In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
Are we on the road to uploading our brains to computers and living forever? Singularity proponents require a two-pronged approach to believing so; wildly overstating the technology curve of what future computers and programmers will accomplish and wildly understating the complexity of the human brain. If you believe strongly enough, the future looks bright for an eternal...future.
Science 2.0 fave Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson recently sent a funny thing across his Twitter feed:Q: What do you call Alternative Medicine that survives double-blind laboratory tests? A: Regular Medicine.And that's the crux of the issue, isn't it? There's no Big Pharm conspiracy against homeopathy, for example. What multi-national conglomerate wouldn't love to slosh some magic water in a bottle and sell it for 10 bucks or more? It just doesn't work.
How soon after the claim that the Higgs discovery is 'international' did self-loathing Americans and Europeans ridicule the American institutions that issued press releases noting their part in the work?About a day. The smug intimation was because America did not want to fund the whole LHC completely - understandable given the fiasco of the Superconducting Supercollider - that we somehow 'lost out' on the discovery and made no contributions worth mentioning.
When the only organization who thinks continued funding of your technology is the United Steelworkers union, you may have a business problem. Gamesa Wind Corporation has announced a layoff of 165 workers at plants in Fairless Hills and Ebensburg, Pa. The United Steelworkers (USW) says non-renewal of the the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which expires on December 31st, 2012, is the problem.
When I wrote about watching the Higgs discovery, I chided scientists on Twitter for over-reaching regarding what was being said and lauded science journalists for showing some moderation, but that does not mean all journalists could resist being silly. And it doesn't mean all scientists were over-reaching.
I stayed up late (California) to watch the Higgs announcement and posted various thoughts of my own, and comments from the presentations, on my Twitter feed.
What causes obesity? Obviously ingesting more calories than a person burns leads to weight gain but what really causes obesity?Will banning Big Gulps, Happy Meals and Trans fats make people thin? (1)While a modern 'ban, legislate and micromanage' mentality about food has taken hold on the coasts of the US, obesity researchers in the middle, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, contend handing over even more control of choice to social authoritarians won't work; we instead have to show people that just because you can eat a lot of junk food doesn't mean you should. And go for a walk once in a while.
Sigmund Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" - he meant not everything was about sex, which must really frustrate evolutionary psychology grad students(1), being as he is the most famous psychiatrist ever and was wrong about almost everything else but correct on that point.But that also means a cigar isn't always just a cigar, even in the literal sense. In an era where progressive busybodies have taken to micro-regulation of choice (grocery bags, Big Gulps, goldfish, Happy Meals, golf), it was only a matter of time before the cultural mullahs who want to ban cigarettes (but legalize pot) turned their sights on cigars.
Who hasn't thought about Chasing UFOs? When I saw "Independence Day" in 1996 I first thought, "A Mac can bring down an entire alien civilization? Their users really are creative!" but then I wondered if some day, someone might actually get paid to find aliens.Well, that day is here. But I have to warn you, the language is bad in this UFO stuff.
Self-plagiariasm is big news these days. A short while ago, former ACS president Ron Breslow had an article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society pulled - not because he claimed dinosaurs might be ruling other planets, but because he re-used work from other articles he wrote without crediting himself.
Is the world ready for a robot DJ?Sometimes you have to be bold. People laughed at Microsoft when they introduced Microsoft Bob too; people didn't know they needed a graphical image of their office showing a fax machine to send a fax - until it was available.
James Ephraim Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS, Ph.D, aged 92, is a chemist and creator of the Gaia Hypothesis. He is called the 'Godfather of Global Warming'. What he was, to most people, was an alarmist more on the order of President Obama's Science Czar John Holdren, a doomsday zealot. And I don't mean 'alarmist' in the American political sense, i.e., anyone who accepts the science of climate change - I mean a real End Of The World Is Nigh prophet. So silly even the hysterical poster child of Think Progress, Joe Romm, believed Lovelock was over the top.
