Want to hear the world's first blooper?You can, along with the oldest recording of an American voice and the first-ever recording of a musical performance. It is now digital, not on tinfoil. The recording was originally made on a Thomas Edison-invented phonograph in St. Louis in 1878.The recording opens with a 23-second cornet solo of an unidentified song, followed by a man's voice reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and "Old Mother Hubbard." The man laughs at two spots during the recording, including at the end, when he recites the wrong words in the second nursery rhyme. "Look at me; I don't know the song," he says.
The promise of in vitro meat has been speculated about for decades - almost a hundred years. In Science Left Behind, I quote Winston Churchill from 1932 talking about his science-based vision of future meat production but I only used him because he is a well-known name. Scientists were talking about growing meat in a lab long before that and still do.There are good reasons to do so - reasons that make everyone happy. Animal activists, for example, want fewer delicious animals killed. Problem solved. Environmental activists want fewer emissions and growing food contributes a lot to emissions. Problem solved there also.
The stereotype of the mad, creative genius is well established - because it is firmly rooted in reality.A new study shows that bipolar disorder - e.g. manic depression - is more common among all groups that have artistic or scientific professions, from dancers and photographers to researchers and authors. Even mental patients’ relatives are more likely to have creative professions, according to the researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet, who analyzed 1.2 million patients and all their relatives, as far removed as second cousins.It may mean that the definition of crazy needs a rethink; bad for psychiatrists but maybe better for patients.Most at risk: book authors.
In a closely watched trial, prosecutors who argued that a group of Italian scientists is accountable for not adequately warning residents about the risks of an earthquake in the town of L'Aquila have succeeded. The Italian scientific community has naturally been concerned; how can you penalize people for not doing the impossible? Nevertheless, legal minds have found that the seven scientists charged with manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake and alerting residents to evacuate their homes are to blame. The court in L'Aquila Monday evening handed down six-year-prison sentences to the defendants, members of a national "Great Risks Commission."
What do French attitudes about capitalism, American attitudes about sex and Korean attitudes about evolution have in common? They are all in school textbooks used by their countries. It's not news that school textbooks have a powerful influence on developing minds, that is why efforts to hijack school teaching for the purpose of social engineering have always been a factor - heck, the origin of government school control was social engineering, not education.
Dr. Oz, the famous television doctor/celebrity, has never found a bit of scare journalism or a miracle vegetable he didn't promote. He is infamous among public health professionals for exaggerating the origins of autism, vaccines, dangers of BPA and chemical additives, arsenic in foods. His latest misadventure in questionable pop science was an October 12 program titled “GMO Foods: Are They Dangerous to Your Health?”in his “investigation,” Oz provided uncritical time for Jeffrey Smith, an activist with no scientific or medical background, and Dr. Robin Bernhoft, a leading proponent of unconventional medical interventions and a belief, unsupported by mainstream science, that most chronic medical problems are caused by “toxic environmental exposures.”
Wouldn't it be great if seeds from GMO plants were sterile? Then, unlike with regular seeds, farmers would have to buy them over and over again.Wait, Monsanto already does that, right? No, but it's a nice myth. Heck, I bet even Monsanto lets that one slide, because then gullible people will buy their seed every year, even for crops that don't need it. And it perpetuates the shrill claims by anti-science progressives that evil corporations are all corporation-y and out to kill us all with their evil seed, except when they are getting rich making us addicted to it.And if you accidentally get seeds from a Monsanto crop, they are going to sue you, right? Well, that isn't true either.
Some physicists are looking to do for elections what they have done for economics - try and prove that people can behave rationally. Here is hoping it goes better this time.Unfortunately, the biggest believers in the idea that humans might, on occasion, obey rules that yield predictable collective patterns, have been non-scientists, like political philosopher John Stuart Mill and social scientists Auguste Comte and Adolphe Quetelet.
Recently, scientists in New Zealand welcomed a terrific new genetically modified organism (GMO) into the world: A cute, tailless cow named "Daisy" that produces hypoallergenic milk. Scientists engineered the animal to address the problem of infant allergies to cow milk, which affects up to 3% of children in the developed world.
Gilles-Eric Séralini, the University of Caen biologist and anti-GMO activist, is under intense pressure to report the full data behind his team’s claim that rats fed for two years with Monsanto’s glyphosate-resistant NK603 maize (corn) developed many more tumors and died earlier than controls.
