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.
In case you do not easily panic, you may have missed the story that two asteroids were passing close to Earth yesterday. Not to worry, it happens all of the time, but because their existence was only discovered Sunday by the Catalina Sky Survey, people were concerned.The 50-foot 2010 RX30 came within 154,000 miles of Earth, just over halfway from here to the moon (0.6 lunar distances if you want to impress your friends), yesterday morning and then 2010 RF12, about 30 feet in size, came within 50,000 miles of Earth yesterday afternoon.
I have long told my more progressive brethren who have been happy about overarching judicial decisions they happened to like that activism is a double-edged sword. Certainly it's reasonable to 'cross that bridge' when society gets to it, but until then the repercussions are substantial.In the instance of an injunction on embryonic stem cell research being upheld, it's not evil Republicans sticking it to stem cell research, though I have long contended they never did by simply restricting the human embryonic stem cell kind anyway - that law was signed by Clinton. Instead, it is a court and we have 50 solid years of aggressive judicial good works that has gone well beyond interpreting the Constitution, making it the most powerful branch of government.
Recent estimates are that 7-11% of published research is 'open access', a term used to distinguish content that is open to other researchers and the public (free of charge to read) from research available only to subscribers of journals (called 'toll access' by open access advocates) and readers in libraries.
The great thing about being a bureaucrat in a dictatorship is you can take credit for everything that happens in your personal fiefdom and treat people like garbage and there is no recourse. Well, almost no recourse. Those guys working for Saddam Hussein didn't fare all that well when their boss started floating rumors he had weapons of mass destruction, but generally the life of a senior guy in a dictatorship is pretty good.
It only takes a look at the Science 2.0 entry on Wikipedia to know their system is flawed (1) - anyone can create an entry but in order to edit it, like what Science 2.0 is, you have to document for some stranger on Wikipedia that you know what you are talking about, even if you're one of few people who knows what the topic is about.
Dr. Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame has been a Science 2.0 favorite since the moment we came online and for almost a decade prior to that. He combines wit and no-nonsense skepticism with the kind of creative reflex that makes fundamental science concepts understandable by virtually everyone who doesn't hate getting a little smarter.
A few weeks ago, an event occurred that added another layer of drama to one of the biggest controversies in video gaming history - namely, who is the King of Kong. Donkey Kong, that is.If you've never seen "The King of Kong", a documentary about the Donkey Kong controversy, you won't be aware of the fuzzy favoritism of the 'official' record keepers for retro video game scores, Twin Galaxies, who happen to be close friends and business associates of the record holder since the early 1980s, Billy Mitchell.
Junk food will make your waistline bigger, which is bad for you, and candy is no exception. But candy that makes your intelligence bigger? Garth Sundem's Brain Candy is here to satisfy your intellectual sweet tooth.
Should you happen to be in Washington, D.C. in October and at House of Sweden, the Swedish Embassy, you will get a chance to see a fireball red colored car that delighted Europeans who like tiny red cars earlier this year.It's called the Baldos II and it is a hybrid auto built by engineering students at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. So what?The fuel tests show it can run 152.2 kilometers on a liter of fuel, whatever that means - in Sweden, they use some primitive system invented during the French Revolution to stick it to the English, so I am not certain but that sounds like 357 MPG. Or approximately 12X my tiny convertible's mileage!
I took a moment to look at Ray Kurzweil's response to PZ Myers' second-hand dissection of his talk at the Singularity Summit(1) I attended last weekend (see The Singularity Stole My ATM Card) because Andrea Kuszewki is on the case and trying to keep things on track (like, can we reverse engineer the brain?
A few days ago, while talking about mundane business issues, I learned that today, August 19th, was the birthday of that famous childhood delight, the 'black cow', what would later be called a root beer float.If you are not up on your carbonated beverage lore, root beer hails from the root of the sassafras tree or the sarsaparilla vine. When the root mixture is mixed with water, sugar and yeast, it is sweetened and the yeast generates carbon dioxide and carbonates the water.
Despite being one of psychology's most memorable concepts and a genuinely good idea, Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, immortalized in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" and later Motivation and Personality, needs a makeover, say some researchers. Maslow's hierarchy says humans will fulfill basic needs before moving on to higher level ones. If you're unemployed and losing your house because fuzzy 'jobs saved or created' statistics have no real value to you, for example, global warming will not be your biggest concern.
