The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking. Marketing the Moon: How NASA Sold Space to Earth. By Michelle Legro When the mission became the message and NASA undertook the monumental task of explaining rocket science to an audience looking to the stars.
It wasn’t until the soft beep…beep…beep of the Sputnik satellite reached Earth on October 4, 1957 that the Soviet Union could declare the first unequivocal success of their space program. The Soviets had launched Sputnik in secret, and the news took the United States by surprise. It was Soviet policy that every launch would be kept secret unless it was successful, and that its public would only be fed propaganda. The Soviet government would deny ever having attempted a manned lunar landing until 1990, and cosmonauts who died in the line of duty were erased from the public record. One year after the surprise launch of Sputnik, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was founded. Is Hell Exothermic or Endothermic? Jokes > Is Hell exothermic or endothermic?
I was emailed the following by Reynir Stefánsson, who says: "I have seen a few versions of this on the net, but so far none better than the one enclosed below".
The university mentioned varies widely around the Web -- for example, some sites quote Texas A&M, others quote McGill. One variant gives more detail , naming the student, identifying the course as "Momentum, Heat and Mass Transfer II" at the University of Oklahoma School of Chemical Engineering, and the examiner as Dr. Schambaugh, allegedly famous for asking exam questions such as "why do airplanes fly". There is indeed such a person as Dr. Schambaugh at that institution, but when Reynir emailed him for confirmation, his reply was: "The course number and title are correct, and I have asked why airplanes fly. [Dec 2011] John Jensen emailed me to say that Snopes has the answer ; they attribute it to Paul Darwin Foote. Muslims 'warned in Fatwa not to live on Mars'
The Sochi Gold Medals Are Actually Made With Pieces of Russian Meteorite. On Feb. 15, the gold medals at the Sochi Olympics will get just a bit more special: the winners will receive pieces of a Russian meteorite embedded in their medals.
Ten special commemorative medals have been crafted, and these will be given to the winning athletes in addition to their official Olympic medals. Robots may become elementary school teachers in the future. Photo by PHILIPPE MERLE/AFP/Getty Images On Thursday, Aug. 9, Future Tense will host an event called “Getting Schooled by a Third Grader: What Kids’ Gaming, Tweeting, Streaming and Sharing Tells us About the Future of Elementary Education” in Washington, D.C.
To learn more and to RSVP, visit the New America Foundation website. We’ve been promised for years that robots will soon move from factories into our everyday lives (maybe even white-collar offices), and yet so far, the closest thing we have to Rosie Jetson is the Roomba. In addition to dexterity and the ability to walk, one of the biggest hurdles to personal robotics has been human-machine interaction. For a machine to enter human space, it has to understand certain niceties. Reinforcing gender stereotypes: how our schools narrow children's choices.
Children learn sexism at school.
So says the headline of a piece in the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, in response to a shocking report on the experiences of more than a thousand Girl Guides. Primary school children who feel they have to diet in order to conform to airbrushed images in the media, secondary school children who are "touched up" in ways that make them feel uncomfortable – this seems to be the fate of the young girls in our population.
One might, indeed should, question why schools are doing so little to counter these sorts of attitudes and actions. Looking at how schools tackle the more formal aspects of education it is clear that here too sexism is prevalent. The report launched today by the Institute of Physics (IOP) entitled "Closing Doors" shows that the majority of schools fail to encourage subject choices in a gender neutral way. As with the previous IOP report mentioned above, there is another group of schools that can be compared with these state schools. China shoots for the moon. Updated: 2013-12-02 00:20 By Zhao Huanxin in Beijing and Zhao Lei in Xichang, Sichuan (China Daily) Mission would be first landing of lunar probe in nation's space program The scheduled launch of lunar probe Chang'e-3 would bring China closer to putting an astronaut on the moon and using Earth's closest neighbor for deep space exploration, scientists said.
If everything goes as planned during the launch, set for 1:30 am on Monday, the lunar probe will land in mid-December, Xichang Satellite Launch Center sources said over the weekend. Two hours before the planned liftoff, officials at the Beijing Aerospace Control Center announced that everything was "going well" for the mission. China Shoots 'Jade Rabbit' Rover to the Moon. Copyright © 2013 NPR.
For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. Einstein's letter to Roosevelt, August 2, 1939. UP to Leo Szilard Online In the summer of 1939, six months after the discovery of uranium fission, American newspapers and magazines openly discussed the prospect of atomic energy.
However, most American physicists doubted that atomic energy or atomic bombs were realistic possibilities. No official U.S. atomic energy project existed. Copenhagen . The Bohr Letters. The Genographic Project by National Geographic - Human Migration, Population Genetics.
Carl Sagan on Mastering the Vital Balance of Skepticism and Openness. The Elusive Theory of Everything. Science's most beautiful theories. Henrietta Lacks Foundation. Rosalind Elsie Franklin: Pioneer Molecular Biologist. Born: London, England, July 25, 1920 Died: London, England, April 16, 1958 There is probably no other woman scientist with as much controversy surrounding her life and work as Rosalind Franklin.
What You Can Find Here. The Art of Chance-Opportunism in Creativity and Scientific Discovery: A 1957 Guide. By Maria Popova “To be perfectly original one should think much and read little, and this is impossible, for one must have read before one has learnt to think.”
What a magical Rube Goldberg machine of discovery literature is — the original “inter-net,” if you will, with the allusions, citations, and references in one work opening doors to countless others. One such Rube Goldberg chain reaction began in last month’s Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity, which first led me to the 1939 gem A Technique for Producing Ideas, and then to The Art of Scientific Investigation (public library; public domain) — an absolutely fantastic treatise on creativity in science and, by extension, in all endeavors of the mind, originally written by Cambridge University animal pathology professor W. I. B. Biomimicry. Oakland Ebonics controversy. For students whose primary dialect was "Ebonics", the Oakland resolution mandated some instruction in that dialect, both for "maintaining the legitimacy and richness of such language... and to facilitate their acquisition and mastery of English language skills.
" This also included the proposed increase of salaries of those proficient in both "Ebonics" and Standard English to the level of those teaching LEP (limited English proficiency) students and the use of public funding to help teachers learn AAVE themselves.[1] Popular response[edit] Amended resolution[edit] Linguists' response[edit] Some linguists and associated organizations issued statements in support of recognizing the legitimacy of African-American Vernacular English as a language system. "The systematic and expressive nature of the grammar and pronunciation patterns of the African-American vernacular has been established by numerous scientific studies over the past thirty years.
Notes[edit] References[edit] External links[edit] TOK1NatScience. ToK: Natural Science by Chris Kirby on Prezi. TOK The Natural Sciences flashcards. Reason and Logic. Mr. Hoye's TOK Website.