Tag Archives: science

When You’re Convinced Your Loved Ones Are Imposters [Memoryforever]

You're looking at a woman who resembles your mother. She moves and talks like your mother, and she's even dressed the same as your mother. In fact, she is your mother. But you're absolutely certain that she's an imposter
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Bill Nye the Science Guy: Don’t Worry, Your Phone Isn’t Making You Dumb [Brains]

Talking with Bill Nye the Science Guy is like meeting your favorite HS science teacher in a bar—the conversation might flail wildly, but you learn something at every twist. This week, I picked his brain about, well, brains. More
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feature: A photo tour of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Last week, Brookhaven National Lab hosted a press tour of their Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider , one of only two active particle colliders in the US. The tour also included a briefing on the work that Brookhaven scientists are doing at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. We'll cover the information in more detail in the near future, but we wanted to share some of the great photos we were able to take during the tour. Brookhaven's Peter Steinberg, whose session at last year's AAAS meeting received some coverage here , joined us for the bus ride out.
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Breakaway: High-Schooler-Designed Robots Play Gauntlet Soccer [Image Cache]

This picture shows entrants in this year's FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Breakaway match. Teams of ambitious high school kids build robots to compete in what's basically the American Gladiator version of soccer. It's pretty amazing. More
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The Weird Science of toilet plants and rhythmless reindeer

Well, that's one way to get a balanced diet: We all know that carnivorous plants have evolved in regions where the soil isn't very nutrient-rich, and they use their prey to supplement what they don't get via roots. Apparently, however, there are alternatives to eating the victim. I'll let the authors of a recent paper explain matters : "Three Bornean pitcher plant species... produce modified pitchers that 'capture' tree shrew faeces for nutritional benefit
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R/C Helicopters + Petri Dish + Flying Whale Snot = Science [Machines Vs Nature]

Instead of harpooning a whale for samples, wouldn't it be easier to just collect their snot using an R/C helicopter? More
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Why Sex-Ed Remains a Challenge for Social Media

Geoff Livingston co-founded Zoetica to focus on cause-related work, and released an award-winning book on new media Now is Gone in 2007. Addressing the very private nature of intimacy remains the most difficult aspect of sex-ed on the social web. While “Public Health 2.0″ is a top priority for related causes and organizations, it can be difficult to approach from a social media standpoint. Because it’s the most private and sensitive of issues, many people are embarrassed or offended by conversations about sex. However, many organizations, from mass media outlets to cause-specific efforts, are still attempting to use social tools to address reproductive health issues
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Remainders – The Things We Didn’t Post: Take a Look Edition [Remainders]

In today's Remainders: sights! Visit Paris in your browser with a magnificent 24 gigapixel photograph; behold America, circa 1972, in the EPA's 15,000 photograph Documerica project, and more. More
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The Void Between Protons and Electrons Makes Us All Phantoms [Science]

Are you real? You may seem real and solid, but you are mostly made of empty space. To demonstrate it, someone enlarged an electron to the size of one pixel , proportionally showing its distance from a equally scaled proton.
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Science journo quits writing to fight chiropractic libel suit

The UK's libel laws, which place the burden of proof onto those who have published inflammatory statements, have had a chilling effect on journalism in that nation, and have led to a closet industry in "libel tourism." As such, there have been repeated efforts to reform the laws, often led by professional organizations of writers and journalists. A 2008 case, however, brought a new community into the fight: science communicators, drawn in when the British Chiropractic Association sued a journalist for calling some of its medical claims "bogus." Although the legal fight has continued, the journalist in question, Simon Singh, has now been forced to quit his job at The Guardian in order to defend himself. Many of our readers who follow science news carefully are probably already aware of Singh's plight, but we've not covered it at Ars previously, so a recap seems in order. Singh, who was working on a book on alternative medicine, took a look at some of the claims promoted by BCA members, which suggest that chiropractic treatments are effective for diseases for which there is no apparent spinal involvement, like asthma
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