Category: Science, Engineering & Technology
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The classic demonstrator of the conjunction fallacy is the following: 1. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which is more probable?1A. Linda is a bank teller.1B. Linda…
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Bringing new meaning to navel gazing and much, much more, is NCBI ROFL. Am I just giving a shout out to a friend's blog? No — I'm giving a shout out to a friend's blog that posts abstracts from real scientific research articles that are often hilarious enough to have you rolling on the floor…
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From the Indychannel: Patrick Roth uses a fully electric car to take his daughter to school and run errands, 6News' Jennifer Carmack reported.The car may look like any ordinary Ford Escort, but a closer look reveals that it's anything but. Roth didn't buy the car that way. He built it himself Here's a step by…
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I am sure everyone saw this item in the news yesterday on TV or on the web. There is really nothing chemically or nutritionally yucky here. I guess one just has to get used to the idea. At the international space station, it was one small sip for man and a giant gulp of recycled urine for mankind. Astronauts…
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Are scientists on the path to deciphering the Indus Valley script? The story here and here. An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers. Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated…
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Less than a year ago, I recounted my experience of living through a hurricane both before and after the storm. Although Ike was technically a Category 2 hurricane (falling 1 mph short of Cat 3), it has been repeatedly described as a monster storm and the devastation it wreaked on the cities of Galveston and Houston qualified it…
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NASA hopes to launch the giant telescope / light meter Kepler on Friday. The mission is to look for Earth-like planets in our galaxy – planets whose size and conditions could support life forms. From the Houston Chronicle: The universe may be filled with Earth-like planets — worlds where extraterrestrials might flourish. But these planets were once considered too…
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A second post on the same day about altered images – or at least an extrapolated one. This one does not involve plagiarism or copyright infringement. Rather it is an exercise in the restoration of national vanity. The president of the United States is widely perceived to be the most powerful person in the world. So far only…
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That’s the tally as I skim the responses to the 2009 Edge Annual Question: “What will change everything?”—or, more prosaically, “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” The respondents tend to represent the science crowd (of the hard, social, and popular varieties), with lots of neuro-this and that-ologists. There…
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Could dwarfs hold the key to cancer therapy? Sounds promising.
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So apparently there’s some other CO2 problem that doesn’t get talked about as much as rising temperatures. CO2 forms carbonic acid when it dissolves in water, and the oceans are soaking up more and more of it. Recent studies show that the seas have absorbed about a third of all the fossil-fuel carbon released into…
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