Take that, Sir Isaac Newton. 16-year-old Shouryya Ray has solved two fundamental particle dynamics theories, which will help scientists calculate the flight path of a thrown ball and predict how it will strike and bounce off a wall, a tough problem for hundreds of years.Ray attributes his success to "Schuele generic naivety" - schoolboy naiveté - but good math should not be discounted. His engineer father started teaching him calculus at age 6. Newton basically had to invent fluxions at age 24 so Ray had a bit of an advantage there.
2012 KT42, an asteroid about the size of a school bus, went by us at a distance of about 9,000 miles - larger than the diameter of the Earth but still a near miss, astronomically speaking. Why weren't hysterics worried about this one? They're still obsessing with Nibiru, I suppose. Plus, small rocks are never known about that far in advance.
What do you do when the project you did is complete but your entry badge still works for the AOL Palo Alto campus and you have no place to live?You sleep on couches there.Eric Simons, age 19, managed to pull it off for two months before being caught by a security guard - he ate the free food, drank the free drink, worked out in the gym when he wasn't working, and took showers there.And built his company.Meet the tireless entrepreneur who squatted at AOL by Daniel Terdiman, CNET
How can scientists be out to kill us when it comes to food but out to save us when it comes to global warming? Easy, just 'follow the money'. Everyone knows that funding source makes the difference, right? So science done during the Bush years is not valid if you are a Democrat and likewise for science done during the Obama years for Republicans.But that isn't really true. Union of Concerned Scientists spends more in one year promoting climate change than Exxon has spent in its history denying it; is UCS just a cynical fundraising group advocating the latest pet causes? Maybe, but getting donations is not evidence of that.
Some cultural wars that throw science out the window - anti-DDT, anti-vaccine, anti-GMO, anti-evolution - are baffling. Others at least have some science basis - smoking, for example - but sometimes bandwagon charlatans use the obvious to make all kinds of exaggerated, silly claims. Where smoking harm was once clearly denied by Big Tobacco companies, exaggerated claims of all the ills smoking may cause are now so commonplace people assume that everyone with lung cancer got it from smoking. And when that isn't true, they get even crazier ideas. Donna Summer, the disco singer, never smoked but got lung cancer. She believed the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001 'caused' it.
Everyone has heard of the politicization of science - that is when various government agencies seek to insure that science is guided by the whims of the current administration. Obama does it, Bush did it (both 43 and 41) Clinton did it, Reagan did it - every president in the post-World War II era has done it, that was the whole reason to take over basic and applied research from the private sector. The atomic bomb showed what science could do when properly guided by political motivations. It's nothing new.
Physicist George "Jay" Keyworth was not invited to join a panel at the National Academy of Sciences despite having a set of qualifications very few others - among them, just John Holdren, Frank Press, John Gibbons and Neal Lane - have.
High-sugar diets are bad for your waistline but they may be bad for your brain too.Researchers trained rats to successfully navigate a maze and then for six weeks the rats' water was replaced with syrups that were 15 percent fructose. But half the rodents were also given flaxseed oil and fish oil—both rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which may protect against damage to synapses in the brain.After six weeks of the fructose syrup, all the rats were slower at running the maze. However, those that had received omega-3s were slightly faster than their counterparts. Lesson: Don't replace your water with syrup.
Psychologists contend there is a 'health halo' adopted toward foods thought to be 'healthy', whether or not they actually are (granola, low fat yogurt, etc). There is also a health halo around foods that are organic. Some people even think organic foods are nutritionally superior and are even lower in fat and lower in calorie than foods without that organic label - which only required paying a fee and filling out a form.As with young hipsters who like a band until they become popular, organic food eaters also seem to have adopted a 'moral halo' about their belief system - they think they are better than other people for buying organic pineapples.
With four members of Congress possessing science degrees, it is no wonder our science policies looks a lot like what lawyers would create.But Science 2.0 is about lighting candles for people, not cursing their darkness, and toward that end we tirelessly scour the Internet for new ways to provide proper context for complex science issues. Basically, getting a handle on science for people who aren't going to get Ph.D.s.
