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.
Twice in two days Botulinum toxin (Botox) has graced our front page, and it's not just because it makes Joan Rivers look like The Joker.
Yesterday we reported that Botox has helped infants with CHARGE Syndrome and today we discovered an article in Medical Hypotheses talking about its many beneficial effects.
Not bad press for an often fatal poison produced by a rare type of food poisoning bacteria.
You can tell a lot about the concerns of society regarding science by the kinds of topics that bring people to sites like ours. Not a day goes by that people don't arrive using Google searches looking for answers about organic food. The top query is something like 'what is organic food?' and it seems odd that after hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and $20 billion in sales, no one is sure what organic food is.
There are two sides to the organic food issue to most people; genetics and chemicals. I don't worry too much about organic food from a genetics standpoint, for example, but I am not a fan of most chemicals. I am not even a fan of other people touching my food.
Numerous studies have shown the the benefits of coffee. Science studies go back and forth on foods so use some judgment but generally today it is considered one of the best sources of the antioxidants that protect us against pesky free radicals that can cause premature aging and certain diseases.
Old media news groups that have put up news websites have had inconsistent success due to factors like the costs of moderation and the inconsistent quality of their user-generated content (UGC). As a result, readers are not all that excited about it.
You know what that means, right? Yes, we eat their lunch.
In a New Media & Society article(1), Neil Thurman of City University London states that despite a full-court press by old media to embrace Web 2.0 concepts, their own restrictions have caused readers to participate less than they would like. So some of them are considering it a failure.
There are lots of journals out there, more than I could name in any one article, but as you get into science communication, the number of peer-reviewed publications drops considerably.
That seems odd, since communicating with the public, and therefore with the voters on policy, is so crucial to keeping science funding in place.
A group of volunteers had that same thought, so they secured some funding from the European Space Agency's Hubble Space Telescope group and set out to fill that gap. CAP Journal was born. CAP Journal stands for Communicating Astronomy with the Public. It's a new magazine, in print and online, and the timing is excellent.
Ahhhh, Valentine's Day. Bad food, shoddy restaurant service - and you have no choice about it. The Soviet Union had toilet paper lines but they didn't force Valentine's Day on its people. Really, anyone who is unsure what mandates accomplish only needs to look at ethanol for a modern comparison of why things suffer when you force a solution on people.
But all is not lost. There's science in love, you know, and that means there's science in Valentine's Day. Science on Valentine's Day is like cold fusion instead of ethanol. Completely wonderful. And we have it all right here.
We're creating a page just for Darwin Day posts and links so if you have written something, leave a comment or download the button and we'll include a paragraph and a link.
If you've written it here, it's linked automatically. Happy writing!
Also, just in time for Valentine's Day, Garth Sundem has an article in the BBC News on making the right decisions and will demonstrate his equations in Horizon on BBC Two at 2100GMT on Tuesday 12 February.
Honestly, did you even known there was a Department of Pedagogy anywhere? Well, there is. They teach about the science of teaching. And apparently cartoons.
Pilar Casares García is a teacher in the Department of Pedagogy at the University of Granada but instead of teaching about teaching, she researches male chauvinism. In cartoons.
This was apparently once a real problem once but she says it's better now; women are as intelligent, agile, attractive, strong, and heroic as their male counterparts ... or more.
A new report by the Arizona Arts, Sciences, and Technology Academy (AASTA) found that research in astronomy, planetary sciences, and space sciences (APSS) pumped over $250 million into Arizona’s economy in 2006 alone.
That's real money but it's not all balloons and ponies for Arizona. There are threats to that economic engine and it's what you can probably guess - the instability of federal funding and competition from other locations - but it's also things you might not guess, like light pollution from residential and commercial development and lingering memories of environmental and political activism.
Yes, you read that right. I said Blu-ray. Ever since the defection of Warner Bros. from HD-DVD to Blu-ray a few days before the Consumer Electronics Show(CES), every expert who knows anything at all about this industry has predicted the demise of HD-DVD. And they're wrong.
The most important reason is that no one is an expert on the high-definition marketplace. The industry barely even exists so people making projections based on expert knowledge of laser disc or DVD figures are only slightly more accurate than Voodoo shamen sorting chicken bones. You just can't rely on recent sales in a nascent industry and extrapolate a projection from it. Projections about what people will or will not do at this stage are even less accurate than political exit polls.
My thoughts are not based on any secret knowledge of the DVD marketplace but I have a pretty good knowledge of business. Absent an overwhelming leap in technology from Blu-ray some time soon, here are my reasons HD-DVD will win:
Loneliness is commonly regarded as a social phenomenon in which individual personality differences contribute to its severity. Some people enjoy solitude, for example, because they never feel lonely, while people with high degrees of loneliness have shorter life expectancies than people who never feel lonely.
There may be more to it than that. Recent research shows that the gene expression in the immune cells of people with chronically high levels of loneliness is different than people who do not feel lonely. Even more telling, some genes were underexpressed in the same subjects, including those in antibody production.
When people in a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study were told that anorexia nervosa had a biological or genetics-based cause they were less likely to put any personal accountability on anorexics than when they were told it was personal or cultural.
That makes sense. A disease that is egalitarian and exculpatory like a genetics or biological mutation is different than a syndrome. We can't blame kids with Autism for having Autism, though we do teach them to moderate their behavior - and that's a key point.
Anorexia nervosa is characterized by an obsessive desire to be thin and results in self-starvation and related medical complications.
