Monthly Archives: March 2014

Multiverse Controversy Heats Up – Scientific American

The multiverse is one of the most divisive topics in physics, and it just became more so. The major announcement last week of evidence for primordial ripples in spacetime has bolstered a cosmological theory called inflation, and with it, some … Continue reading

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Palaeontology: Shovel face | The Economist

YUNNAN province, in China, is home to the Luoping formation, a trove of spectacularly preserved fossils of creatures that roamed the seas 240m years ago, during the Triassic period. The latest—and arguably most spectacular yet—is Atopodentatus unicus, described this week … Continue reading

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The Dream of Intelligent Robot Friends – Carla Diana – The Atlantic

Karotz is an Internet-enabled console in the shape of an abstracted rabbit. One sits on my coffee table, continuously connected to WiFi, programmed to broadcast certain bits of live information such as Twitter messages, news headlines or weather reports by … Continue reading

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A World without Scarcity?

An intellectual property lawyer considers the philosophical and legal consequences of a world where anything can be printed and copied. …new technologies promise to do for a variety of physical goods and even services what the Internet has already done … Continue reading

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The Overwhelm

Brigid Schulte, author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, talks with the Atlantic Monthly. Schulte scrutinizes this state of affairs: Why do we all feel so overworked? How is that feeling different for men … Continue reading

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New spin on zebra stripe origins › News in Science (ABC Science)

A weird zebra-stripe pattern discovered in Earth’s inner Van Allen radiation belt is generated by the planet’s rotation, according to new research. The study, reported in the journal Nature, changes science’s understanding of Earth’s radiation belts, and may provide new … Continue reading

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What Would Plato Tweet? – NYTimes.com

…For the past few years I’d been obsessed with trying to figure out what lay behind the spectacular achievements that had occurred there. In a mere couple of centuries, Greek speakers went from anomie and illiteracy, lacking even an alphabet, … Continue reading

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The Future of Brain Implants – WSJ.com

What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, … Continue reading

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The Germ Theory of Democracy, Dictatorship, and Your Cherished Beliefs – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

Anyone with a basic grasp of biology knows that all animals have immune systems that battle pathogens—be they viruses, bacteria, parasites, or fungi—on the cellular level. And it’s also fairly well understood that animals sometimes exhibit outward behaviors that serve … Continue reading

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Elephants recognize the voices of their enemies : Nature News & Comment

Humans are among the very few animals that constitute a threat to elephants. Yet not all people are a danger — and elephants seem to know it. The giants have shown a remarkable ability to use sight and scent to … Continue reading

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The Youngest Technorati – NYTimes.com

Ryan [Orbuch]… is among the many entrepreneurially minded, technologically skilled teenagers who are striving to do serious business. Their work is enabled by low-cost or free tools to make apps or to design games, and they are encouraged by tech … Continue reading

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How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner | King’s Review – Magazine

An interview with molecular biologist Sydney Brenner… In most places in the world, you live your social life and your ordinary life in the lab. You don’t know anybody else. Sometimes you don’t even know other people in the same … Continue reading

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Graduate Student Research Symposium – TWU Federation of North Texas Area Universities – Texas Woman’s University

The Federation of North Texas Area Universities is pleased to sponsor its fifth annual Graduate Student Research Symposium on April 25, 2014, at Texas Woman’s University (Symposium Location & Directions). At the Symposium, graduate students from Federation disciplines across the three universities–Texas A&M-Commerce, … Continue reading

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Public Books — Stop Defending the Humanities

Those who matter most to the humanities fall, I think, into two classes. The most important is that relatively small group of 18-year-olds (disproportionately few from poorer families) who are inclined to study the humanities. Our immediate future rests primarily … Continue reading

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