Category: science
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The Growth of Scientific Knowledge and Scientific Ignorance
Noting that knowledge is growing at an exponential rate, Kevin Kelly argues that thanks to science, our ignorance is growing exponentially faster. If knowledge is growing exponentially we should be quickly running out of puzzles. Because of our accelerating rate of learning, a few writers declared we must be in the age of “the end…
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Top 10 Nobel Snubs
As the 2008 Nobel Laureates are announced, SciAm looks at the top 10 Nobel snubs – those who undoubtedly deserved the award, but never did: Lise Meitner: left out of the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission Oswald Avery: never won a Nobel for showing that genes are made of…
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The Negawatt Unit of Power
Seed Magazine highlights the word Negawatt: \né-gə-wät\ n: A measure of the avoided use or the conservation of a unit of energy. Wikipedia goes into more detail: By investing to reduce electricity demand instead of investing to increase electricity generation capacity, this “virtual generation” method can supply growth of supply by improving the efficiency of…
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Obama, Science, and 61 Nobel Laureates
In an open letter to the American people, 61 Nobel Laureates are endorsing Barack Obama for President (pdf). As the largest number of Laureates to ever endorse a candidate for office, surely this will have some influence over the undecided voters (then again, Kerry had 48 and we know what happened there).
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The Declining State of Science Writing
With the media frenzy over the LHC’s ‘first beam’ eventually abating, Slate looks at the failing of science journalists to write coherent and accurate articles on this and other scientific topics of interest to the general public. No one ever said writing about particle physics was easy—the field of quantum mechanics shares a kind of…
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Observing Primate Behaviour on Monkey Island
In order to study the many facets of primate behaviour, scientists have populated a small island near Puerto Rico with a thousand rhesus monkeys. Access to the island—dubbed ‘Monkey Island’—is granted only for research purposes, creating a vast and unusual outdoor lab. As the researcher interviewed for the National Geographic video on the island says,…
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The Future of Science Blogging
Earlier this month Seed Media, the organisation behind the excellent Seed Magazine, launched Research Blogging – a great new website/hub for disseminating peer-reviewed research. In light of this, The Economist discusses the future of scientific debate on the Internet. Although Web 2.0, with its emphasis on user-generated content, has been derided as a commercial cul-de-sac,…
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Crow Intelligence
A couple of interesting ornithological studies: Like elephants, could it be that crows never forget a face, and learn to recognise threatening (and, conversely, rewarding) humans from both parents and others in their flock? Crows and their relatives — among them ravens, magpies and jays — are renowned for their intelligence and for their ability…
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Believing in Impossible Things
Lewis Wolpert, the Emeritus Professor in Cell and Developmental Biology at UCL who gave the Is Science Dangerous? lecture (pdf) at the 120th Nobel Symposium, recently wrote the book Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast. In this book Wolpert explores the evolutionary origins of belief, and ABC News discusses this opinion in Why Do We Believe…
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Science Cribsheets
Since late 2005, Seed Magazine has been producing a series of cribsheets (or cheatsheets, as they are more commonly known in the UK) for “living in the 21st century”. These one-page introductions to contemporary scientific issues are really useful as reference sheets on a number of disparate topics. So far, subjects covered include stem cells,…