SpaceShipOne needed to reach 100 kilometers, or about 62.5 miles, twice within a two-week window to take the X Prize. The other principal requirement was to carry a pilot and either two passengers or their weight equivalent in ballast. —Dan Brekke —SpaceShipOne Wins the X Prize (Wired)
High-school student Jillian Clarke investigated the scientific validity of the “5-second rule” during her apprenticeship in Hans Blaschek’s University of Illinois lab this summer. You know the rule: If food falls to the floor and it’s in contact with the floor for fewer than 5 seconds, it’s safe to pick it up and eat it.…
But how does one measure the godliness of bacteria versus a fruit fly? (Keats opted for flies in lieu of humans, which, he said, would require “a really big bell jar.”) After briefly considering omnipotence, Keats decided to measure omnipresence. Did the number of organisms increase? How fast? In the case of the fruit flies,…
The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply “important” people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse…
There is little financial incentive for recycling, and recycling is generally, with a few exceptions, more expensive than dumping and making new goods from virgin materials. Yet there is a growing campaign for recycling, particularly promoted by local government – and more people are taking it up. The ‘black box’ outside your house is becoming…
WHEN I heard the learn?d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;…
One proposal put forward is that Newton’s idea that the force of gravity weakens as distance increases may be incorrect over very large spaces, and may drop off over very long distances. —Robin McKie —Space probes feel cosmic tug of bizarre forces (Guardian)
A ROBOT that will generate its own power by eating flies is being developed by British scientists. The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects’ skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current. —Robot eats flies to…
Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus. —Climate: Media’s Balance Tips To…
You know the strategy by now. Hundreds of right-wing think tanks pound the media with press releases. Newspapers and cable TV stations smell a conflict — always a safe bet for increasing circulations and ratings — and bring in the “think tank” experts for interviews. They pound away, repeating the same stock phrases over and…
Our genes are basically the same now, as they were a hundred thousand years ago, as evidenced from the accepted theory that the more distant surviving twigs of our family tree branched off at about that time. Thus, however much concrete or how many people I am surrounded by, in my heart and in my…
The importance of classification, like any other piece of information, is that it affects the way people think and behave. Let’s say that a big space story breaks, and the editors of The New York Times want someone to cover it. Each journalist has a beat: national, local, foreign, sports, business, science, etc. Space is…
In computer and math science, holders of high school diplomas and associate’s degrees make up approximately 40 percent of employees. In engineering, 20 percent of workers have less than a bachelor’s degree. The proportions are much smaller (10 percent or less) for occupations in the life, physical and social sciences. —Ed Frauenheim —Many engineers lack…
No two signatures by one person are exactly the same in style, so the new technique involves making a 3D model of the pressure applied when a person writes. The model translates the writing into an image showing dips and furrows of the sample so that anomalies can be detected. Conventionally, handwriting has been analysed…
At my first mock job interview with a faculty member from my home institution, I was informed that I would appear “too white.” (My dissertation examined the uses of rock music and culture in American prose literature of the last 50 years, and white men have created the lion’s share of the source material.) Having…
Two years later, the children were brought back to the laboratory and were given a number of tests of academic achievement that included a test of mathematical achievement. What O’Neill found was that those children who scored highly on the mathematics test had also scored highly on certain measures of their storytelling ability two years…
Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and other characters from history may soon be able to speak again, as scientists perfect techniques to recover the sound from recordings that are far too delicate to be played. —Maggie Shiels —Getting back into the groove (BBC) Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.
Once people overhear some pale guy with wizard hair explaining how a light saber simply isn’t possible, as the exposed plasma from the device would irradiate every living organism with a 5-kilometer radius, what are people supposed to think? “Sexy?” Yet, part of being a sci-fi fan is being its harshest critic, and so we…
Hawking has always stuck resolutely to the idea that once information goes into a black hole, there is no way out. Until now. When news@nature.com asked about his change of heart, Hawking smiled and wrote: “My views have evolved.” —Mark Peplow —Hawking changes his mind about black holes (Nature)
[Translated from Italian, by Google.] More interesting, above all for the informative content, are instead articles of historical character like “The scientist on the stage: to survey “of M. To Orthofer, a review of teatrali witnesses from the classic antiquity today with a more rather wide deepening on the dramas of the atomic “era “,…