August 2012
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July 2012
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“Next week, while we’re all watching NBC, a nuclear-powered, MINI-Cooper-sized...”
– Andrew Kessler, The Huffington Post. Why You Should Be More Interested in Mars Than the Olympics.
Kessler, who spent ninety days inside NASA to write Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen and My 90 Days with the Phoenix Mars Mission, believes the agency is “so frightened of failure that...
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WatchSkylights
Tell ya what … today is just going to be home to a time-lapse trifecta, okay? Especially with all the Jonah Lehrer stress from earlier. I think we all need a chill-out moment.
NASA’s first images from Mercury and Gemini came this morning, then a gorgeous tour through the night skies as seen from the ISS. Now Knate Myers (who did the ISS video) has just posted this tour...
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jimicowan replied to your photo: Let’s all thank BuzzFeed for these 18 photos of…
Fairly certain Big Al is wearing two different shoes… word.
So he is. So he is.
Albert Einstein does as Albert Einstein wants.
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Oh Jonah . . . what have you done?
From a science and education standpoint (the standpoint that I prefer), this whole situation is very sad. I think the “self-plagiarism” fiasco would have gone away, a very minor blip in the evolution of modern science journalism. But this is just a killer blow, and a tragically avoidable one at that.
Jonah Lehrer has a long record of sharing amazing, informative science journalism in...
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theworldbeyondthevoid asked: How would our world look like to us if our brains did not flip the images our eyes gives us back to its normal way? Would just everything be flipped upside down or would certain things be twisted? If I then look down at my body, how would it look like to me? And if it was just flipped, would it make any difference, I mean we would be used to it, just like we are used to what we see now, if that...
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WatchNASA’s First Time-Lapses
We’ve grown to love the peaceful beauty of NASA’s time-lapse videos. Some of us, me included, are certifiably addicted to the dramatic orbital imagery, the stellar art and the emotional music.
But NASA has been collecting orbital photography since the early 1960’s, starting with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Here’s some of the first images of...
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Robert Hazen: How the planet got its spots →
A fascinating discussion with Robert Hazen, George Mason University professor of earth science and author of “The Story of Earth”, a book about how our planet formed, and how life on Earth shaped geologic evolution:
It turns out, and this is what was so shocking, that two-thirds of all the minerals on Earth were formed as a consequence of the biosphere. They were the consequence of...
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Watchexplore-blog:
Blueprint for the Brain – 6-minute film by PBS and the Public Library of Science explores how the three-pound lump of jelly inside our skulls enables us to do everything that makes us human, and how scientists are now beginning to decipher the architecture of the brain and its secret lives.
(↬ The Atlantic)
We are at once both more, and no more, than that three pound lump. And...
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A Rainbow Is A Song: The Wild, Curious & Wonderful... →
On a late winter day in 1922, the sound of a gun shot resounded with a loud boom in the hills surrounding the house of three-year-old Edgar Curtis. The sound itself wasn’t out of the ordinary, since the Curtises lived near a firing range. What was extraordinary was the question the boy turned to ask his mother: “What is that big, black noise?”
The cross-blending of the...
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“Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous...”
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This was a — wait for it — Koch-funded study that finally reached the same conclusion as 97 percent of the scientific community.
Actually, it even found the the current findings underestimatedthe rate of warming.
Remember that time the Koch brothers funded a study to disprove man-made climate...
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One One-Hundredth of a Second Faster: Building... →
After a century of whirlwind progress in sports science and hi-tech training, the curve is flattening out. Records are broken by hundredths of seconds, mere inches, and incremental progress.
Are we close to reaching the limits of human athletic potential? Wired takes a look at how we arrived at today’s superhuman sports science:
For elite athletes, traditional training is no longer...
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Stanley Kubrick: The Complete 1968 Playboy... →
Soon after the theatrical release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick sat down with Playboy to discuss his artistic and scientific philosophy. It’s a must-read account of his quest to create the perfect sci-fi film, a piece of art that was both commercially popular and deeply philosophical. Released in a time when man’s journey to the stars had just begun, it looked not only at...
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“Curiosity, which may or may not eventuate in something useful, is probably the...”
– Abraham Flexner, American educator in “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”, Harper’s 1939
More on of the importance of making time for abstract, creative thought in today’s efficiency-obsessed education system at Brain Pickings.
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Bill Nye the Science Guy: Reddit IAmA . . .... →
That’s right, our favorite science guy (me excluded) is over at Reddit doing an IAmA! This should prove to be an awesome one … the questions are flowing in at warp speed, though:
Just in case he doesn’t get to your question, what would you ask him?
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