Rosemary Frezza writes: I can run this program and have a “virtual commute” on those days when I work from home. —Microsimulation of Road TrafficWWW) It’s not really a “game,” but it comes close. See also my own “York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator“.
“Omigod, Earth’s core is about to explode, destroying the planet and everything on it! That is, unless a gigantic asteroid strikes first. Or an advanced physics experiment goes haywire, negating space-time in a runaway chain reaction. Or the sun’s distant companion star, Nemesis, sends an untimely barrage of comets our way. Or … ” Gregg…
The ancient ossuary (“bone box”) marked with an inscription identifying the occupant as “James, brother of Jesus” has been officially declared a fake: “The varnish covered large areas of the ossuary surface and the patina had burst through the varnish in many places. Both varnish and patina coated a rosette inscribed on the other side…
“Faced with a limited amount of food, [the developing fetus] has choices about how to use it. Dr Barker’s suggestion is that food will be allocated in ways that give an individual the best chance in early life, at the expense of later years when he will have had children and might, indeed, have died…
Hong Kong scientist: SARS came from cats. British scientist: SARS came from space. Disney: The Cat [came] from Outer Space. Tracking SARSLiteracy Weblog)
“The Chinese government, fiercely vigilant when it comes to any manifestation of press freedom, are learning this lesson the hard way with regard to the viral condition known as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. It used to be thought that in China, the only way of confirming if a story was true was if…
“Live web cam video from the dentist office.” —DentCam (Pearly Whites)
“The hunter-gatherers whose genetic make-up we inherit devoted all their energies to getting food. Labour, danger, stress and companionship attended their provisioning. Having secured their meal through their shared hardship, it is hardly surprising if our ancestors consumed it in a common ceremony, with rejoicing, affection, and gifts to the gods. | That experience of…
“Western medicine is a war against disease, and the immune response is the first line of defence…. A world of molecules and cells becomes a battlefield, complete with alerts, invaders, recruitment and mobilisation, search-and-destroy missions and natural-born killers…. Medical school textbooks and immunologists’ research papers are imbued with the same ideas. They are so central…
“I was in an ideal location at an observatory in Hampshire, England, where in the pale light of the pre-dawn, I gathered with a few other enthusiasts to watch the event. | A transit of Mercury is a rare thing. These days it is of no great scientific importance, but it is fascinating to watch…
“Regardless of motive, the race to patent the SARS virus has revived the debate about the ethics of a pivotal U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1980 that cleared the way for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to award patents for living things, most notably individual human genes.” —Researchers Race to Patent SARS VirusAP/Daily Press)
Visualizing huge numbers can be very difficult. People regularly talk about millions of miles, billions of bytes, or trillions of dollars, yet it’s still hard to grasp just how much a “billion” really is. The MegaPenny Project aims to help by taking one small everyday item, the U.S. penny, and building on that to answer…
“One of the first scientists I spoke to, a highly decorated nanochemist, confessed in the most forthright way that he felt he had been duped. It turned out that his candor was typical.|But these physicists were more than helpful. They were downright friendly. They often had to stop to explain concepts that were elementary to…
“What can one say to a writer who thinks he’s arguing for the existence of our very essence? Thanks, but, uh, your timing is bad? That you have the misfortune of living in a time of exponential technological growth, where miniaturization is colliding head-on with genetics, where technologies may so on have the potential to…
“The idea that you should let a fire burn, and destroy valuable forest, was so counter-intuitive that it took the U.S. Forest Service a hundred years to realize the problem and to change the strategy and let the fire burn.” Jared Diamond —Why Do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions?Edge) Hit “page down” three times to…
“The anti-science movement in health promotion has arisen as part of the humanistic perspective within the discipline that positions itself in direct opposition to a science-based approach that it terms ‘positivism.’ According to this view, the application of the scientific method — that is, an approach to the world founded upon experimentation and hypothesis testing…
“A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of…
“By ordering up athletics-enhanced, music-enhanced, optimism-enhanced children, you are not merely urging them in some direction – all parents do that; you are wiring your own tastes into their genes, literally twisting their minds and bodies into the shape you have chosen. And this staggering arrogance is bound to be futile because the technology will…
“With regard to the article by David Whitehouse posted Friday, 18 April, 2003, 13:45 GMT 14:45 UK: Does anyone actually read these BBC stories before they are posted? It would be polite to to spell Mr. Rutan’s name properly (‘Burt’ not ‘Bert’). Moreover, this is not the ‘world’s first manned sub-orbital space programme’. I cannot…
What if “pi” were a recent discovery? How would journals publicize it, and how would the educational system absorb it? “Once the discovery had been reported in a contemporary journal, mathematicians could be expected to begin using and citing Archimedes? constant… While the term Archimedes? constant would become increasingly familiar even to school children, scientists…