches of the various disciplines. Neither faculty members nor librarians expect e-books to constitute a viable substitute for print books; they are more generally seen as complementary. Somewhat oddly given this low level of faculty interest…
Uncovering the ultimate family tree
From the BBC… thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. The 3,000-year-old skeletons were in such good condition that anthropologists at the University of Goettingen managed to extract a sample of DNA. That was then matched to two men living nearby: Uwe Lange, a surveyor, and Manfred Huchthausen, a teacher. The two men have now become local…
The Innumeracy of Intellectuals
I’m not exaggerating when I say that I think the lack of respect for math and science is one of the largest unacknowledged problems in today’s society. And it starts in the academy — somehow, we have moved to a place where people can consider themselves educated while remaining ignorant of remarkably basic facts of…
Jonathan Coulton’s “Mandelbrot Set”
27 Aug 2019 — Updated with a fresh link.
Immune Attack
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won’t get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting. Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue in an attempt to save an ailing patient by…
Get Out of Your Own Way: Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision
Science Journal (WSJ): “We think our decisions are conscious,” said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. “But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t rule out free will, but it does make it implausible.” Through a series…
The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete
Wired: The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy…
Bright Chunks at Phoenix Lander's Mars Site Must Have Been Ice
Best evidence of ice on mars: “It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do…
Researcher Who Was Found to Have Manipulated Scientific Images Faces New Scrutiny
Chronicle Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Health Research Institute who was found by U.S. investigators last year to have wrongfully doctored images published with her scientific research while at the University of Pennsylvania, was suspended last week pending an investigation into her work at the Canadian institution.
Cuttlefish spot target prey early
A fascinating exploration of learning at a very early stage. Thanks for the link, Robert. (BBC) Usually, cuttlefish eggs lie in an envelope full of black ink. But this clears as the embryos grow older, leaving them growing within translucent eggs. These unborn cuttlefish also have fully developed eyes. That leads the researchers to conclude…