After finding food, scout bees returning to the hive dance on the vertical walls of the honeycomb. A round dance indicates the food is very close, within 35 yards or less. A figure-eight pattern indicates that the food is farther away. The bee indicates the distance to the food by how long it dances; it…
The World’s Energy Problems Solved by My 7-year-old (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) For months now, my son has been requesting, for his bedtime stories, books about chemistry and energy. We just finished one on windmills. These aren’t kiddie picture books — they are thin, but they are chapter books, packed with statistics and chemical equations. For a…
Provided it is fed with cubes, the robot can create a copy of itself within a few minutes. To build a replica, a ‘parent’ robot bends down and places its own uppermost cube on the table next to it. This becomes the base of the ‘child’ robot. The parent then picks up a new cube,…
”You cannot overestimate the passion that engineers and scientists of that generation have for the slide rule,” said Douglas, carefully sorting these precursors to the calculator with her white curator’s gloves. —Jonathan Abel —For curator, slide rules are cutting edge (Boston.com) Similar:I have a daughter who does things. Here’s what she’ll be starting on next week.…
Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: “It’s pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It’s the news value that is most important.” He said that after his own team produced…
The researchers presented a group of vervet monkeys with a selection of toys, including rag dolls, trucks and some gender-neutral items such as picture books. They found that male monkeys spent more time playing with the “masculine” toys than their female counterparts did, and female monkeys spent more time interacting with the playthings typically preferred…
First, pigeons cannot fly through Windows. Second, since they don’t fly in darkness either, this method’s bandwidth drops to zero 50% of the time. Finally, there’s the problem of droppings download. We are pleased to report that all these shortcomings were resolved in our new data transfer protocol, as we now turn to describe. System…
Nogroski presented his results before the entire fifth-grade science community Monday, in partial fulfillment of his seventh-period research project. According to the review panel, which convened in the lunchroom Tuesday, “Otters” was fundamentally flawed by Nogroski’s failure to identify a significant research gap. “When Mike said, ‘Otters,’ I almost puked,” said 11-year-old peer examiner Lacey…
Sorry, we were unable to locate document(s) pertaining to your request. Did you mean: zirconium instead of kirschenbaum? —This Morning’s Lesson in Machine Learning (Or, So Said the Search Engine Unto Me) (MGK) This is tremendous news… search technology has advanced to the point where a search engine has become aware of Matt Kirschenbaum’s strong, metallic…
Are libraries and librarians willing to support initiative to provide weblog support for their community? The University of Minnesota Libraries think so: “It is our goal to develop a blog server through which everyone in the university community (faculty, staff, and student) can have access to their own individual blog” (University of Minnesota Libraries, accessed…
Super-volcano, robotic rebellion or terrorism? Kate Ravilious asks 10 scientists to name the biggest danger to Earth and assesses the chances of it happening. —What a way to go (Guardian) Just in case you’ve gotten lax and started feeling optimistic or something, and you were planning to get a good 8 hours sleep tonight, this…
He escaped Hitler’s Germany and devoted the rest of his life to humanitarian and pacifist causes with an authority unmatched by any scientist today, or even most politicians and religious leaders. He used his celebrity to speak out against fascism, racial prejudice and the McCarthy hearings. His FBI file ran 1,400 pages. His letters reveal…
The picture of gravitational collapse provided by classical general relativity cannot be physically correct because it conflicts with ordinary quantum mechanics. For example, an event horizon makes it impossible to everywhere synchronize atomic clocks. As an alternative it has been proposed that the vacuum state has off-diagonal order, and that space-time undergoes a continuous phase…
US scientists have designed a bionic eye to allow blind people to see again. It comprises a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual’s eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear. Images captured by the camera are beamed to the chip, which translates them into…
“It’s Pi Day because the date is 3/14 — the first three digits of Pi,” said Howard Greenspan, who oversaw a Pi Day Party online with a Pi drop at MathematiciansPictures.com, a Web site that sells Pi paraphernalia. —Jan Paschal —Pi Day Gives Math Mavens Something to Celebrate (Yahoo/Reuters) Seton Hill celebrates Pi Day with a…
In one study, Martha Carr, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Georgia, looked at first graders who were learning to add and subtract using “manipulatives,” like counting with their fingers or with beads. Midway through the year, she noticed that most boys were abandoning the manipulatives and were doing the problems in…
Larry Summers is no more free to pop off at the mouth about a vexed academic question than George Bush is free to wander around the country dropping off-the-cuff remarks about Social Security or Islam. Of course both men are free in the First Amendment sense to say anything that comes into their pretty little…
The two researchers, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke, do think they may have evidence for methane in Mars’ atmosphere. Methane cannot last long without being replenished, and it’s not easy to replenish it. There are non-biological ways (for example, sunlight + C02 plus water, which can be found on Mars), but life is the easiest…
Bowing to faculty demands, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers on Thursday released a transcript of his controversial remarks on women and science. He did so while releasing yet another apology for those remarks and as the head of the Harvard Corporation released a statement backing Summers. —Scott Jaschik —What Larry Summers Said (Inside Higher Ed) I’m…
The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceed value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags…