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Some ideas are better than others. The machinery for distinguishing them is an essential tool in dealing with the world and especially in dealing with the future.
— Carl Sagan on mastering the vital balance between skepticism and open-mindedness (via explore-blog)
(Source: , via ikenbot)
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Craig Venter has been on a tear of invention and exploration. In 2004 he sailed around the world, discovering thousands of new species and sequencing millions of new genes. In 2007 he unveiled his own genome, unexpurgated (it revealed a predisposition for risk-taking, among other things). And in 2010 he announced the first successful synthesis of life—a unique critter borne from two distinct organisms, thus proving for the first time that it is indeed possible to create new organisms for specific purposes and functions. He is, in every respect, the epitome of an icon—a figure who has pushed science forward, sometimes by sheer force of will.
Photo: Joe Pugliese
Everyone’s favorite genome cowboy, profiled at Wired Science.
To get your appetite going, here’s some of his words about how the human genome project panned out, and where we’re going from here (emphasis mine):
“… what most people think about when it comes to genetics is personalized medicine. If we sequence your genome or my genome, what can we interpret, what can we predict for the future, what can we change? That’s in its absolute infancy. We’re at the point where we don’t need one genome or just a few genomes to interpret your genome. We need tens of thousands of genomes as a starting point, coupled with everything we can know about their physiology. It’s only when we do that giant computer search, putting all that DNA together, that we will be able to make sense in a meaningful statistical manner of what your DNA is telling you. We’re just at the start of trying to do that.”
(Source: Wired, via darylelockhart)
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Handy Guide to Reading Science News!
Someone very smart once said (paraphrasing here): “Your head should be open to new ideas, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
Keep these tips in mind when you read science news, and beware alarmism. You don’t have to stop feeling amazed and awed to be a little cautious and skeptical. I’ll be posting more tips like this in the future.
(via Double X Science)
Very useful. Read it, live by it
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A magnetic field visualized
Love simple, effective demonstrations like this!
Speaking of magnetism, have you seen this amazing ferrofluids video yet?
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Ambigram duality.
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Einstein’s office on the day he died, April 18 1955
Fifty seven years ago, the world lost one of its greatest minds. This is a photo of Einstein’s office as it appeared, still cluttered with things he was working on the day he died that day.
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The Secret of the Ooze: Two Years After the Spill
Al Jazeera has a frightening, damning, and infuriating report on the ongoing damage to the Gulf of Mexico ecosystems since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It’s been nearly two years since the Macondo well was ruptured, spilling almost 5 million barrels of oil and requiring almost 2 million barrels of dispersants to clean it up.
Fishermen are reporting shrimp catches full of eyeless shrimp, as well as fish and shellfish with oozing sores and black gills. The damage doesn’t seem limited to oil, either. Manganese-heavy drilling mud and dispersant lefotvers are showing up at even higher rates than petroleum.
Head over to Al Jazeera to read the full article. The Gulf has not recovered, and it will likely take most of a lifetime to do so. It’s important that scientists continue to get financial support to monitor the area and that the government keep pressure on BP to do their part. Not just this year, but until the mistake is fixed.
This is one of the most diverse and fruitful ecosystems in America, and we must repair it.
This gave me the chills. FUCK YOU, BP.
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mdt:
Back off man, I’m a scientist.
via Star Power
A young Neil deGrasse Tyson. From the article:
Frank Bash, professor emeritus of astronomy and former director of UT’s McDonald Observatory, supervised Tyson as a teaching assistant for Intro to Astronomy. “Neil had a natural gift for teaching,” Bash says. “After he taught, the students would beg for him back. He did crazy stuff—moonwalking in class.”
Doing the moonwalk for his students wasn’t a gag, Tyson says—it was a strategy. “If you’re only using words to communicate as a teacher, why show up?” he says. “Why not just type your notes? Teaching is a full-body performance. The moonwalk was all the rage in 1983, and the students loved it. It made the material work for them.”
According to Tyson, one of the biggest reasons scientists so often struggle to communicate research to the public is not jargon or lack of interest. It’s a culture gap.
“The average person watches 30 hours of television per week,” he says. “But the average professor doesn’t own a TV, let alone watch the Kardashians or cute kitten videos on YouTube or whatever. And people live for that stuff. We have to speak their language.”
(via jtotheizzoe)
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This post had to happen
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Your Handedness May Make Decisions For You
RCS Highlights:
We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, absorbing information, weighing it carefully, and making thoughtful decisions. But, as it turns out, we’re kidding ourselves. Over the past few decades, scientists have shown there are many different internal and external factors influencing how we think, feel, communicate, and make decisions at any given moment. One particularly powerful influence may be our own bodies…
Cognitive scientist Daniel Casasanto.. has shown that quirks of our bodies affect our thinking in predictable ways, across many different areas of life, from language to mental imagery to emotion… an idea Casasanto has termed the ‘body-specificity hypothesis.’
One way our bodies appear to shape our decision-making is through handedness. Casasanto and his colleagues explored whether being right-handed or left-handed might influence our judgments about abstract ideas like value, intelligence, and honesty.
Through a series of experiments, they found that, in general, people tend to prefer the things that they encounter on the same side as their dominant hand… right-handers routinely chose the product, person, or creature they saw on the right side of the page, while left-handers preferred the one on the left. These kinds of preferences have been found in children as young as 5 years old…
This preference for things on our dominant side isn’t set in stone. Right-handers who’ve had their right hands permanently handicapped start to associate ‘good’ with ‘left.’ The same goes for righties whose ‘good’ hand is temporarily handicapped in the laboratory, Casasanto and colleagues found. “After a few minutes of fumbling with their right hand, righties start to think like lefties,” says Casasanto. “If you change people’s bodies, you change their minds.”
It’s clear that this association has implications beyond the laboratory… ”Since about 90 percent of the population is right-handed,” says Casasanto, “people who want to attract customers, sell products, or get votes should consider that the right side of a page or a computer screen might be the ‘right’ place to be.”
Somewhat related to my other post today about brains being biological computers, this kind of research demonstrates, yet again, that we (whatever are consciousness is) are not entirely in control of ourselves, that our free will may not necessarily be entirely our own will (though I’ll leave aside how that might effect the notion of “free” as well). It shows that there’s background programming running behind the scenes in our minds and that like computers, our biology and psychology uses shortcuts, heuristics, to work well. Additionally, many of those shortcuts are indicative of our creator - not a terrifying Apple factory in China, but our evolutionary history (such as our instinctual fear of snakes).
My $.02. I’ll leave you to take from this fascinating article what you will.
P.s. Some reader comments.
(via darylelockhart)
