Mohammed: the Anti-Innovator, with Ayaan Hirsi Ali click2x Transcript Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Early on, it seemed as if Mohammed's ambition was simply to go from door to door from person to person and say, "Leave alone what you believe in. Believe in the one God, the one who spoke to me through the angel Gabriel." Of course I don't argue with that.
We're More than Stardust — We're Made of the Big Bang Itself Transcript Anna Frebel: The work of stellar archaeology really goes to the heart of the "we are stardust" and "we are children of the stars" statement. You’ve probably heard it all but what does it actually mean? We are mostly made all humans and all life forms that we know of are made mostly of carbon and a bunch of other elements but in much lesser quantities. Where does this carbon come from? Well, you could say it comes from the Earth and yes that is true. And so this is how we can piece together the chemical evolution of the universe that is really the basis for any biological evolution to take place on Earth.
Why Apple Pay Is a Huge Milestone in Payments Breakthrough A service that makes it practical to use your smartphone as a wallet in everyday situations. Why It Matters Credit card fraud damages the economy by raising the costs of goods and services. Key Players Apple Visa MasterCard Google When Apple Pay was announced in September, Osama Bedier was unimpressed. Yet when Apple Pay launched just a few weeks later, Bedier was a convert. Momentum for mobile payment technologies was building even before Apple Pay debuted last fall. None of the individual technologies is novel, but Apple turned them into a service that is demonstrably easier than any other. But even if Apple didn’t invent mobile payments, it has significantly enhanced them. That doesn’t mean most of us will be ditching our wallets and waving phones in every store in 2015—far from it. Still, Apple has done a lot of things right, suggesting that Apple Pay will turn out to be a milestone. As a result, Apple is now cementing standards for the payment industry. —Robert D.
Probiotics Alleviate Anxiety If I told you that bacteria could alleviate your anxiety you’d probably think I was joking or uninformed. But, if you suffer from anxiety, particularly social anxiety, you’ll be happy to learn about the exciting research conducted by researchers at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia that shows bacteria, indeed, may be the solution to your anxiety. The study, which was published in Psychiatry Research, found that regular consumption of fermented foods replete with plentiful amounts of beneficial bacteria reduced social anxiety. In the College of William and Mary study, 710 students completed food diaries about their intake of fermented foods over the previous 30 days. They were also asked about exercise frequency and their consumption of fruits and vegetables so that the researchers could control for healthy habits beyond fermented food intake. Researchers found that those who ate higher amounts of fermented foods had lower levels of social anxiety. Love This?
Spooky Action 101: Is Space as We Know It a Kind of Illusion? Transcript George Musser: So spooky action at a distance was [Albert] Einstein’s kind of appellation for the idea of nonlocality. Non-locality is the technical term for it. And what it means is that there’s a connection between different objects or places in the universe. This phenomenon of nonlocality that worried Einstein actually comes out in many different ways. So the example I often give is two coins. So if you think of those two coins — they’re on opposite sides of the universe or the continent or wherever they may be. Startling new finding: 600 million years ago, a biological mishap changed everything Ken Prehoda, a biochemist and director of the University of Oregon's Institute of Molecular Biology, discusses his research identifying the mutation that led to multicellular animals. (YouTube/University of Oregan) If life is effectively an endless series of photocopies, as DNA is transcribed and passed on from one being to the next, then evolution is the high-stakes game of waiting for the copier to get it wrong. Too wrong, and you’ll live burdened by a maladaptive mutation or genetic disorder. But if the flaw is wrong in exactly the right way, the incredible can happen: disease resistance, sharper eyesight, swifter feet, big brains, better beaks for Darwin’s finches. In a paper published in the open-access journal eLife this week, researchers say they have pinpointed what may well be one of evolution’s greatest copy mess-ups yet: the mutation that allowed our ancient protozoa predecessors to evolve into complex, multi-cellular organisms. For this, the choanoflagellates were perfect.
How the Science of Swarms Can Help Us Fight Cancer and Predict the Future | Science The first thing to hit Iain Couzin when he walked into the Oxford lab where he kept his locusts was the smell, like a stale barn full of old hay. The second, third, and fourth things to hit him were locusts. The insects frequently escaped their cages and careened into the faces of scientists and lab techs. The room was hot and humid, and the constant commotion of 20,000 bugs produced a miasma of aerosolized insect exoskeleton. Many of the staff had to wear respirators to avoid developing severe allergies. In the mid-2000s that lab was, however, one of the only places on earth to do the kind of science Couzin wanted. Couzin would put groups of up to 120 juveniles into a sombrero-shaped arena he called the locust accelerator, letting them walk in circles around the rim for eight hours a day while an overhead camera filmed their movements and software mapped their positions and orientations. Couzin wanted to know what if-then rules produced similar behaviors in living things.
