The
recent report of a set of fossils of geniune significance for our understanding of human evolution highlights just how scientifically pathetic the PR circus over the primate fossil
Darwinius masillae really was. Paleontologist Jørn Hurum, who purchased the fossil from a collector, clearly thought he had made the find of his life, and so he decided to milk it for all it was worth. The result was science via PR blitz.
I'm inclined to agree with
this:
The problem the country faces is that the conditions in which Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and George Smith made their breakthroughs are harder to come by today. Kao, for example, made his breakthroughs in fiber optics (the thin glass threads that now carry a vast chunk of the world’s phone and data traffic) while at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories in the U.K. Similarly, Boyle and Smith designed the first digital imaging technology while working at Bell Labs, the legendary research organization that was once part of AT&T.
What was so special in these corporate labs of the 1960s?
One of the best books on evolution to come out in this year of Darwin celebrations, Sean Carroll's
Remarkable Creatures, is a
National Book Award finalist.
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom, by Graham Farmelo
Basic Books, 2009
When Niels Bohr calls you strange, you know you're in rare company. Niels Bohr, as director of one of the great institutes of theoretical physics, came to know almost every one of the oddballs who populated the early 20th century physics community, and he rated Paul Dirac as "the strangest man" he ever met. Hence the title of Graham Farmelo's excellent new biography of this major physicist.
The coolest science conference of the 20th century was, hands down, the 1927 Solvay conference. Occurring during one of the most intense periods in the development of quantum mechanics, and attended by some of the most famous scientists in history, this meeting is especially well known for the
sparring between Einstein and Bohr.
I don't hate computational biology, but I've got my issues with the way the field is often practiced. Most of my complaints boil down to this: if a computational biologist is not contributing to our understanding of biology, and not contributing to fundamental computer science either, then what's the point? What are we learning from the research?
The problem usually crops up when computational biologists don't seem to care whether their computational results correspond with any biological reality. If a computer model or algorithm is able to (more or less) recapitulate existing data, then that's considered sufficient. But then what is your model contributing? We already knew the existing data, and chances are, your model hasn't contributed anything new to computer science.
Melville on Science vs. Creation Myth
Non-coding DNA Function... Surprising?
Yep, This Should Get You Fired
No, There Are No Alien Bar Codes In Our Genomes
