L'article faux qui a rapporté 1,4 million de visites à BuzzFeed - Capture d'écran de BuzzFeed - Au lieu de faire quelque chose de productif comme finir le deuxième chapitre de mon livre (c'est en bonne voie de toute façon), j'ai passé une heure ce mardi 3 décembre à regarder comment l'Internet s'était fait avoir par un nouveau canular. Elan Gale, un producteur de The Bachelor et donc une des pires personnes de la planète, a passé une partie de son Thanksgiving à live-tweeter ce qu'il affirmait être une querelle avec une femme irritante portant «des jeans de maman» qui se plaignait trop bruyamment du retard de son avion. Gale lui a envoyé des boissons et des petits mots pour lui dire de se taire et de «manger une bite» («eat a dick» en anglais, expression utilisée pour répondre en marquant son énervement à une attaque verbale). publicité Internet a adoré, surtout BuzzFeed. Problème: l'histoire de Gale n'était pas vraie. BuzzFeed s'est moqué de moi Je ne dis pas que BuzzFeed devrait virer qui que ce soit. Malheureusement fréquent «Trop bon pour vérifier»
How Much Nature Do We Have to Use? | Guest Blog Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Notnarayan It’s so easy to slip into debt, but so hard to dig oneself out. Just ask the typical wage earner—even business and national leaders. People who know better still wait for that next paycheck, assumed pay raise or small miracle to help them catch up. As any accountant will tell you, accumulating debt is not a sound financial management policy. If you want to grow your savings and avoid going into financial debt, you need to spend your money no faster than you earn it. Similarly, if you want to ensure that you are not overusing ecological assets—which provide the ecological services on which all human activities, including the economy, depend—you need to know how productive these assets are, and the rate at which you use them. Biocapacity can be compared with the rate at which you are using these ecological services—your “Ecological Footprint.” To avoid sinking further into ecological debt, we need to rein in our ecological overspending.
Hierarchy of Beings How snowflakes get their shape The key is here: each branch on a single snowflake experiences the same history of variations as it falls, but different flakes don't. The thing with (classical) physics is that if you start with identical starting conditions, and subject something to the same conditions, you get the same outcome. But isn't it amazing that the snowflake is small enough that even then there are no variations on the conditions each of the six branches experiences?! It is amazing :D Snowflakes are such a weird size, really — just big enough that we can see them, but as you said, small enough to act like a "particle" when you consider its environment.
The Balance of Nature and Human Impact.Klaus Rohde, editor. The Balance of Nature and Human Impact. Klaus Rohde, editor.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.426 pp. ISBN 97811070109614 (hardcover), $99 Aldina M. + Author Affiliations Human impact on the natural environment has reached unprecedented levels. This book summarizes ecological responses to global environmental change; it is relevant to interested readers of different backgrounds trying to understand why scientists are worried about current environmental change. The book starts with Kevin Gaston’s foreword and an analogy between stability concepts needed for sea kayaking and instability … Les animaux: êtres sensibles, sujets de droit LE MONDE SCIENCE ET TECHNO | • Mis à jour le | Par Catherine Vincent Que dit la science de l'aptitude des bêtes à ressentir la douleur ? Comment ces connaissances sont-elles prises en compte dans les textes de loi ? "Dans ce domaine, les recherches françaises sont essentiellement menées par l'Institut national de recherche agronomique (INRA), dans le but de réduire la douleur dans les techniques d'élevage ou d'abattage, précise Thierry Auffret Van der Kemp, directeur de la LFDA. Chez l'homme comme chez l'animal, la douleur remplit une fonction d'alerte : elle signale à celui qui la ressent la présence d'une menace sur son intégrité physique, et lui permet de déclencher des mécanismes de défense ou d'adaptation. A tout seigneur, tout honneur, c'est sur les mammifères - et sur l'homme en premier lieu - que les savoirs ont d'abord progressé. Variables physiologiques Mais chez les autres ? Et pourtant ! Décapodes Autre famille longtemps sous-estimée : les crustacés décapodes. Boîte de Pandore
Listen to Isaac Asimov in 1988, explaining why scientists rule Each generation informs the next, a larger public belief in the mystical only hinders our progress as we return to that which we have ruled out as possible, many of these belief systems insisting that their followers act on blind faith and follow doctrine without question. A return to tradition only stifles progress as we are tempted to continue centuries old conflicts started by men long dead. It makes me sad to know that I shared the world with Issac Asimov and Carl Sagan and other great minds before I was aware of them or the brilliance of their vision and now that I have learned to respect them they are no longer here to admire. I am however grateful that they have left us with documents such as this interview where they speak from the heart for the coming generation that is ready to listen.