Let's celebrate the 240th Birthday of Mary Somerville, the world's first "Scientist" Today we celebrate the 240th birthday of Mary Fairfax Somerville (Dec 26,1780 – Nov 29, 1872) the Scottish polymath, scientist and science writer extraordinaire. In an era with great men of science but few women, in an era where the pursuit of science was highly specialized and accessible only to a few, she pioneered the art of presenting science in words that were engaging and accessible to a wide audience. She was the first popular science writer and a mathematician and scientist in her own right. The word scientist was coined for her. About Mary Somerville Mary Somerville, the daughter of admiral William Fairfax, grew up near Scotland's Firth of Forth wandering the seashore, collecting shells and studying seabirds. With little formal education, Mary was a self-taught student. Her book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences is one of the most celebrated works of science writing. Somerville was a a friend of Charles Babbage and mathematics tutor to Ada Lovelace. x Epilogue
160 years of US immigration trends, mapped US immigration trends shifted dramatically between 1850 and 2013 —including changes in the dominant countries of origin for each state and decade, and the total size of foreign-born population — according to a new series of historical maps from the Pew Research Center. There's no argument about the fact that immigrants have consistently played an important part in American history, but the maps, based on recent US Census data, reveal lesser-known facts about immigrant population rate changes over time. The census shows us that different decades saw changing sizes of non-US-born populations. Compare, for example, the largest immigrant populations by country of origin in 1900, 1950, and 2000. In 1900, 2.7 million Germans made up the largest total percentage of immigrants. USA immigrants by country or origin in 1900. By 1950, an estimated 1.5 million Italians comprised the largest group of immigrants that year, more than a million less than the largest group (Germans) in 1900.
Scientists have used groundbreaking technology to figure out how the Earth looked a billion years ago By the time Dietmar Mueller arrived at the University of Texas as a graduate student in the mid-1980s, scientists had already long embraced a once-astonishing idea: that the continents on which all human history has unfolded, rather than fixtures of constancy, were orphans of a former grand supercontinent called Pangaea. Showered with awards, the pioneers of this theory—plate tectonics—had by and large dispersed in search of the next big challenge. But Mueller and his classmates sensed far more ground to cover. Three decades later, Mueller, now at the University of Sydney, is part of a new upheaval in tectonics, this time ignited by advances in computing power. The same leaps in big-data analysis, supercomputing, and intelligent algorithms that have shaken up finance, genetics, and espionage are transforming our view of the elusive ancient world. “It’s like detective work. To some degree, paleogeology is merely an academic enthusiasm. “It’s like detective work,” Mueller said.
Google Ventures is coming to Europe with a $100 million fund for startups Google has confirmed that it is launching a European arm of its Google Ventures VC fund, following media speculation last week. The company’s first European fund is $100 million and it will be used “invest in the best ideas from the best European entrepreneurs, and help them bring those ideas to life”. The company has an initial team of four general partners at its European office in London, which the Financial Times reports includes Google Europe exec Eze Vidra, entrepreneur Tom Hulme, angel investor Peter Read, and Code.org UK head Avid Larizadeh. The team will be based in Clerkenwell, a stone’s throw from London’s ‘Silicon Roundabout’ startup district, but it will invest across Europe. ➤ Google Ventures invests in Europe [Google]
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that reality does not depend on the person measuring it Quantum mechanics arose in the 1920s, and since then scientists have disagreed on how best to interpret it. Many interpretations, including the Copenhagen interpretation presented by Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, and in particular, von Neumann-Wigner interpretation, state that the consciousness of the person conducting the test affects its result. On the other hand, Karl Popper and Albert Einstein thought that an objective reality exists. In their most recent article, Finnish civil servants Jussi Lindgren and Jukka Liukkonen, who study quantum mechanics in their free time, take a look at the uncertainty principle that was developed by Heisenberg in 1927. However, in their study Lindgren and Liukkonen concluded that the correlation between a location and momentum, i.e., their relationship, is fixed. "The results suggest that there is no logical reason for the results to be dependent on the person conducting the measurement. "We study quantum mechanics as a statistical theory.
Watch how immigration in America has changed since 1820 by Alvin Chang on April 26, 2016 The idea of banning an entire racial or ethnic group from entering the US isn't a new proposal. Donald Trump is far from the first person to propose it. In 1790, the US banned nonwhite people from naturalizing as citizens. The graphic above shows how these policies affect who enters the country. And we're back again to talking about restricting entire immigrant groups from coming to the US. 200 years of immigration also show how today's population came to be But this isn't just a story about immigration. In 1820, where the graphic starts, there were only about 9.7 million people in the United States, which is about the current population of Sweden. It is these people, and their descendants, who largely make up today's US population. At the end of the graphic, you can see how colorful the bars get, which is partially the reason why demographers predict the majority of the US will be minorities by the year 2044.