HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing pollution.
In the early 1990s, American politicians saw a statistic that showed people with a college education earned more money than people without one. In politician thinking, they figured they would create a lot of sympathetic future voters by declaring a college education a 'right'. Student loans became unlimited and tuition soon followed. The strategy worked, sort of. The beneficiaries of all that money are politically so far out of the American mainstream as to be almost unrecognizable, while a lot of disgruntled students have found that when everyone gets a degree, it is no longer special, and now they need a PhD or an MBA.
Cancer is the blanket term for over a hundred diseases where abnormal cells divide and invade tissues through blood and lymph systems. The extra cells are often detected in the form of a tumor that people notice as their first symptom, and those can be benign or malignant.
The 21st century will be the century of the 'smart home', where your home and your portable technology all interact seamlessly with one another.
If you read politics on Twitter, you would have recently seen that Republicans in the U.S. Congress are going to impeach President Obama if they get enough seats in November, so it is vital that Democrats win elections.
DDT, the first modern pesticide, has been banned in the United States since 1972 but it is still commonly used in places where malaria is prevalent. The United Nations recommends it because it is far less harmful to people than malaria is and remains superior to replacements. Malaria drugs have become less effective over time so it's better kill pests before they infect people.
Revolutions are messy business, they require participation by a type of personality that is not very savory; militant, bombastic, a little crazy.
There is a little miracle of science happening in your body right now. As you read this, a minuscule 5 grams of a high-energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate - ATP - is causing all kinds of reactions in order to give you the energy to sit at your computer. In total, 8 ounces of ATP is being recycled hundreds of times each day, so many times that a human can use their body weight - 200 pounds of ATP in my case – every 24 hours.
George Dyson. Credit: edge.orgIf you read about Big Data for very long, a quote from science historian George Dyson is sure to come up: "Big data is what happened when the cost of keeping information became less than the cost of throwing it away." That will be a platform to talk about the challenges, etc.But there is a bigger problem that shows the challenges of Big Data - that isn't what Dyson said. But like with Einstein quotes about bees, in a Google world, where accuracy is measured by how often you are repeated and thus make it to the top of search engines, the Big Data problem is accuracy, not volume.
In today's Wall Street Journal, I have an article discussing recent problems in peer review.
A recent review in the British Journal of Nutrition concluded that the nutritional quality and safety of organic food was higher than conventional food. Fruits, vegetables, and grains, organic versions were better in all ways than conventional farming, they determined.
Organic food had fewer pesticides, a much different result than other studies, and also had more important nutrients, also a much different result than other studies.
Not the JVC peer review ring, an actual gambling ring. Credit: China Daily
It's something of a mild joke in science circles - you can figure out who is peer-reviewing your paper by looking for the common author in the citations you 'missed' in your submission.It was only a matter of time before peer review cabals became an actual strategy somewhere.
IBM takes data seriously, as seriously as they took Business Machines back in their early days. They want to be the resource for the blanket concept of The Internet Of Things. Someone will have to do it, because the amount of information available today is overwhelming. When you can produce 250 gigabytes of data an hour, you have too much data. Or you are onto something big.
