Category: science
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A Presidential Debate on Science
Science Debate 2008 is a small group of people who, in 2007, began working to “restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue”. Enlisting the help of over 38,000 people they gathered a total of 3,400 pressing science questions from nearly every major American science organization, dozens of Nobel laureates, elected officials and business leaders,…
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Science’s 10 Most Beautiful Experiments
Interested in finding “the most beautiful physics experiment of all time”, Robert P. Crease (a member of the philosophy department at the State University of New York and the historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory) asked physicist to nominate their favourites. The New York Times duly compiled the results, but rather than visiting their un-scannable list,…
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Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics and Social Theory
The Flickr group Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics and Social Theory is fairly self-explanatory: I’m looking forward to seeing the group grow. via Neuroanthropology and Mind Hacks
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Randy Pausch Lectures
By now I’m sure everyone has watched, listened to, or at the very least heard of, Randy Pausch’s lecture Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams which he gave at Carnegie Mellon University a year ago today (the lecture is more commonly referred to as The Last Lecture). Since then I’ve watched two more speeches by Pausch…
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Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Earth
Bad Astronomy compiles a list of ten things you don’t know about the Earth. You probably (hopefully?) know a few of these already. The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball The Earth is an oblate spheroid The Earth isn’t an oblate spheroid The Earth is not exactly aligned with its geoid Jumping into a…
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Top 10 Physics Videos
Wired Science compiles the top 10 physics videos on YouTube. The Musical Tesla Coil Inhaling Sulphur Hexafluoride Boomerang in Zero Gravity Helium Superfluid Halo of Water Vapour Around a Supersonic F-14 Jet Reuben’s Tube Water Droplets in Zero Gravity Ferrofluids Superconducting Levitation The Large Hadron Collider Rap via Link Banana
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Church of England to Apologise to Charles Darwin
A breath of fresh air:the Church of England is to officially apologise to Charles Darwin—126 years following his death—for dismissing his theory of evolution. This apology coincides with the release of a new CoE website promoting Darwin and his views, released this morning. The trouble with homo sapiens is that we’re only human. People, and…
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Self-Recognition in Magpies
News from ScienceBlogs on magpies and self-recognition: Self-recognition, previously thought to be found only in a small number of mammals, including humans, chimps, dolphins and elephants, has now been observed in birds as well. Psychologists at Goethe University in Germany watched five magpies remove colored stickers from their feathers after viewing their own reflections in…
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LHC First Beam
“If people don’t have an understanding of what science is and what scientists do, then they can tend to think that global warming, for example, is just a matter of opinion.” Brian Cox As I’m sure you are all aware—and don’t need reminding—CERN’s LHC is commencing its operations this morning with the first beam injection…
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Global Catastrophic Risks
The University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute recently held a conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. There’s an upcoming book which might be worth a read but what I’m more excited about is that soon all of the conference’s lectures will be made available for free. Global catastrophes have occurred many times in history, even…