The Story of Science: Power, Proof and Passion For thousands of years we have wrestled with the great questions of existence. Who are we? What is the world made of? How did we get here? Each week, medical journalist Michael Mosley traces the often unpredictable path we have taken. It is a tale of courage and of fear, of hope and disaster, of persistence and success. This is the story of how history made science and how science made history, and how the ideas which emerged made the modern world. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - )
What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit? | 2011 Annual Question | Edge James Flynn has defined "shorthand abstractions" (or "SHA's") as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates ("market", "placebo", "random sample," "naturalistic fallacy," are a few of his examples). His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk which can be used as an element in thinking and debate. The Edge Question 2011 The term 'scientific"is to be understood in a broad sense as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be the human spirit, the role of great people in history, or the structure of DNA. [Thanks to Steven Pinker for suggesting this year's Edge Question and to Daniel Kahneman for advice on its presentation.] 165 CONTRIBUTORS (115,000 words): Daniel Kahneman, Richard Dawkins, V.S. Paul Jáuregui This year, the question posed by Edge was: "What scientific concept improve our cognitive tools?". ... [Continue] DIE ZEIT January 20, 2011
100 Best (Free) Science Documentaries Online No matter how much you know, there is always something new to learn about science. While your college courses may cover the basics, you can get a more in-depth look at a wide variety of topics from Internet resources such as these great documentaries. These selections will help you explore everything from the inner reaches of the human mind to the outer areas of our universe and just about everything else in between. Better yet, they’re all free to watch online so you can learn more without spending a dime. Health and Medicine These documentaries cover topics like health care, diseases, nutrition, nursing, and more so you can get great insights into health and medicine. Super Size Me: In this movie, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock attempts to subsist on only a diet of McDonald’s for a full month. Drugs Learn how drugs impact the brain and the variety of legal restrictions imposed upon them from these documentaries. Genetics Evolution and Biological History Physics The Quantum Revolution: Dr. Geology
Aurora shooting: If we want to prevent the next massacre, we need to cure our addiction to evil In 1996, a man shot and killed 35 people in Port Arthur, Tasmania. If degrees of abjectness are assignable in such cases, for a massacre to unfold at Port Arthur was, for Australians, doubly awful. As Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, his superlative history of the country’s origins as a penal colony: “Port Arthur has always dominated the popular historical imagination in Australia as the emblem of the miseries of transportation, ‘the Hell on Earth.’” Since the late 1970s, the ruins at Port Arthur, once the British Empire’s most pitiless labor camp, had been treated on the model of the European death camps; as a secular holy place, a site to wander in while meditating on how human beings subjugate and deform and generally thieve the dignity from other human beings. One of the first victims of the Port Arthur massacre, facing the barrel of the gun, said simply: “Not here.” Narcissism, persecution, resentment—even as I write it, I think check, check, check.
The Alchemist Newsletter: Apr 26, 2012 — Welcome to ChemWeb Aspirin by any other name An international research program has revealed once more that the earliest of commercial pharmaceuticals, aspirin, has yet more roles to play in medicine. The researchers have demonstrated that salicylate, the active metabolite, directly increases the activity of AMP-activated protein kinase. This enzyme is key player in the regulation of cell growth and metabolism and is, figuratively speaking, the cellular fuel-gauge. It is triggered by exercise and by the anti-diabetic medication metformin, so understanding and modulating its activity could be relevant to overweight, obesity and type 2 diabetes. “We show that salicylate increases fat burning and reduces liver fat in obese mice," says McMaster University's Greg Steinberg who is a principal investigator on the project. McMaster Researchers Find Potential for New Uses of Old Drug back to top
All Work and No Play Make the Baining the "Dullest Culture on Earth" The Baining—one of the indigenous cultural groups of Papua New Guinea—have the reputation, at least among some researchers, of being the dullest culture on earth. Early in his career , in the 1920s, the famous British anthropologist Gregory Bateson spent 14 months among them, until he finally left in frustration. He called them “unstudiable,” because of their reluctance to say anything interesting about their lives and their failure to exhibit much activity beyond the mundane routines of daily work, and he later wrote that they lived “a drab and colorless existence.” Forty years later, Jeremy Pool, a graduate student in anthropology, spent more than a year living among them in the attempt to develop a doctoral dissertation. He too found almost nothing interesting to say about the Baining, and the experience caused him to leave anthropology and go into computer science (reference here ). Fajans studied the Baining in the late 1970s and again in the early 1990s.
In the Dark Water clock A display of two outflow water clocks from the Ancient Agora Museum in Athens. The top is an original from the late 5th century BC. The bottom is a reconstruction of a clay original. A water clock or clepsydra (Greek κλέπτειν kleptein, 'to steal'; ὕδωρ hydor, 'water') is any timepiece in which time is measured by the regulated flow of liquid into (inflow type) or out from (outflow type) a vessel where the amount is then measured. Water clocks, along with sundials, are likely to be the oldest time-measuring instruments, with the only exceptions being the vertical gnomon and the day-counting tally stick.[1] Where and when they were first invented is not known, and given their great antiquity it may never be. Some modern timepieces are called "water clocks" but work differently from the ancient ones. Some water clock designs were developed independently and some knowledge was transferred through the spread of trade. Regional development[edit] Persia[edit] Egypt[edit] Babylon[edit] India[edit]
Brightsurf: Science Current Events and Science News Famous Plagiarists: Could it Happen Today? A recent article on Cracked.com entitled 5 Great Men Who Built Their Careers on Plagiarism has gotten a lot of attention and a few people have emailed me about it. The five men on the list, Stephen Ambrose, T.S. Eliot, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. History is littered with famous authors, scientists and other important figures who we later discovered that their works were plagiarized and only a few cases of where they were actually punished for it. These thoughts always put writers on edge. Fortunately, the plagiarisms reported in the article, for the most part, took place in a different era. Stephen Ambrose Ambrose is the only case actually from the last 25 years. In 2001, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing large passages out of his then-new novel, the Wild Blue. Both books contained passages virtually identical to previous works by other historians. Could it Happen Today? It is worth noting that Ambrose was actually caught. T.S. T.S. Very unlikely. Dr. Dr. Almost impossible. Dr. Dr.
Symphony of Science Graphing the history of philosophy « Drunks&Lampposts A close up of ancient and medieval philosophy ending at Descartes and Leibniz If you are interested in this data set you might like my latest post where I use it to make book recommendations. This one came about because I was searching for a data set on horror films (don’t ask) and ended up with one describing the links between philosophers. To cut a long story very short I’ve extracted the information in the influenced by section for every philosopher on Wikipedia and used it to construct a network which I’ve then visualised using gephi It’s an easy process to repeat. First I’ll show why I think it’s worked as a visualisation. Each philosopher is a node in the network and the lines between them (or edges in the terminology of graph theory) represents lines of influence. It gets more interesting when we use Gephi to identify communities (or modules) within the network. It has been fairly successful. The Continental Tradition The graph is probably most insightful when you zoom in close.