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.
Do you know the name of the first computer game? I confess I didn't and I learned programming on a Univac 1100/62 so I am a lot closer to the origination date of computer games than most people who will read this.I assumed it was a kind of punchcard-loaded word game, like a 1960s Leather Goddesses of Phobos only without the divine genius of Dostoevsky that game possessed, but the history of video games is much more elaborate than that.
If you're a reader of geography or a student of eastern philosophy, you may have seen the name K'un Lun. It is the name of a mountain range in western China and borders the northern edge of Tibet (1) and is also a name for 'paradise' in Taoism. Whoever can climb to the top of K'un Lun gains access to the heavens, the ancients said. There's a city there now and if you visit K'un Lun City and drink the yellow water in the lakes of its parks known as cinnabar (tan), they also say you will become immortal.(2)That last part is scientifically undocumented. Drinking yellow water is generally a bad idea.
There was a big development in science this year, yet most people missed it. It wasn't induced pluripotent stem cells or global warming or Barack Obama securing 99% of the scientist vote despite his belief that vaccines cause autism, which caused even heterosexual scientists to disregard Jenny McCarthy. No, it was an alarming decrease in available clichés to describe what scientists think about new discoveries.
For the dwindling minority that still smokes and don't feel oppressed enough, here's something new to worry about; even if you choose to smoke outside of your house, thinking that you're keeping your kids away from second-hand smoke, you're still exposing them to toxins and potentially cognitive deficits, say researchers in the January issue of Pediatrics. Did they do a clinical study? No, they did a survey and found people who agree. That is why I use the term jumping the shark. Anti-smoking fundamentalists may have done it.
George Bush, he of the horned skull and demonic scowl, mortal enemy of all science, with the funding increases during his tenure being just a clever headfake so he could ruin science for everyone under the age of 30, has done something no one (well, no one who thinks Republicans are all evil and hate science) thought he would do; he gave a Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering (PECASE) to Kevin Eggan, PhD, principal faculty member at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.
As you can imagine, running a swanky science publication ends up getting me a lot of press releases. People want to get the word out about what they are doing and I make no secret of the fact that I want to know what's going on because I don't have time to proactively go out and find the latest stuff. So I like getting them, including the ones I want to make fun of.
In spring 2004, at the meeting of the Scientific Council of the Frombork-based Baltic Research Centre, Jerzy Gąssowski received an interesting challenge - find the remains of Nicolas Copernicus. To be sure, something was known of his death. He had died in Poland at age 70, and he was buried at his church somewhere, but he died while his work was being printed so the man who theorized that the sun, rather than the Earth, is at the center of the universe, was not yet famous enough to merit a monument. But the provost of the Frombork metropolitan church, bishop Doctor Jacek Jezierski, did not think the job impossible.
You'd think if you won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for discoveries about modern magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) you wouldn't have a lot to offer the world of fashion, but you certainly would be wrong in the case of the brains behind Nobel Textiles.Atomic nuclei in a magnetic field rotate with a frequency dependent on the strength of the magnetic field - that's the basis of MRI - and their energy can be increased if they absorb radio waves at the same resonant frequency. When those atomic nuclei return to their original energy level, radio waves are emitted. It got the Nobel Prize in 1952 but it was only in the 1970s that Paul Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield made advancements that allowed for the medical imaging it is commonly used for today.
Time Magazine did a poll for top invention of 2008 and the i-limb hand, created by Scottish company Touch Bionics, came in at number 14. You can read about it here at It's i-LIMB Versus Fluidhand For The Prosthetic Hand World Title if you missed it the first time. Why is it so great? It can grasp thin objects but is also modular, so the whole hand doesn't need to go into the shop when things go awry.What came in first? 23andMe's retail DNA test - not a bad idea should Time need a cash infusion, owing to Anne Wojcicki's close relationship to husband and Google rich guy Sergey Brin.
Vampires, Mummies, Ghosts, Zombies - we have it all today. We even have costumes. Why? Halloween, like everything else great in life, has a science aspect to it.
If you've been around Science 2.0 for a while, you may notice something different this weekend. We've gone through a bit of a makeover. After 21 months, some 30,000 articles and a difficult to guess number of tens of millions of readers, something more like we had originally intended is finally here. Why did it take so long? Well, if it isn't broken, you don't need to fix it and clearly people have come here for quality writing. Appearance is secondary to our sort of audience.But at some level you want the appearance and 'ease of use' to reflect the same quality the writing has. Scientific Blogging, Science 2.0 v1, could do everything, you just had to know how to find it. And it wasn't pretty.
There's no love lost between open access PLoS (Public Library of Science) and print journals. Nature doesn't think much of PLoS, for example, and PLoS says they created the company to make science less insular so it isn't any surprise that that a new PLoS essay by Neal Young, John Ioannidis and Omar Al-Ubaydli claims that the current system of publishing medical and scientific research provides "a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic."
They apply shade-tree-mechanic economics principles to support their idea of the distortion. There is an "extreme imbalance," they say, between the abundance of supply (science laboratories and clinical investigations) and the limited venues for publication (journals with sufficiently high impact to be valuable to the authors - let's come back to that part later). Scientific information, they say, is an economic commodity and the 'consumers' are other scientists, patients, funding agencies, etc.
The result of the imbalance, they note accurately, is that only a small proportion of all research studies are chosen for publication in the best journals, and these results are unrepresentative of scientists' overall work.
