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.
Frustrated in dealing with the public? You are not alone. It may seem to researchers that the public is either stupid or intentionally ignoring evidence but it's not that one-sided, writes Chris Mooney in the Washington Post.Chris generally doesn't think a lot of the science IQ of Americans (and don't even get him started on Republicans!) but he recognizes something more scientists should (and most do here, thus the whole Science 2.0 thing) - making scientifically smarter people does not mean they will always agree with you.
The big war in science during this decade has not been Republicans against human embryonic stem cell research or Democrats against agriculture, it has instead been open access publishing versus subscription peer-reviewed journals.Open access publishing of science results, freely available to all, would clearly kill subscription-based peer-reviewed journals. Right now, those peer reviewed journals are terrifically profitable for multiple companies despite the fact that everyone is saying print is dead. These companies add value to researchers, they say, by having a higher impact than other companies that do less marketing, etc.
If you've watched any World Cup matches at all (and statistically, if you have not, you are not reading this article) you have been aware of an omnipresent drone in the background - and you might believe it is the biggest swarm of mutant bees you ever imagined or perhaps South Africa's revenge for Apartheid-based boycotts in the 1980s. Instead, it is a horn South African fans like to use. They call it a vuvuzela - I call it a B flat plastic trumpet from hell. And I am not alone.
In team sports it is often difficult to determine the value of an individual. Some sports can do it easily enough, like baseball(1) or basketball, but during the World Cup, casual fans who hear commentators talk about the quality 'form' of a player are lost when the game is 0-0.Jordi Duch, Joshua S. Waitzman and Luís A. Nunes Amaral of Northwestern University say they may have an answer.
People who have been around a long time know the somewhat convoluted history of Science 2.0 in general and Scientific Blogging in specific but the top question I get after people say, "Oh, you're that guy!" is "Why did you call it Scientific Blogging?"Why not Science 2.0? Well, there's a practical reason and a philosophical one. The practical reason is that the way domain names work it isn't really possible. In order to make Science2.0.com I would have to make Science2 a subdomain of 0.com and that has been in existence since 1985. Yes, 1985, well before Tim Berners-Lee blessed us with an elegant way to make a World Wide Web. VeriSign owns it and they are unlikely to give it to me.
Extinction is nothing new; more than 99% of all species that have ever lived we will never know about. Extinction is entirely natural and, if you've ever watched someone's car weaving on the highway while they talk on the phone and drink a coffee, you have probably hoped it will remain a fundamental process of evolution.But survival of the fitter(1) can be a fickle mistress. Why, after 800,000 years of successful survival did the Hundsheim rhino (Stephanorhinus hundsheimensis) suddenly and irrecoverably disappear?
It's no secret social media is big - every marketing group latches on to the latest fad (even us - we gots the Tweetypages, we gots the Faceyspaceys) and people are using it more and more. But in the recent past, for many the Internet was just another way to get 'traditional' news, preferably for free.
Advocates of good science breathed a sigh of relief when Andrew Wakefield was finally lambasted for questionable methods and shoddy science, basically eliminating the validity of the fundamental text of the 'anti-vaccination' movement outside science circles.What about another fundamental text inside science circles? Namely Nepotism and sexism in peer-review, by Christine Wennerås&Agnes Wold (Nature 387, 341-343, 22 May 1997, doi:10.1038/387341a0 ), who claimed they did not receive Swedish postdoctoral fellowships because of male chauvinism.
Is David Beckham a keen physicist? Though he wouldn't know how to do the equations on a chalkboard, he certainly does it in his head and then with his feet - so perhaps he is an experimental physicist at heart.I've often used baseball to talk about concepts such as drag, the Bernoulli principle, Reynolds number and the Magnus effect but Beckham's ability to curve the football so much can teach the same things.The Bernoulli effect tells us faster moving air reduces pressure and a pressure difference is on either side of the ball creates a net force called the Magnus effect: Velocity Drag
Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University, says in Econ Journal Watch that progressives do not understand how money works; basically they would flunk Economics 101.
3 Quarks Daily is a 'filter blog' that compiles stuff from around the web on a daily basis, in science, design, literature, current affairs, art, and anything else they deem inherently fascinating.They say the name derives from that moment in 1964 when Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig postulated the existence of three new subatomic particles and Gell-Mann decided to name them "quarks", an unusual word meaning "croak" or "caw" which James Joyce had used in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"
Joanne Chu, community moderator at Ranker.com, did such a terrific list of cutest animals impacted by the BP oil spill that rather than put up a link, which might only get a relatively small number of readers, I asked if we could print it here and get it out to perhaps a lot. That is, if this Internet thing is working properly.
