As a follow up to my previous post about the likelihood of being killed by various forms of transport, I went and looked up comparable statistics on the space shuttle.
I'll probably get docked a week's pay for saying this, but Popular Science Mechanics is getting better all the time. When was the last time you can remember a science magazine doing enterprise journalism?...
credit: Paul Carlon I'm betting that even if you don't live in New York, you heard about the explosion / subsequent volcano of steam, mud and asphalt that erupted yesterday evening at 41st st...
I know we're not all scientists here, but anyone who has even glanced at the graphs in a few scientific papers will instantly recognize that trying to fit a curve to the following data is prima facie idiotic: I'm not going to go into the reasons why picking an inflection point at the one outlying data point on this graph is so, let us not be delicate-- dumb --that you don't even have to understand the math to sense why this is wrong...
From The Editors: In "Future Farming: A Return to Roots" in the new August issue, Jerry D. Glover, Cindy M. Cox and John P. Reganold argue that many of the problems associated with the modern agriculture--soil erosion, excessive water demands, high energy inputs and so on--are linked to the fact that most important grain crops are annuals, not perennials...
Artificial fertilizer was a by-product of the effort to wage deadlier warfare, and sex drives early adoption of new media technologies, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the killer app that finally brings stem cell therapy into the mainstream might be, as one Australian news service so delicately put it: "Lunch break boob jobs."Using fat from the patient's own body to rebuild other areas is not a novel idea, but such reconstructions often fail as the fat is simply reabsorbed.However using fat-derived stem cells appears to overcome this problem, according to the company behind the procedure, Cytori Therapeutics.Quoth the BBC.UPDATE:A PR rep for Cytori Therapeutics, the company behind this technology, just contacted us with the information that (surprise surprise!) the original news items on this technology were a bit, shall we say, sensationalized?...
Your cell phone could be your link to personally tailored beauty products
Scientists often uncover truths that are politically inconvenient for whomever is in power. Which doesn't make it any less saddening that this sort of thing goes on.
Quantum mechanics shows up in editorial cartoons about as often as James K. Polk, which is why it's especially gratifying to see such a nuanced application of it in today's episode of This Modern World...
Hormones don't necessarily make men violent, but they do cause them to seek social dominance
Like a tinfoil hat for your house, new technology promises to block hackers' access to your wireless transmissions—and protect against EMP attacks and explosions, to boot
Despite spending half what the U.S. does on health care, Canada doesn't appear to be any worse at looking after the health of its citizens
Powered by the same chip that drives cell phones and the Nintendo DS, a little blue box is poised to do for robotics what the Altair did for home computers
Vaccines, air bags, contact lenses and the technology that made the personal computer revolution possible are just a few of the items whose inventors are being honored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame [click here to view the slideshow]...
A new model of poker player behavior reproduces results from actual games
Familiarity with an idea makes some people more likely to forget where it came from—and confuse fact with fiction
Depending on whom you ask, not having babies is easier, or harder, than ever
An interview with the professor who estimated the probability that a particular tomb could have been the final resting place of a family other than that of Jesus
Should You Accept the 600-to-One Odds That the Talpiot Tomb Belonged to Jesus?
Humans aren't the only animals who engage in elaborate courtship rituals—view the gallery
