milhayser

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January 27, 2012
On Discovering Biology in a Digital World, Sandra Porter imagines the fallout of HR 3699, a bill that would eliminate the requirement for free public access to NIH-funded research papers. Porter writes, "The reasoning behind this requirement is that taxpayers funded everything about the research…
January 24, 2012
What's better than an answer to a question? More questions, perhaps? ScienceBloggers have been very quizzical the last few days, beginning with Jason Rosenhouse on EvolutionBlog. After co-authoring Taking Sudoku Seriously with Laura Taalman, Rosenhouse wondered if 17 is really the minimum number…
January 20, 2012
On the USA Science and Engineering Festival blog, founder Larry Bock addresses the "declining number of young Americans entering the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM)." The Festival expo will take place April 28th and 29th, aiming to "inspire the next generation of…
January 13, 2012
When the stars align, the results can be nothing short of spectacular. On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel shows us an "Einstein ring" photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. This celestial halo surrounds a massive red galaxy, and is in fact light from a much more distant galaxy focused by…
January 12, 2012
The Higgs Boson, an elementary particle thought to give mass to all other particles, remains an elusive final piece of the Standard Model of physics. On The Weizmann Wave, Professor Eilam Gross writes "many scientists believe that the Standard Model will stand or fall on the discovery of Higgs…
January 11, 2012
Renewable energy sources could allow for a prudent decrease in CO2 emissions while still powering a populous, electrified global economy. On The Pump Handle, Mark Pendergrast examines the proverbial canary in the coal mine, Japan. Wary of imported fossil fuels and burned by nuclear disaster,…
January 10, 2012
Not one to let physical and economic reality get in the way of a good one-liner, Newt Gingrich recently remarked that the United States could "open up enough oil fields in the next year that the price of oil worldwide would collapse." But as Sharon Astyk reports on Casaubon's Book, it can take…
January 6, 2012
After announcing in September that they had detected neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light, OPERA researchers immediately set out to replicate their results. On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel says they reconfigured the neutrino beam, which originally fired 10,000-nanosecond pulses…
January 3, 2012
On Greg Laden's Blog, we learn that "a subspecies of 'Black Rhino' also known as the 'browsing rhino'" has gone extinct in Africa, while Northern White Rhinos and Javan Rhinos have likely met the same fate. Dr. Dolittle says the last known Javan rhinoceros in Vietnam was found "with its horn cut…
December 23, 2011
On Uncertain Principles, Chad Orzel counts down to—what else?—Isaac Newton's birthday. Opening a link on this advent calendar yields not a chocolate, but an equation and an important piece of the physics puzzle. For December 19th, we come to "one of the most revolutionary moment in the history…
December 19, 2011
On The Pump Handle, Liz Borkowski examines the ethical dilemma of testing the anthrax vaccine in children. If a widespread attack were to occur, we would want to know the safety and efficacy of the vaccine beforehand. But is an attack likely enough to warrant testing the vaccine on children? On…
December 15, 2011
On Tomorrow's Table, Pamela Ronald shares a breakthrough in the study of bacterial communication. Although bacteria have been known to use a limited chemical vocabulary, for the first time they have been observed to use a protein as a signalling mechanism. Ronald writes, "Ax21 is a small protein…
December 13, 2011
Like addicts, we would love to stick to what is easy, familiar, and dependable. The withering consequences of our actions, abstracted to an intangible future, are easy to deny. Prominent politicians say that global warming is a fantasy, that we can keep doing what we're doing, that everything will…
December 6, 2011
On The USA Science and Engineering Festival, Joe Schwarcz writes that in the media's "drive to capture public attention, science sometimes takes a back seat." He offers an accurate headline for one study: "Large daily dose of blueberry powder may reduce the growth of a rare type of artificially…
December 5, 2011
On Pharyngula, PZ Myers tries to imagine an ancient squid, preying on reptilian whales and arranging their vertebrae as a testament to its glory. He writes "I love the idea of ancient giant cephalopods creating art and us finding the works now. But then, reality sinks in: that's a genuinely,…
