ksharpe | March 8, 2007When weird-science group the Athanasius Kircher Society held its inaugural meeting in New York City this January, the meeting's flaming grand finale was a live onstage performance by a 20-foot-long Rube Goldberg contraption.
The device's designer, Jesse Ferguson, has posted a video of the machine in action in his Seattle apartment, just before it was dismantled to be shipped across the country for its star turn at the AKS. The video is here, and with flames galore and a real, live laser, it's guaranteed to titillate your inner pyro.
ksharpe | March 7, 2007...because Jessica Hagy, author of the indispensable fun-with-charts-and-graphs blog Indexed, has landed a book deal.
We expect it will be full of gems like this:
Image: Indexed.
ksharpe | March 6, 2007"When I was in high school, I remember friends who were jealous that my parents knew math and science," writes Janet Stemwedel of ScienceBlogs' Adventures in Ethics and Science, over at the current issue of the Science Creative Quarterly,
since obviously that meant I could ask them for help with my homework. What my friends didn't know was that my parents treated the most straightforward question as an invitation to a freewheeling Socratic dialogue of no less than 30 minutes. While I would have been happy just to finish my assignment with time to watch some TV, my parents wanted me to…
ksharpe | March 5, 2007This YouTube video presents a rejoinder to creationists who believe that, regarding the question of whether human beings evolved or were created, personal opinion matters. The first few seconds seem to presage a talk-show style arguement-fest, but the presentation soon turns into a soothing pastiche of science-related imagery, culminating in amazing shots (or CGI?) of the Mars rover. The larger point is that "well, I believe..." statements pale in comparison to the tangible achievements of applied reason. But argument aside it bears enjoying as an aesthetic meditation on science and tech.
"…
ksharpe | March 2, 2007Chris Rowan, a geologist, maintains a blog with a tongue-twister of a name. Highly Allochthonous is the spot where he blogs about geology, a subject he has found to boast "more field trips and more beer" than his first love, physics. Chris is based in the UK and currently beginning a postdoc at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He also writes a column about the life of a postdoc for Naturejobs. And the blog name—?
An allochthon is a sequence of rocks which has been superimposed by faulting on top of another sequence which it was originally a large distance away from; for example…
ksharpe | March 1, 2007Do you feel unsatisfied, irritated, impatient with yourself? Ever?
Do you not always enjoy activities that you once enjoyed? Do you feel older than you used to be?
Stop right there—you could be suffering from a serious problem called Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD).
Don't be afraid: millions do. And help is on the way, in the form of—what else?—a pill. That would be Havidol®, the trade name of Avafynetime HCl. As the Havidol package insert reminds us, "No prescription drug can promise endless happiness." But with Havidol, you can achieve the "terminal…
ksharpe | February 28, 2007The Western honeybee, Apis mellifera, came to North America with European settlers in 1622. An invasive species in the 17th century, the honeybee has since become indispensable for its services as a pollinator. Carrying pollen from flower to flower on their bodies, honeybees complete the plant reproductive cycle, vital for the creation of fruit. Farmers in the U.S. rely on honeybees to pollinate crops including apples, blueberries, cantaloupe, soybeans, pumpkins, and almonds, among others.
Honeybee populations in North America have declined by about 50 percent in the last half-century.…
ksharpe | February 26, 2007Have you ever blown it on a standardized test? Had your mind go blank during a job interview? Faced a situation of enormous urgency and...totally underwhelmed yourself?
If you've ever been puzzled by your inability to do under pressure tasks that you usually find a snap, you can now soothe yourself with the thought that your breakdown may be due to your big brain.
At the AAAS meeting earlier this month, University of Chicago psychology professor Sian Beilock presented her finding that talented people fail under pressure more than less-talented people do. This is because talented folks (the…
ksharpe | February 25, 2007Love ScienceBlogs, but find the combined RSS feed overwhelming? Been wanting a way to siphon the cream of ScienceBlogs off the top? Want no more.
This week, we introduce ScienceBlogs Select, a new, filtered RSS feed made up of ScienceBloggers' own favorite posts. The Select feed contains fewer posts than the full feed, and they've all been hand-picked for quality, from funniest to pithiest to most insightful. We like it, and we hope you will too.
Give ScienceBlogs Select a try by visiting the ScienceBlogs RSS page and clicking on 'ScienceBlogs Select' to subscribe.
ksharpe | February 23, 2007Nerds have seldom been held up as paragons of romantic prowess, and that's generally gone double for those of the female persuasion.
But an essay in the Boston Globe by historian of the family Stephanie Coontz uses demographic evidence to punch a few holes into the popular idea that over-educated women have a hard time finding mates.
Entitled "The Romantic Life of Brainiacs," the essay argues that, contra to stereotype, highly-educated women are more likely to be married, to enjoy lasting marriages, and to be sexually satisfied than their less-educated counterparts.
