Though the developed world is concerned about greenhouse gas emissions implicated in climate change and global warming, reactions in nature have been less consistent.Polar bears have been increasingly forced on shore due to sea ice loss, where they eat berries, birds and eggs, while ice seals, the usual lipid-rich prey of bears, couldn't be happier that thinner ice has made them harder to get to.
The plain truth is, if you want an impartial analysis of beer, you can't ask a beer drinker. They just can't give you a scientific opinion because they care too much. It's like asking me to choose between Rocio Guario Diaz and Doutzen Kroes.* Sure, I can give you an answer but it will depend on my mood. It's the same for beer drinkers.
So if you didn't read Practical Science Part I - Bugs Bunny and Beer you may not know how to make your very own shrunken head or how smart Bugs Bunny really is or why moms actually do know best but you most especially don't know how, at the end of that research project, I came to grab a cold beer.
There's a lot of "Can X make you gay?" articles being written these days. This fellow says soy is making you gay and even the New York Times wonders if you have a gay car.
Now a study from the University of Pittsburgh says that fish from Pittsburgh rivers contain substances that act like estrogen.
Estrogen. The female hormone.
Anyone can tell you, the surest test of your science chops is your ability to make a kid understand it. Science, at its most fundamental, can be understood by anyone if explained properly. Science is, for the most part, conceptual. The math is relatively unimportant as long as you understand why things work the way they work.
The first fax machine had no value. It couldn't send a fax to anyone. It was, from a value perspective, useless.
The second fax machine added value to the first because it now had something which could receive faxes. The third added value to the first two and received value from them in the network as well. As each fax machine came into existence, the value it added was nonlinear. The more fax machines that existed, the more value each of them had.
Many things in life are like that.
For all that Darwin did, Evolution as yet has no explanation for puzzling animal behavior.
Social insects provide some of the most fascinating examples of altruism in the natural world, with sterile workers sacrificing their own reproduction for the greater good of the colony.
That isn't the case with all insects - in some cases, there is a very real battle of the sexes going on, even in their larvae.
It's been generally believed that sterile 'soldier' larvae act in positive ways, by protecting them from attack by other species of parasitoids.
You may have read about the strange double asteroids dancing in space but putting together the pictures is a perfect example of science collaboration.
Prior to 2000, Antiope was just another asteroid. Then the 10-meter Keck II telescope in Hawaii discovered it was a doublet but not much else was known.
Two years ago, improved images from the European Southern Observatory's 8-meter Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and Keck II determined an approximate orbit of the asteroids - but information was still sparse.
Enter crowdsourcing.
Common sense says businesses, driven by profits, will go where they can make the most by paying the least.
Three researchers, Dr Holger Görg from GEP (the Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre, University of Nottingham ) and Professor Hassan Molana and Dr Catia Montagna from the University of Dundee, disagree.
After analyzing data from 18 countries over a 14 year period, the team found that the countries which attracted the highest levels of foreign investment were the ones with higher taxes and higher public social expenditure as a proportion of GDP.
Dr Görg, Associate Professor and Reader in Economics at GEP, said:
"The results may be startling and appear to be counterintuitive.
"Most economists have always argued that globalisation leads to a ‘race-to-th
As an electromagnetics guy I stay in touch with a lot of what is happening in that segment of physics by subscribing to plain, ol' email lists. People who need info just fire off a question to the group and someone helps.
Occasionally recruiters spam the place because, you know, all of their recruiting emails are terribly important to the whole planet. When I got my email this morning, I saw this:
If this were true, it would make it more difficult to promote a quality website of terrific scientists, right?
Maybe - maybe not. Perhaps it is instead the case that information democracy is replacing sources that are hampered by niche fields or ideology or politics.
We're at the top of Google! Provided you type in 'Scientific Blogging.' Credit: Google
You sometimes hear that blind people have disadvantages. Don't say it to Geerat Vermeij. He got into graduate school at Yale after proving to the faculty he could identify shells through their shape and feel - using samples at random from their collection.
Vermeij, now 60, contracted a rare childhood form of glaucoma and has been blind since age 3. He discovered his love of shells attending school in New Jersey at age 9, where his family had moved because they liked that state's policies on educating the blind more than their native Holland.
"I thought of them as beautiful works of art," he said.
Now Vermeij is best known for his work highlighting the impact of competition among species in evolution.
I saw a press release about a global warming 'virtual march'( we'll get back to that ) and a tour being conducted by Laurie David ( married to "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David and thus an expert on climate science, also founder of the website that put out the press release ) and Sheryl Crow called the "Stop Global Warming College Tour" beginning April 9th in Dallas.
I was itching to find more information about it and, other than discovering they were going to show clips from Al Gore's movie ( yeah, no college student will have seen that ) and Sheryl Crow would sing a few songs at each stop, the only interesting thing I came across was an article in something called the
We don't normally like to highlight people funnier than we are but we have to make an exception here - we mean Lee Silver, of course, not Stephen Colbert, though he might be pretty funny also.
Taped last summer, now you can get the six-minute lesson on stem cell research, how science is threatened by the left and the right, and why sometimes "mother nature is a real nasty bitch."
Lee Silver on Vimeo