November 21, 2011
Recipients of the 2011 Nobel Prizes were announced the week of October 3. The winners in medicine were honored for their work in immunology, as reported on Tomorrow's Table. Steinman "discovered a new class of cell, known as dendritic cells, which are key activators of the adaptive immune system…
October 31, 2011
On Class M, James Hrynyshyn reports a counter-intuitive survey conclusion: people who are more educated about science are less likely to be worried about climate change. The study posits that views on climate change are "cultural" and not purely scientific, making people want to "fit in" to a…
October 17, 2011
Last month, a team of researchers announced that their neutrinos appeared to be travelling faster than the speed of light. Ethan Siegel explains that the mass of a neutrino is "less than one-millionth the mass of the electron, but still not equal to zero" and "should move at a speed…
October 13, 2011
Meteorology still depends on a bit of clairvoyance, but in the 19th century many sailors, fishermen, and farmers "had to rely on storm glass, an inexpensive and profoundly inaccurate divining tool." The mixture of "camphor crystals, potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, water and alcohol"…
October 12, 2011
On Casaubon's Book, Sharon Astyk asks if we can stomach a new kind of cuisine— in case, you know, a massive volcanic eruption wipes out all our staple grains. Instead of wheat, corn and rice, "we probably would begin getting comfortable with acorn pancakes and turnip stew with taro dumplings."…
October 4, 2011
The planet-hunting spacecraft known as Kepler has detected the first definitive exoplanet in a binary star system, and lead author Dr. Laurance Doyle has all the details on Life at the SETI Institute. He writes, "Perhaps half the stars in the galaxy are in double star systems. Understanding that…
October 3, 2011
On Developing Intelligence, Chris Chatham shares a new study which demonstrates that performing new tasks actually reverses the accustomed workflow between different parts of the brain. Chris writes "Cole et al demonstrate that the causal influence is from [the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex] to…
September 30, 2011
A new paper published in the journal Animal Behavior tackles the origin of the female orgasm—does it have gender-specific advantages, or is it merely a byproduct of male adaptations? Having polled 10,000 twins about their orgasmic tendencies, researchers found "no significant correlation between…
September 26, 2011
On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel investigates the hamstringing of the James Webb Space Telescope. Originally scheduled to launch in 2013 at a cost of $5.1 billion, the JWST was pushed to 2015 and $6.5 billion by a government review panel that faulted NASA mismanagement. But the revised…
September 23, 2011
It seems like every time we turn around, there's another new smartphone or robotic butler pouring coffee in our laps. On Uncertain Principles, the engineering breakthroughs du jour are "technical advances in ion trap quantum computing." Chad Orzel explains, "previous experiments have used…
September 20, 2011
On Deltoid, Tim Lambert reports that Wolfgang Wagner, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing, has taken personal responsibility for the publication of a "problematic" paper and resigned his role. Wagner writes, "With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors…
September 14, 2011
Natural disaster struck twice last month on the east coast of the United States: first, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake rattled windows from Atlanta to Boston, and then a waning hurricane whirled all the way to New York City and on to Canada as a tropical storm. The temblor caused hundreds of millions…
September 9, 2011
Earlier this month, NASA announced the discovery of DNA components in a meteorite. On We Beasties, Heather Olins writes that "while claims of meteorites containing DNA components have been made before, they may very well have been terrestrial contamination. This seems to be different, because the…
September 7, 2011
On Starts With a Bang, Ethan Siegel explains that although we see the full range of spectral classes in the night sky—from cool red M stars to blazing blue O's—75% of nearby stars "are the reddest, coolest, M-class stars, including the closest star to us." Only 4.2 light-years away, Proxima…
September 6, 2011
On Stoat, a new paper says that misinformation causes confusion about otherwise settled climate science, and suggests that the "direct study of misinformation" can potentially "sharpen student critical thinking skills, raise awareness of the processes of science such as peer review, and improve…