A universe in an eBook (or app) The Tree of Diversification (or why the March of Progress is wrong) This post is syndicated from The Atavism – Original Post I’m giving a big talk next week – a departmental seminar.
It’s the first time I’ve had more than 15 minutes to talk about my research, so this talk will be a little more discursive that my usual. I study speciation, how new species come into being, and one of the things that I want to emphasise is that speciation hasn’t really entered into the broader understanding of what evolution is.Take the one image that describes evolution in modern society: The March of Progress, Rudolph F. Zallinger. Sciblogs Events.
BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results. Skip to main content Science/AAAS Subscribe Main menu You are here News » ScienceInsider » Physics » BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results Edwin Cartlidge Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on redditMore Sharing ServicesShare on email ScienceInsider BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results 22 February 2012 1:45 pm 232 Comments It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all.
Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer.
Physics. Plankton-fuelled ocean eddy is 150 kilometres wide. Flora Graham, deputy editor, newscientist.com (Image: NASA's Earth Observatory ) Deep below the surface, the ocean has its own weather.
Genius Swedish computer program has IQ of 150. Researchers at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg in Göteborg, Sweden, have created a computer program that can score 150 on standard non-verbal IQ test questions.
Intelligence is an "I know it when I see it" phenomenon, but psychologists have formed no consensus on what abilities combine to produce the appearance of great intelligence. Despite this, the lure of condensing a person's "intelligence" into a simple "intelligence quotient" (IQ) has proven irresistible to many in the field. Measuring intelligence The first IQ test was introduced by Alfred Binet in 1905. While in principle an IQ score is meant to be 100 x (mental age)/(chronological age), this definition only applies to children, as mental abilities tend to stabilize at about 16 years of age. IQ tests for adults are developed so that their scores fall on a bell curve, the peak of the curve being defined as an IQ of 100. Squid can fly to save energy. Bob Hulse These flying squid may find it easier to to travel through the air than the water.
Squid can save energy by flying rather than swimming, according to calculations based on high-speed photography. Squid of many species have been seen to 'fly' using the same jet-propulsion mechanisms that they use to swim: squirting water out of their mantles so that they rocket out of the sea and glide through the air. Until now, most researchers have thought that such flight was a way to avoid predators1, but Ronald O’Dor, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, has calculated that propelling themselves through the air may actually be an efficient way for squid to travel long distances. Bioscience proves lucrative to NZ economy. By Esther Goh, Bioscience-based organisations earned at least $677 million for New Zealand last year, with the majority of that coming from exports.
According to Statistics New Zealand, 150 organisations identified bioscience as their primary focus in 2011, and they generated an average profit of $640,000 from bioscience work compared with an average profit of $117,000 for all organisations in New Zealand. And of 474 organisations using bioscience as identified in the Bioscience Survey 2011, just over half were applying it to human health and natural products. Science and technology manager Hamish Hill said many organisations had bioscience as a part of their business so it was hard to establish exact earnings. "But what we do know is that purely bioscience-based organisations earned $677 million last year, over half of that from exports," he said.
“If we take a broad view of all the organisations using bioscience in some way, they earned $40 billion last year. Share this on See also Tagged as. Hubble Reveals a New Class of Extrasolar Planet. Observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have come up with a new class of planet, a waterworld enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere.
It’s smaller than Uranus but larger than Earth. Logy Magazine. Our solar system contains three types of planets: rocky, terrestrial worlds (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn), and ice giants (Uranus and Neptune).
Planets orbiting distant stars come in an even wider variety, including lava worlds and “hot Jupiters.” Observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have added a new type of planet to the mix. By analyzing the previously discovered world GJ 1214b, astronomer Zachory Berta (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) and colleagues proved that it is a water world enshrouded by a thick, steamy atmosphere. “GJ 1214b is like no planet we know of,” said Berta. “A huge fraction of its mass is made up of water.” GJ 1214b was discovered in 2009 by the ground-based MEarth (pronounced “mirth”) Project, which is led by CfA’s David Charbonneau.
In 2010, CfA scientist Jacob Bean and colleagues reported that they had measured the atmosphere of GJ 1214b, finding it likely that the atmosphere was composed mainly of water.