If the notion of hacking DNA sounds like genetic engineering, think again. Genetic engineering generally involves moving a preexisting gene from one organism to another, an activity Endy calls DNA bashing. For all its impressive and profitable results, DNA bashing is hardly creative. Proper engineering, by contrast, means designing what you want to make, analyzing…
Crichton doesn’t like the idea that someone else is better placed to make judgments than he is. He seems convinced that global warming is largely an invention of careerist scientists abetted by a partisan press. And he seems to find something smug and stifling, if not dishonest, about consensus: “the work of science has nothing…
IN THE span of 18 months, Isaac Newton invented calculus, constructed a theory of optics, explained how gravity works and discovered his laws of motion. As a result, 1665 and the early months of 1666 are termed his annus mirabilis. It was a sustained sprint of intellectual achievement that no one thought could ever be…
The MASSIVE database (last updated on 12-7-04) contains information on over 1700 science and math songs. Some of these songs are suitable for 2nd graders; others might only appeal to tenured professors. Some songs have been professionally recorded; others haven’t. Some are quite silly; others are downright serious. —MASSIVE (Math And Science Song Information, Viewable…
Researchers singled out the deaths of more than 300,000 cancer patients, because deaths from cancer are usually more predictable and less sudden than those from heart attacks, strokes or other ailments. There was no increase in overall mortality after Christmas. —Liz Szabo —Terminal Patients Don’t Hang on Until After Holidays (TechNewsWorld.com) That probably won’t put that…
Because government schooling is so bad, and dissatisfies such a gigantic amount of people, as represented in ?survey upon survey,? it therefore follows that they cannot be held liable for their faults! Imagine this being said of a private company?an auto maker, or a toy manufacturer, produces products that are so extremely bad that they…
“Will you sit with the baby while I read the boy a good-night story?” “I’m so dead,” the wife sighs. “You put them both to bed tonight.” The six-year-old parades past holding the book he’s chosen. Nuclear Energy. Husband and wife exchange glances. “Look!” the boy beams. “It has a whole chapter on protons!” Wife…
They reported that the more someone heads a soccer ball, the lower that player will score on tests measuring attention, concentration, and general intellectual functioning. Lezak is unsurprised. “I know what happens when you bat on the brain,” she says. “Given what we know about boxing, it would have been surprising if we hadn’t found…
In justifying this nightmare society [Orwell’s 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien, like the Director in Brave New World, is wrong. People…
I believe that educational use of blogs is plausible only if the educational context is suitable for its use. For example, it is plausible for me if one uses blogs in a journalism class; however, I don’t see any reason for a math teacher to use blogs in teaching mathematics, it’sreally pointless for me. —Murat…
A standard modification among the Nerfing community for any spring-powered gun is to simply stretch the spring. The formula for the force exerted by a spring is Fs = -kx, where ‘k’ is a spring constant (which varies from spring to spring) and ‘x’ is the difference in length between the spring at rest and…
It must be emphasized that, in the entire history of modern science, no claim of any type of supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated under strictly controlled conditions. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. One would think that all medical journal editors would be keenly aware of this fact and therefore be highly…
When I teach “memoir writing” to what degree am I “intervening” with human subjects when I grade their personal essays and confessional writing? It’s not research that I would ever report, but I wonder to what degree I am treading on fuzzy privacy matters as a teacher when it comes to grading my “human subjects”?…
I know that Ms. J.K.Rowling provided the approximation of the value of a Galleon (“about 5 pounds, but the exchange rate varies”), in an interview, but I think it is off a tad. This is not Ms. Rowling’s fault, but it is the fault of Scholastic Books. The price tag on my copy of Quidditch…
“Our mission is to look at how such a robot should be programmed to respect personal spaces of humans.” The research also focuses on human perception of robots, including how they should look, and how a robot can learn new skills by imitating a human demonstrator. “Without such studies, you will build robots which might…
Last month, Drs. Joshua Freedman and Marco Iacoboni of the University of California at Los Angeles finished scanning the brains of 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats. Each viewed images of President Bush, John Kerry and Ralph Nader. […] Freedman came to political brain scanning through his brother Tom, who served as a consultant to President…
A University of Florida scientist has grown a living ?brain? that can fly a simulated plane, giving scientists a novel way to observe how brain cells function as a network. —UF Scientist: ?Brain? in a Dish Acts as Autopilot, Living Computer
At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh … who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation. Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated…
The NASA spacecraft that smashed into the Utah desert last month while bringing home fragile samples of the sun may have been doomed by engineering drawings that had been done backwards, an investigating board said Friday. —Drawings Blamed for Genesis Crash (Wired)
Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and…