It is incredibly refreshing to hear a leader clearly articulate the importance in dedication to and advancement of science and technology is in either good times or bad. President Obama, ever since his inauguration speech where he famously declared his intent to bring science to its rightful place, has been making a clear and convincing [...]
By Fetu
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Posted in Pieces of Information, Science and Technology, The Grand Energy Challenge
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Also tagged Barack Obama, Department of Energy, NAS, National Academy of Sciences, NIH, NSF, president, Science and Technology, speech
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April 18, 2009 – 10:23 am
Thanks to the tireless and thankless efforts of the Hubble telescope, we have been graced with insights into the natural order and beauty in the grandest of scales imaginable. Here is an awesome video about the Hubble Deep Field, which is arguably one of the most important images taken by humanity. Enjoy!
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A clear and thoroughly enjoyable explanation of what open-mindedness is:
The who-is-who of the minds that saw into the nature of God by unveiling scientific and philosophical know-how to better understand the universe. Why is it that they don’t make them like that any more?
The following picture is from the famous 5th Solvay Conference in Belgium, which brought together the greatest minds of the [...]
By Fetu
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Posted in Pieces of Information
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Also tagged Bohr, Born, Curie, Dirac, Einstein, God, Heisenberg, Lorentz, Minds, nobel prize, Pauli, physics, Planck, Schroedinger
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Via Technology Review, we learn about another exciting scientific development. This one deals with the discovery that a novel matrix of neural stem cells and a biodegradable polymer can quickly repair brain damage from stroke in rats.
Scientists say that the key to the advance, published today in the journal Biomaterials, is the use of a [...]
March 14, 2009 – 12:52 pm
What distinguishes discoveries is that they unearth a new perspective to look at a problem, sometimes as long standing and well studied topic as superconductivity. Here we learn about the discovery of a new type of superconductor. It turns out that Victor Moshchalkov of the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium and colleagues have shown [...]
Ever wondered how Albert Einstein would explain his infamous equation of mass-energy equivalence (E = m c 2)? Wonder no more:
February 22, 2009 – 11:33 am
Who said scientists could not dance? A dance competition put together by AAAS/Science has yielded some interesting interpretations of scientific research into dance. The winners and runners-up are listed here. Among the winners:
Category: PROFESSOR
Name: Vince LiCata
PhD Title: “Resolving Pathways of Functional Coupling in Human Hemoglobin Using Quantitative Low Temperature Isoelectric Focusing [...]
February 17, 2009 – 5:20 pm
At this point in the human experience, the existence of a super natural force that brought the universe into being is at best the likeliest conclusion, at least a convenient answer to the grand existential question, one arrives at. That is fundamentally due to the fact that no matter how definitive scientific insights may [...]
February 1, 2009 – 10:47 am
In a study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, Kristian Ove Myrseth and Ayelet Fishbach of the University of Chicago and Yaacov Trope of NYU describe that “the mind protects itself against succumbing to temptation for as long as it must, and it does this by devaluing what’s most [...]
January 8, 2009 – 8:18 pm
Scientists at Cornell report that “mosquitoes create harmonic love song before mating.. . The males and females flap their wings and change their tune to create a harmonic duet just before mating.” It turns out that male and female mosquitoes, which can spread such diseases as yellow and dengue fevers, “interact acoustically with each other [...]
By Fetu
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Posted in Pieces of Information, Science and Technology
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Also tagged cornell, dengue fevers, diseases, foreplay, love song, mating, mosquito, mosquitoes, Ron Hoy, sex, yellow fevers
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January 5, 2009 – 6:58 pm
Here is another top 10 list via Wired, according to which the “Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2008″ are the following. This information is included here not necessarily as an endorsement of the weight given to these breakthroughs in comparison to others, but to provide an insight into what some of the milestones are that [...]
January 4, 2009 – 5:24 pm
In the age where Null Information is expanding and growing at a rate faster than our ability to make sense and use of it all, there are some precious tools that make it easy for one to stay on top of major developments in human endeavors. In the area of science and technology, one such [...]
January 4, 2009 – 5:10 pm
First there was smoking. We learned that it is disastrous for the smoker’s health. One in five deaths and millions of illnesses every year in the US is caused by smoking. Millions more die and suffer from diseases and cancers caused by it. Then, we learned that, in fact, those around smokers are not safe [...]
December 30, 2008 – 7:36 pm
A series of conversations with the late Prof. Richard Feynman, a genius and thinker we can all aspire to learn from.
December 24, 2008 – 6:33 pm
In the spirit of continuing the process of correlating concepts in physics/science with that of day-to-day human behaviors, here we will discuss why some ideas go viral and others do not. The formulation presented here concerns with the idea of quantum tunneling. When a wave-like entity at a quantum scale encounters a potential barrier of a higher energy than [...]
By Fetu
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Posted in General Musings, Science and Technology, Writings
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Also tagged advertising, barrier, genesis, ideas, marketing, physics, potential, publicity, quantum mechanics, quantum tunneling, refinement, time, tunneling, viral, Writings
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December 23, 2008 – 8:34 pm
In an excerpt from a NOVA program on “The Race for Absolute Zero,” Prof. Daniel Kleppner of MIT explains how matter changes as it nears -459.67 °F, or absolute zero. This state of matter, the Bose-Einstein condensate, was discovered, in 1995, to exist in alkali metals at twenty-billionth of a degree (20 nK) above absolute zero by [...]
December 20, 2008 – 2:04 pm
President-elect Obama has announced his Science and Technology Team. Via change.gov:
President-elect Obama announced his appointment of Dr. John Holdren as Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). He also announced [...]
December 13, 2008 – 11:39 am
Are you moved by the concept of fractals? Would you be interested in finding out what a simple equation describing the Mandelbrot Set as the following gives?
an+1 = an2 + c
I strongly recommend watching the following documentary by Arthur Clarke, Fractals: The Colors of Infinity.
December 9, 2008 – 10:24 pm
This reporting from BBC is saying so. In a study reported in Astrophysical Journal, German scientists have shown, by tracking the movement of 28 stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, that there exists a blackhole 4 millions time the size of the sun at the center of our galaxy. In the words of Prof. [...]
