Madame Curie's Passion | History & Archaeology When Marie Curie came to the United States for the first time, in May 1921, she had already discovered the elements radium and polonium, coined the term “radio-active” and won the Nobel Prize—twice. But the Polish-born scientist, almost pathologically shy and accustomed to spending most of her time in her Paris laboratory, was stunned by the fanfare that greeted her. She attended a luncheon on her first day at the house of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie before receptions at the Waldorf Astoria and Carnegie Hall. She would later appear at the American Museum of Natural History, where an exhibit commemorated her discovery of radium. The American Chemical Society, the New York Mineralogical Club, cancer research facilities and the Bureau of Mines held events in her honor. The marquee event of her six-week U.S. tour was held in the East Room of the White House. This year marks the 100th anniversary of her second Nobel Prize, the first time anyone had achieved such a feat.
The next Pangaea will have pieces missing - environment - 16 September 2011 THE world's ultimate jigsaw puzzle will be missing a couple of pieces when it is next put together. A Pangaea-like supercontinent is forecast to form in 250 million years, but a new model predicts that superplumes rising from hotspots deep in the Earth's mantle will keep South America and Antarctica from re-merging with the other continents. Supercontinents form, break apart, then form again every few hundred million years. Geophysicists have traced the process back to early in Earth's history by measuring magnetic fields in ancient rocks, and some have attempted to extrapolate from the present motion of the plates the likely shape of the next supercontinent. That supercontinent is already beginning to form: Africa is slowly colliding with Europe, and the fringes of Australia have begun to collide with Asia. variously dubbed "Amasia" or "Novopangaea". New Scientist Not just a website! More From New Scientist Invisible: Photo of a landscape no human can ever see (New Scientist)
Give geo- and genetic engineering a fair trial - 07 September 2011 IN A city in eastern Brazil, scientists are preparing to release millions of genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild. If the trial works, the people of Juazeiro will have GM technology to thank for keeping them safe from dengue fever (see “Swarm troopers: Mutant armies waging war in the wild“). Meanwhile, in Bristol, UK, scientists are preparing one of the first experiments to figure out how to engineer the climate. At first glance these tests have little in common, but dig a little deeper and parallels start to emerge. The geoengineering experiment, in itself an innocuous effort to test one proposed system for pumping cooling particles into the atmosphere, has already attracted the ire of the ETC Group, a Canadian NGO that is a leading opponent of geoengineering. The release of GM mosquitoes into the wild has so far attracted relatively little protest, following encouraging results from a field trial in the Cayman Islands. A similar argument applies to the use of GM mosquitoes.
The Elements Revealed: An Interactive Periodic Table In the October 2011 issue of Scientific American, we celebrate the International Year of Chemistry. Learn more about its impact on our daily lives in our Special Report. UPDATED: 06/18/2013 In honor of the 2013 Lindau meeting, which focuses on chemistry, we have updated our interactive periodic table with links to Nature Chemistry's In Your Element essay series. Each essay tells the story of a particular element, often describing its discovery, history and eventual uses. Main Sources & More to Explore: The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. Interactive by Krista Fuentes Davide Castelvecchi Davide Castelvecchi is a freelance science writer based in Rome and a contributing editor for Scientific American magazine.
What Day Is Doomsday? How to Mentally Calculate the Day of the Week for Any Date Every now and then a prominent religious zealot proclaims that the end is nigh. Harold Camping is the most recent example of such a doomsayer. He declared that judgment day commenced on May 21, 2011, and he also predicted that the destruction of the universe would follow on October 21. Wouldn't it be nice to know which day of the week our universe would end? It's easy to declare that October 21 is a Friday, and many people can tell you that May 21 was a Saturday—because those are relatively recent dates. In a book titled 1994? Algorithms in Wonderland When he was not writing literary works like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll dabbled in mathematics. Many years later longtime Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner read about Carroll's calendar algorithm. The doomsday rule is now more commonly known as the doomsday algorithm. The idea that makes the doomsday algorithm tick is that certain memorizable dates always share the same day of the week within any given year.
A Tweet is Worth (at least) 140 Words So, I recently read An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. It is a very nice popular introduction to Information Theory, a modern scientific pursuit to quantify information started by Claude Shannon in 1948. This got me thinking. Increasingly, people try to hold conversations on Twitter, where posts are limited to 140 characters. After some coding and investigation, I created this, an experimental twitter English compression algorithm capable of compressing around 140 words into 140 characters. So, what's the story? UPDATE: Tomo in the comments below made a chrome extension for the algorithm Entropy Ultimately, we need some way to assess how much information is contained in a signal. Shannon tried to quantify how we could estimate just how much information any message contains. This question might sound a little familiar. where p_i stands for the probability of a particular configuration, and we are supposed to sum over all possible configurations of the system.
This is not a carrot: Paraconsistent mathematics Paraconsistent mathematics is a type of mathematics in which contradictions may be true. In such a system it is perfectly possible for a statement A and its negation not A to both be true. How can this be, and be coherent? What does it all mean? And why should we think mathematics might actually be paraconsistent? We'll look at the last question first starting with a quick trip into mathematical history. Hilbert's programme and Gödel's theorem David Hilbert, 1862 - 1943. In the early 20th century, the mathematician David Hilbert proposed a project called Hilbert's programme: to ground all of mathematics on the basis of a small, elegant collection of self-evident truths, or axioms. However, Kurt Gödel famously proved that this was impossible, at least in the sense that mathematicians of the time had in mind. In any formal system that is free of contradictions and captures arithmetic, there are statements which cannot be proven true or false from within that system. Russell's paradox , then
Technology Is One Path Toward Sustainability A case for modernization as the road to salvation by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus Illustration: Thom Lang / Corbis SOMETIME AROUND 2014, Italy will complete construction of seventy-eight mobile floodgates aimed at protecting Venice’s three inlets from the rising tides of the Adriatic Sea. The massive doors—twenty meters by thirty meters, and five meters thick—will, most of the time, lie flat on the sandy seabed between the lagoon and the sea. But when a high tide is predicted, the doors will empty themselves of water and fill with compressed air, rising up on hinges to keep the Adriatic out of the city. Nowhere else in the world have humans so constantly had to create and re-create their infrastructure in response to a changing natural environment than in Venice. In truth, the grandeur that is Venice has always rested—quite literally—on a series of pretentious, costly, and environmentally harmful technological gambles.
Beliefs About Alien Intelligence Posted 10.21.11 NOVA Do intelligent aliens exist in the universe? In this interview, Michael Shermer, author and founder of the Skeptics Society, helps deconstruct the question of extraterrestrial intelligence, along the way touching on topics as wide-ranging as intelligence swarms, carbon chauvinism, Neanderthals, and protoscience, to name just a few. Michael Shermer is the founder of the Skeptics Society, editor in chief of Skeptic magazine, and the author of several books about beliefs, including most recently, The Believing Brain. NOVA: Do you remember when you first became interested in the question of extraterrestrial intelligence? Michael Shermer: I'm a big Star Trek fan, so that's part of the whole sci-fi scenario. But I'm also really interested in evolutionary theory. ET [extraterrestrial intelligence] is the same question. The counterargument to that is: Then how come there aren't that many creatures like us on Earth? How would you define intelligence? Yeah, operational. Right.