January 8, 2008
If you are in New Hampshire, you must read this latest important political news before going to the polls...
Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters
Ron Paul's Old Newsletters Filled With Bigotry And Conspiracy Theories
Obama's anthropology connection
January 8, 2008
Eco-friendly cotton from Africa is making its way onto the backs of U2 fans across the world, thanks to a new partnership between Hard Rock International and the ethical T-shirt company edun LIVE. Founded by U2 frontman Bono and his wife Ali Hewson, edun contributes proceeds from the sale of its…
January 8, 2008
Accepting his 2005 TED Prize, photographer Edward Burtynsky makes a wish: that his images -- stunning landscapes that document humanity's impact on the world -- help persuade millions to join a global conversation on sustainability. Burtynsky presents a riveting slideshow of his photographs, which…
January 8, 2008
From a University of Bristol Press Release: "Rather than being gentle giants, new research reveals that Pleistocene cave bears, a species which became extinct 20,000 years ago, ate both plants and animals and competed for food with the other contemporary large carnivores of the time such as…
January 8, 2008
Jimmy Wales assembled "a ragtag band of volunteers," gave them tools for collaborating, and created Wikipedia, the self-organizing, self-correcting, never-finished encyclopedia of the future. Here, he explains how the collaborative approach works, and why it succeeds. Along the way, he debunks some…
January 8, 2008
What if Napster stocked textbooks? Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students -- all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.
January 8, 2008
Pumice is rock that is ejected from a volcano, and has so much gas trapped in it that it can float. So when a pumice-ejecting volcano (not all volcanoes produce pumice) goes off near a body of water, you can get a raft of rock floating around for quite some time. By and by, water replaces the gas…
January 7, 2008
Texas is the winter home of the only self-sustaining wild population of Whooping Cranes Grus americana in the world and this winter record numbers have completed their migration and returned to the southern state.
Whooping Cranes have been on the endangered species list since 1970, when only 56…
January 7, 2008
A Stanford scientist has spelled out for the first time the direct links between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and increases in human mortality, using a state-of-the-art computer model of the atmosphere that incorporates scores of physical and chemical environmental processes…
January 7, 2008
A group of scientists ... has uncovered a new biological mechanism that could provide a clearer window into a cell's inner workings.....What's more, this mechanism could represent an "epigenetic" pathway -- a route that bypasses an organism's normal DNA genetic program -- for so-called Lamarckian…
January 7, 2008
Carbon is cycled from gas (C02) to solid (plant tissue) and and back (through fire, digestion, fermentation, etc.) again and again.
Some of that carbon is trapped over long periods in the form of "fossil fuels."
The earth has, in a sense, grown accustom to having a huge chunk of the available…
January 7, 2008
Accepting the 2007 TED Prize, Bill Clinton says he's trying to build a better world to hand his daughter. Unequal, unstable, and unsustainable, our world must correct its course, and private citizens ("like me") can be powerful forces for change. His Clinton Global Initiative, fresh from success…
January 7, 2008
At the Bell Museum of Natural History
Cafe Scientifique: Looking at Lichens
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; 6 p.m.
Kitty Cat Klub, Dinkytown
We've all seen lichens growing on rocks, trees, or buildings. Yet their unusual and complex structure often goes unnoticed. Though they appear to be a single…
January 7, 2008
The com units are broken, the transporter can't penetrate the ion clouds, and the Klingon have you surrounded. You turn to Scotty and say, "Scotty, if you were any kind of engineer, you'd whip us up a Klingon Repellent device using this tricorder and these useless communicators."
"I cannae mind…
January 7, 2008
High school robotics competition kicks off
Some 35,000 high school students from over 1500 high schools in eight countries today began competing in the annual US FIRST student robotics contest.
This year's competition, dubbed "FIRST Overdrive," challenges the student teams to build semi-autonomous…
January 7, 2008
I'm currently working on a project to assemble species names for various uses, and came across this interesting post by Podblack Cat on Podblack Blog. The author explores the interesting variants of species names of interesting species...
What about a spider called Draculoides bramstokeri? Or the…
January 6, 2008
I don't like the definition of macro vs. micro evolution. But I do enjoy the way this video makes fun of creation science proponents.
January 6, 2008
Blueberry syrup, sodium alginate and calcium chloride is all you need to make these spheres that look a little like caviar.
January 6, 2008
From a Massachusetts Institute of Technology press release:
researchers have uncovered a critical difference between flu viruses that infect birds and humans, a discovery that could help scientists monitor the evolution of avian flu strains and aid in the development of vaccines against a deadly…
January 6, 2008
As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we're still steadily…
January 6, 2008
Jan 06
Millard Fillmore's birthday (let's party!)
Jan 06
Children's Day in Uruguay
Jan 06
Belgium becomes a federal state, 1993
Jan 07
Christmas in Ethiopia
Jan 07
Pioneer's Day in Liberia
January 6, 2008
Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talks about our new wave of overprotected kids -- and spells out 5 (and really, he's got 6) dangerous things you should let your kids do. Allowing kids the freedom to explore, he says, will make them stronger and smarter and actually safer.
January 6, 2008
Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. The motto of his group, Architecture for Humanity, is "Design like you give a damn." Using a litany of striking examples, he shows how AFH has helped find…
January 6, 2008
Have you ever seen the TV show "Wife Swap?" Admit it, you have. It is a form of ethnography in its own somewhat demented way. But it is also a very specific, network-endorsed statement about class and character of society.
It seems that it is fairly often the case that one of the families, and…
January 6, 2008
What is the relationship between what happens in these two early primary races and what actually happens later on in the election cycle?
It turns out that this is a difficult question to answer. One very simple way of asking the question is this: Does the winner of a given contest also become…
January 6, 2008
Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco says, "I'm going to take you on a journey." And does she ever. Showing breathtaking images from the Cassini voyage to Saturn, she focuses on Saturn's intriguing largest moon, Titan,with deserts, mudflats and puzzling lakes, and on frozen Enceladus, which seems to…
January 5, 2008
Wielding laypeople's terms and a sense of humor, Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann drops some knowledge about particle physics, asking questions like, Are elegant equations more likely to be right than inelegant ones? Can the fundamental law, the so-called "theory of everything," really explain…