"The myth of the bitter,…
ksharpe | February 21, 2007Couples who find the pill problematic and condoms cumbersome may be interested in a study out today in the journal Human Reproduction. The report, lead authored by Petra Frank-Hermann, a professor in the Department of Gynecological Endocrinology at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, followed 900 women who practice a form of natural family planning called the symptothermal method (STM). Frank-Hermann's team concluded that perfect use of STM resulted in unintended pregnancy rates of 0.4 percent, making for a highly favorable comparison in rates of effectiveness between STM and the…
ksharpe | February 20, 2007
Sharpen your pencils (or your favorite graphic design app) and strap your thinking cap on. Seed has paired with Threadless to bring you a contest you won't want to miss. Design a tee shirt around the theme of "science is culture." Submit your design by midnight on March 19 for your chance to win an impressive grand prize bundle including $1500 in cash, a $300 Threadless gift certificate, a 60gb iPod loaded with science videos—including sweet Seed Magazine video salons—and more.
If you're looking for inspiration, browse Threadless's impressive collection of cool, user-generated tees. There's…
ksharpe | February 19, 2007Hot off the presses: Skeptical Inquirer magazine has a new rememberance of Carl Sagan by David Morrison, which highlights Sagan's sometimes-forgotten role as a skeptic.
From the article:
Throughout his career, Sagan devoted himself to the quest to improve public understanding of the nature of science. He wanted every citizen to have a "baloney detector" as defense against sham in commerce and politics as well as science. He felt that it was the duty of scientists to face these issues squarely and publicly. The Cosmic Connection (1973), which includes extensive discussions of extraterrestrial…
ksharpe | February 15, 2007Nobody likes being told they're dumb. But being praised up and down for one's intelligence carries its own price, according to research by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her research team.
In the current issue of New York Magazine, writer Po Bronson summarizes Dweck's work, which indicates that children who are frequently told that they are smart give up more easily, become risk-averse, and grow overly concerned with "image maintenance." Bronson describes Dweck's methods:
Dweck sent four female research assistants into New York fifth-grade classrooms. The researchers would take a…
ksharpe | February 13, 2007Tune in to daily podcasts from the route up Mount Kilimanjaro, the world's tallest free-standing mountain and, at 19,340 feet, the highest peak in Africa.
Hosted at seedmagazine.com, the series is following day-by-day progress of a team made up by:
Will Cross, mountaineer and traveler
Jimmy Gould, Seed board member
Jo Anderson, environmental biologist
?
The team will be producing a new, three-to-six minute 'cast each day and, conditions permitting, posting them to the trek homepage as they're created. The group plans to reach Uhuru Peak—Kili's summit—on Thursday, February 15th.
Kilimanjaro…
ksharpe | February 2, 2007Surfing the wave of coverage of this morning's report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? This Q & A piece in the Guardian UK is short, sharp, and to the point—a great starting place for neophytes (and big-picture types).
The heart of the matter:
What does [the IPCC report] say?
Emissions of greenhouse gases are expected to further change the climate over the next 100 years, it says. As a result, sea levels will rise over the century by around half a metre, snow will disappear from all but the highest mountains, deserts will spread, oceans will become acidic, leading to the…
ksharpe | February 1, 2007There are hours to go before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues its much-anticipated report, "Climate Change 2007," but already the internets are abuzz with early punditry.
Joseph Romm at Grist speculates that because the report is written by committee, the findings may have "a conservative edge."
The DeSmog Blog anticipates the PR circus that will doubtless follow on the heels of the report.
And BlueClimate joins ScienceBloggers Josh Rosenau and Chris Mooney in speculating on early reports that the IPCC document will credit global warming with creating stronger hurricanes.…
ksharpe | February 1, 2007Over at BLDGblog, Geoff Manaugh has a long interview with Ed Mazria of the activist architectural nonprofit Architecture 2030.
Mazria is organizing an "Emergency Teach-In" for architects, student architects, and design professionals. The event, to be held at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City on February 20th, and broadcast live on the web, isspecifically organized around the idea that "ecological literacy [must] become a central tenet of design education," and that "a major transformation of the academic design community must begin today."
Read the full story, here.
Image…
ksharpe | January 30, 2007Just in time for the Spring semester, ScienceBlogger Zuska has rolled out an online course of sorts. She's conducting a college-level corse entitled Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science--as professor and student. The course explores science, women, and pleasure. From Zuska's syllabus:
This course explores the existence of pleasure, intellectual excitement, and desire as an important component of theorizing and doing science and engineering. We will examine the presence and/or absence of accounts of pleasure/desire in feminist theories of science, and in mainstream science and engineering…
ksharpe | January 28, 2007
The New York Times reports on a Cambridge University study which argues that the manufacture and purchase of new clothing -- particularly given today's rapid-cycling fashion trends, and the throwaway clothes culture they've enabled -- drives significant carbon emissions.
Consumers' penchant for new clothes, in other words, is becoming an environmental threat.
Hand-me-down clothing, the article notes, has become less of a wardrobe staple now that dirt-cheap, on-trend garments are widely available through retailers like Target and Old Navy. "Fast clothes" are the order of the day.
The Times…