Space Oddity by Chris Hadfield - David Bowie ApprovesNearly 5,000,000 views so far.Chris Hadfield left orbit in style yesterday after five months aboard
the International Space Station. Hours before his planned return to
Earth aboard a Soyuz capsule, he cast himself as Bowie’s Major Tom in a
remake of the singer’s 1969 classic, “Space Oddity”.The Independentvidi audienti dilexiI looked, I listened, I loved it !see also - http://youtu.be/rLRunqi1mDM
The Supreme Court came down overwhelmingly on the side of Monsanto today, ruling unanimously that an Indiana farmer violated Monsanto's patent on genetically modified soybeans when he culled some from a grain elevator and used them to replant his own crop in future years.
While psychology as science is a little overcome by surveys and correlating behavior to images to take seriously, there is one area where it shines - applied marketing.We know psychology as marketing engineering is successful - it is a giant industry, we even have advertising here on Science 2.0. And it's being used in restaurants right now to get you to spend more money.
Visual effects master Ray Harryhausen, whose stop-motion wizardry - he made his models by hand and painstakingly shot them frame by frame to create some of the best-known animated sequences in cinema - became famous in movies from "One Million Years B.C." to "Sinbad", died Tuesday at age 92. Less well known, but famous among World War II buffs, was the "Why We Fight" series he made with Frank Capra for new recruits in the US Army, which also included work by Walt Disney. It was powerful stuff. Capra, directed by G.C. Marshall, quite literally wanted new soldier to know why they were going to a foreign land and why it was right to do so.
Earlier today, President Obama signed an Executive Order directing his administration to take historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation and economic growth. The White House drafted and released the official Open Data Policy of the United States on GitHub! The Presidential Memorandum calls for the creation of Project Open Data, with the goal of making government data "available, discoverable, and usable – in a word, open".The Executive Order declares that information is a valuable resource and strategic asset for the nation.
A Federal judge in Rhode Island didn't like that the Supreme Court struck down an $18 million penalty for a Texas natural gas firm so he is trying to get creative in his new penalty. The company, Southern Union Co., stored liquid mercury from old gas regulators they had removed from customers' homes inside a building in Pawtucket in unsafe conditions and without a permit. Teenage vandals broke into the building and dumped mercury there and at a nearby apartment complex, which had to be evacuated. Residents later were found to have unacceptably high levels of mercury in their blood and showed other symptoms of mercury exposure, such as hair loss and rashes. 90 of them later settled a lawsuit over the spill for undisclosed terms. All recovered.
Vaccines are good. Infectious diseases are no longer the leading cause of death like they were a century ago. Sure, they are also big business now, as marketing for HPV and Shingles can attest, but that doesn't mean just anything can or should be a vaccine.Except in Canada. Health Canada has licensed 10 products with a homeopathic preparation called “influenzinum” for "preventing the flu and its related symptoms" and even homeopathic preparations to prevent polio, measles and pertussis - despite the fact that they are so diluted they have no active ingredient at all, they are just placebos.
The thousands of clueless hippies who hijacked the Cheerios Facebook page to demand that General Mills get behind putting GMO warning labels on food are disappointed the company isn't convinced any of them buy Cheerios anyway.
A paper in Food and Chemical Toxicology, published in Elsevier, claiming that Bacillus thuringiensis showed toxic effects in the blood of Swiss albino mice has been withdrawn.Citation: Mezzomo BP, Miranda-Vilela AL, de Souza Freire I, Barbosa LC, Portilho FA, Lacava ZG, Grisolia CK, 'WITHDRAWN: Effects of oral administration of Bacillus thuringiensis as spore-crystal strains Cry1Aa, Cry1Ab, Cry1Ac or Cry2Aa on hematologic and genotoxic endpoints of Swiss albino mice', Food Chem Toxicol. 2012 Nov 9. pii: S0278-6915(12)00777-6. doi:10.1016/j.fct.2012.10.032That's good news, right?Yeah, but here is the weird part. It is now in another (open access) journal.
Writing at Slate, Greg Laden gives a terrific overview of anthropology and also the war on Napoleon Chagnon:Our way of being is certainly tied to our biological heritage, but the differences we see across cultures are the products of lived experience, with cultural norms shaped by our environment and how we are brought up. It also seems true that within academia, there are subfields into which we are enculturated, and which inform and shape our thinking.