You haven’t so much lost a planet, as gained five dwarves… | Guest Blog …or maybe a few hundred. Photo: A. V. Flox One of my favorite shirts honors the brave souls of the former planet Pluto, those billion voices which shouted out in agony and were suddenly silent as the International Astronomical Union’s space station destroyed– wait, no. What dwarf planets are Let’s start with the reason Pluto got demoted in the first place. So let’s take a look at what they are, where they are, and what’s going on with them. Eight of our nine dwarf planets and candidates, to scale, with their moons and our best guess of their colors. First of all, there’s an official definition of a dwarf planet that makes it possible to actually argue about which is which. More generally, planets can clear debris out of their path in several ways. So that tells us what a dwarf planet is, and that definition is mostly useful so that we have clear categories we can talk about. A Grand Tour of the Dwarves So where do these dwarf planets live? The outer Solar System, Jupiter and beyond.
Les vaches n'ont pas de sentiments: l'auto-persuasion qui nous permet de manger de la viande Pourquoi un caniche aurait-il plus de sentiments qu’un agneau? Votre chat est-il plus intelligent qu’un veau? Des questions auxquelles des psychologues australiens ont indirectement soumis des étudiants via des tests sur leur perception des pensées des animaux. Selon les résultats de cette étude, publiés dans le Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, l’homme s’auto-persuade de l’absence de pensée chez les animaux qu’il retrouve dans son assiette. Sans ça, impossible de dévorer un adorable petit agneau ou une vache au regard touchant. Pas de sentiments pour la boucherie Trois tests ont été menés par les psychologues. Le deuxième test a démontré que les mangeurs de viande avaient tendance à nier la souffrance animale lorsqu’on leur rappelle le lien entre la viande et la mort des animaux. 66 carnivores ont observé deux photos: une vache et un mouton dans une prairie. Le «paradoxe de la viande» Audrey Chauvet
The future of nukes: Even if everything goes wrong, nothing happens GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN—Carlo Rubbia, Nobel Prize winner and former Director General of CERN, has spent his more recent career thinking about energy, and he has some strong thoughts on nuclear power. Those thoughts have been driven in part by climate change (nuclear provides the only source of low-carbon electricity that can be deployed anywhere), but they've also been driven by the events at Fukushima. At least twice during a Nobel Dialog panel, Rubbia said that the sort of risk analyses that we've been doing for nuclear power are simply insufficient. The analyses are based on probabilities: if the failure of a given pump creates an obvious risk, you simply put in a second pump, then a third if necessary. In the end, you get an infinitesimal risk that you can approximate as zero. In its place, Rubbia said that we need to have some form of design that makes safety deterministic—something where, even if things go completely wrong, nothing happens. He's hedging his bets.
Plastisphere microbes go to sea on flotsam fragments - environment - 02 July 2013 (Image: Erik Zettler/Sea Education Association) We dump huge amounts of plastic waste into the ocean every year, much of it ending up as microplastic – fragments less than 5 millimetres across. Famously, much of it has gathered in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it may harm animals that inadvertently swallow it. Now, it appears that microplastic is hosting life as well as hurting it, creating a new niche in the vast oceans. Linda Amaral-Zettler of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and colleagues collected microplastic from the north Atlantic and examined it with scanning electron microscopy and gene-sequencing techniques. Some of the bacteria could break down hydrocarbons (the building blocks of plastics), and the plastic fragments were often pitted. On the flipside, one of the samples was dominated by Vibrio bacteria – the genus that causes cholera. Microbes are not the only organisms to adopt the plastic lifestyle. More From New Scientist Recommended by
Les animaux en toute conscience Darwin affirmait, il y a cent cinquante ans, qu’il n’y a pas une différence de nature mais de degré entre l’homme et les autres espèces animales. Pourtant, il y a encore quelques décennies, parler chez l’animal de conscience, c’est-à-dire des états supérieurs de l’activité intellectuelle, eût été inconcevable dans les milieux scientifiques. Il y régnait un climat de «mentaphobie» dénoncé par Donald Griffin, fondateur de l’éthologie cognitive. Ce temps semble définitivement révolu. A l’issue d’un congrès à l’université de Cambridge sur le sujet, des scientifiques internationaux renommés, dont Stephen Hawking, ont signé le 7 juillet une Déclaration de conscience des animaux (3), dont la conclusion est que «les humains ne sont pas les seuls à posséder les substrats neurologiques qui produisent la conscience. Les animaux non humains, soit tous les mammifères, les oiseaux, et de nombreuses autres créatures, comme les poulpes, possèdent aussi ces substrats neurologiques».
3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production | Autopia Engineer Jim Kor and his design for the Urbee 2. Photo: Sara Payne Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles. If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. Urbee’s approach to maximum miles per gallon starts with lightweight construction – something that 3-D printing is particularly well suited for. Jim Kor is the engineering brains behind the Urbee. “We thought long and hard about doing a second one,” he says of the Urbee. Kor and his team built the three-wheel, two-passenger vehicle at RedEye, an on-demand 3-D printing facility. Photo: Sara Payne “We’re calling it race car safety,” Kor says.