Among the attractions at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels, Belgium, visitors would have beheld “Professor RAMAC,” a four-ton IBM machine capable of offering up responses to users’ queries on a two thousand year historical span… [T]he Professor offered the general public its first encounter with the magnetic disk storage technology today called the hard…
Scientists say measurements taken by the US space agency’s Mars Odyssey craft prove that a human mission could survive on the Martian surface. | Instrument data show radiation around the Red Planet might cause some health problems but is unlikely to be fatal. —Richard Black —Humans ‘could survive Mars visit’ (BBC) Also interesting in this article:…
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a…
Dellavalle’s concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. | Another study, published…
There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, “just blow us away.” We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different…
Hugh Kenner, the literary critic who died on Monday aged 80, wrote on subjects as diverse as geodesic mathematics, the cartoons of Chuck Jones (creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd) and the effect of modern technology on literary imagery; he was best known, however, as a leading authority on American and Irish…
How can both neuroscience and literature bear on the question of what makes writers not only able, but want, even need, to write? How can we understand the outpouring of authors like Joyce Carol Oates or Stephen King? Why does John Updike see a blank sheet of paper as radiant, the sun rising in the…
How do you describe what can’t be seen? Well, thank goodness for the marvelous metaphor. If you took all the metaphors I’ve used over the years and stacked them up end to end, they would reach from Earth to the far side of Uranus and back. But all the good metaphors I’ve used could dance…
—Saturday’s Lunar Eclipse (Yahoo/AP) I didn’t actually see this part of the eclipse, but I put off Peter’s bath so I could take him out during the totality, and then cut his bath short so I could show him the moon re-emerging. Peter asked whether an eclipse was dangerous, and wanted to hold my hand. Of…
A century after the Wright brothers briefly piloted an ungainly aircraft 12 feet above the dunes of North Carolina, humanity is reaching another milestone: getting a craft to the threshold between the solar system and interstellar space. —Peter N. Spotts —Voyager Sails to Edge of Solar System (CS Monitor) I was glued to the TV set…
After inviting every robot maker with a dream to take part in the Grand Challenge, Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, has suddenly declared that only 20 drone roadsters will be allowed to enter. This may not mean much to the conglomerate-sponsored, university-backed outfits in the race. But bootstrapping crews like Chabe’s six-man Team LoGhIQ…
The butterfly effect has, until now, been cited only as an illustration, but Professor Jim Spanners of the Pennsylvania Institute for Making Stuff Up takes it seriously, and believes that butterflies are directly responsible for most of the world’s major problems. —Butterfly (The University of the Bleeding Obvious)
He never imagined just how unenthusiastic his research sponsors — and others with a financial stake in atrazine — would be about his discovery. | Six frustrating years later, Mr. Hayes and his defenders say they know only too well the lengths to which those companies will go to undermine his findings that atrazine may…
She singled out a campaign by Disney – “Remember the magic” – which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers. | She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many…
A professor agrees to review a manuscript that is under consideration for publication at a journal. He has promised to keep the paper and its contents absolutely confidential. When he reads it, however, he realizes that his student’s experiments will never work; the paper shows that they are futile. Does he keep mum, or does…
Parents have been advised to consider making their own babyfood after the discovery of a toxin linked to cancer in jars of manufactured food sold all over the world…. The European agency said that the toxin was getting into food through the plastic gaskets used to seal glass jars with metal twist-off lids, although experts…
[W]hen the results of his DNA test came back, he found himself staggered by the idea that though he still qualified as a person of color, it was not the color he was raised to think he was, one with a distinct culture and definitive place in the American struggle for social equality that he’d…
From 1860 to 1940, Earth’s surface warmed about 0.4ºC. Then Earth’s surface cooled about 0.1ºC in the first four decades after 1940 and warmed about 0.3ºC in the next two. For those two most recent decades, temperature measurements of the atmosphere have also been available, and, while these measurements are subject to significant uncertainty, they…
Is there such a thing as ‘bad genes’? (The fifth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.) If there are bad genes, then there must also be good genes. It is perhaps unfair to bring up Nazi Germany’s aryan supremacy theories every time such a…
Jurassic Park was a cautionary tale about genetic manipulation. Could that actually happen? Why or why not? (The fourth of five questions I may be asked tomorrow as part of a panel on DNA and ethics.) I’ve only seen the first two movies, so I can’t really comment on the technical details as presented in…