“Science advances, funeral by funeral.” (often attributed to Timothy Ferris) The blogosphere has been abuzz over the past week or so with the release of data — emails and program source and documentation — from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, one of the premier climatology research institutions in the world.… Continue reading Climategate, or, how science works
From the protein crystallography beamline at Berkeley Labs Advanced Light Source: an action shapshot the Rho transcription factor from E. coli. The orange spiral in the middle is a strand of RNA, and Rho is everything else. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPQ0OnlfkkA) (h/t Technology Review blog)
Gallery – A joyride through the nanoscale – Image 1 – New Scientist. This New Scientist article has some nice images from Whitesides recent book, sort of a retake on the “Secret House” idea.
Five essential things to know about evolution – Ars Technica. John Timmer dispels some common misconceptions. An understanding of evolution is key to understanding technological change — we individual humans are the mutations and crossover, but the dynamics of the overall process is similar.
The evolution of science moves, in Kuhn’s famous theory, not in a smooth accretion of knowledge but in a series of punctuated equilibria. This means that before a paradigm shift happens, there is an overhang where the majority of scientists believe something that the mojority won’t a scientific generation later. Thomas Bouchard, the psychologist who… Continue reading Foreseeing the next paradigm shift
Over at the Moral Machines blog, there’s a pointer to an AP story about the recent DC train crash: Investigators looking into the deadly crash of two Metro transit trains focused Tuesday on why a computerized system failed to halt an oncoming train, and why the train failed to stop even though the emergency brake… Continue reading Moral Railroads
There is at Technology Review’s arXiv blog an article “How to find bugs in giant software programs.” It’s an overview of a paper on arXiv which is a statistical study of program sizes and bug distributions in the Eclipse dataset of Java programs. TR says, So how are errors distributed among these programs? It would… Continue reading Do the math
“Codex Futurius” is a project of Discover Magazine’s Science Not Fiction blog in which they ask science questions raised by science fiction.. Then they ask the National Academy of Sciences’ Science and Entertainment Exchange to reccommend them experts to answer the questions. Their first question came to me, and it was about gray goo …… Continue reading Codex Futurius on Gray Goo
The highly anticipated Wolfram|Alpha site came online over the weekend, and here are some first impressions: They need a little work on the html — this was Firefox, but it looked the same on Konqueror.
A nice display of serendipitous artistic images found while doing science, at Princeton: Hat-tip to Eurekalert.
