Captain America: Supersoldiers vs glowing blue things. Michael Marshall and Rowan Hooper (Image: Marvel/Paramount) A feeble weakling is given an experimental drug that transforms him into a muscled superman in Marvel Studios' latest comic book adaptation. But Captain America: The First Avenger is a far from super movie. Set in the second world war, it follows Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a New Yorker desperate to enlist and fight Nazis, but who is continually rejected because he's short, skinny and unfit, and has a list of health problems longer than his arms. He finally meets scientist Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), who invites him to take part in a programme to develop supersoldiers. There he meets his new boss, Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), who steals every scene he's in with a torrent of derogatory one-liners, and love interest Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), the obligatory "plucky Brit" character.
Marvel, however, is not interested in this. Baaa. Every river system mapped in World of Rivers. The annual Malofiej awards, for top graphics in journalism, were handed out last week. The best map of 2010 went to National Geographic for the World of Rivers. Every river system in the world was mapped and scaled by annual discharge. We live on a planet covered by water, but more than 97 percent is salty, and nearly 2 percent is locked up in snow and ice.
That leaves less than one percent to grow our crops, cool our power plants, and supply drinking and bathing water for households. Showing everything doesn't always work with so much data, but it does in this case. It reminds me of Ben Fry's All Streets. Also, congratulations to National Geographic for winning the Peter Sullivan award (best in show) for their map of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and The New York Times for their work on how Mariano Rivera dominates, print and online, respectively.
[Society for News Design]
A Billboard That Advertises Nothing But Clean Air | Co.Design. A provocative new sculpture has opened at the U.S. -Canada border crossing near Vancouver, BC. It's a billboard advertising...well, nothing. So instead of your usual glimpse of cheeseburgers and red-faced car salesmen, you've got a snarl of stainless steel rods vaguely reminiscent of TV static, but surrounding only the clean air of Blaine, Washington.
Clearly it's some kind of pinko Canadian stunt, right? A passive-aggressive commentary on Americans? Lead Pencil Studio's Daniel Mihalyo sheds light on the concept: Borrowing the effectiveness of billboards to redirect attention away from the landscape... this permanently open aperture between nations works to frame nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond. Which sounds nice and poetic and non-threatening, but clearly, this thing is a monument to everything America's not. Well, we think it is awesome, and we're elated that the government's supporting Lead Pencil Studio.
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Hypnosis reaches the parts brain scans and neurosurgery cannot | Vaughan Bell | Science. Whenever AR sees a face, her thoughts are bathed in colour and each identity triggers its own rich hue that shines across her mind's eye. This experience is a type of synaesthesia which, for about one in every 100 people, automatically blends the senses. Some people taste words, others see sounds, but AR experiences colour with every face she sees. But on this occasion, perhaps for the first time in her life, a face is just a face. No colours, no rich hues, no internal lights. If the experience is novel for AR, it is equally new to science because no one had suspected that synaesthesia could be reversed. The surprising reversal of AR's synaesthesia was reported in a recent study by psychologist Devine Terhune and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden.
When the colour of the onscreen face clashed with the colour that appeared in her mind's eye, she reacted slowly, as if trying to read traffic lights through tinted glasses. Vaughan Bell blogs at Mind Hacks. Margaret Atwood | Author. Tales from the Road - The NMSU Chile Pepper Institute. Coming Soon - Stay tuned for a BIG announcement about an awesome project Jorge is working on! PHD Store - Our store was down for a while, but now it is back! Free excerpt from The PHD Movie 2! - Watch this free clip from the movie that Nature called "Astute, funny"! Watch the new movie! Filming is done! Coming to Campuses this Fall! The Science Gap - Watch Jorge's TEDx Talk:
What Are We Made Of? : Through The Wormhole. What are the biological differences between different races? Genetic anthropologists have discovered that up to 7 percent of our genes have mutated to new forms in the past 50,000 years. These changes are not just related to skin and eye color, but also to our bones, our digestive systems, and even our brains. Some of these genetic mutations are specific to certain racial groups. This leads to an unsettling question. Could the brains of different races be different? It's an idea that has spawned war and genocide. Or will the natural evolution of the brain continue, making our distant offspring far smarter than us? Op-Ed: DEA Call For Ebonics Experts Smart Move. JK 501: Mathematical Tragedy. MyResearchNews.com « Real-time Science News MyResearchNews.com. What is Twitter and Why Scientists Need To Use It.
Bora Zivkovic an expert about scientific blogging and microblogging, and chair of ScienceOnline states that Twitter forces one to think about the economy of words, to become much more efficient with one’s use of language. It takes work and thought and practice to get to the point of tweeting truly well. I remember Jay Rosen once saying that some of his tweets take 45 minutes to compose and edit until he is satisfied that the text uses the words for maximal clarity and impact. There is no luxury in using superfluous language and the result can be a crystal-clear statement or description that far outshines the often-wordy original [paper, news article, blog post]. Perhaps the best way to think of Twitter as relevant to science was put forth by James Dacey It’s been compared to a cocktail party where multiple conversations, all taking place at once, result in that familiar cacophony of chitchat.
How is Twitter used? Can meaningful content be conveyed on Twitter? Dr. Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog. Fizy / videomusic. If the Cost of Publishing a Scientific Journal Article is $10,000, Who Pays for Open-Access? | Age of Engagement.