I think it's heartening that people are starting to talk about
careers for PhDs past Academia.
One problem with the acceptance of
dark energy and dark matter is that they are presented as if they are brothers, as if presenting merely the start of a new line of cheap ad hoc fudge factors: Dark energy, dark matter, dark force, what next? However, dark energy is not a fudge factor and not new.
Just what computer scientists want - dumb jocks getting all of the credit for artificial intelligence.
Or maybe computer scientists are simply letting football players think they matter, and they are really just data.
For artificial intelligence to get out of its 20-year rut, a computer has to be able to observe a complex operation, learn how to do it, and then optimize those operations or accomplish other related tasks. What if a computer could watch video of football plays, learn from them, and then design plays and control players in a football simulation or video game?
What constitutes racism?
If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism?
A recent survey of NIH R01 applications found that applications from black investigators were 13.2 % less likely to be awarded than whites while Asian investigators were 3.9 % less likely to have their work funded. This correlates to the number of applicants as well; blacks are only 1.4% of total applications while Asians are 16.2% and whites are almost 70%.
Our solar system, with planets over a range of sizes and moving in near-circular paths, seems to be unusual, according to a model in t Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society which finds that forming planetary systems may be knocked around by crashes with nearby clumps of material, leading to systems where planets have highly inclined orbits and where the smaller - and potentially habitable - worlds are thrown out completely.
Researchers have developed an inexpensive way to grade the ethanol potential of perennial grasses at the biorefinery's loading dock - the first use of near-infrared sensing (NIRS) to measure 20 components in switchgrass biomass that determine its potential value to biorefiners. These components include cell wall sugars, soluble sugars and lignin. With this information, 13 traits can be determined, including the efficiency of the conversion from sugars to ethanol.
This is the first use of NIRS to predict maximum and actual ethanol yields of grasses from a basic conversion process. This capability already exists for corn grain using NIRS.
On one of my recent safari’s through the internet jungle, I came across a remarkable little creature. It’s a small (maximum diameter about 4.5 millimeters) bell-shaped jellyfish, with a number of tentacles ranging from 8 in young specimens to 90 in adult ones.
It’s name is Turritopsis nutricula (see figure 1), and it can actually age backwards. A cnidarian Benjamin Button, as it were.
Figure 1: The immortal jellyfish, T. nutricula.
(Source: zmescience)
Look, we all know smoking is bad for you by now. We don't need to spend billions of dollars telling people that but an entire industry has been built around getting people to stop, and it is primarily funded by penalties on tobacco companies and taxes. It's a truly parasitic relationship but it isn't going anywhere and anti-smoking groups need smokers to stay in business. Apparently so do some researchers.
For this instance of my "Guess the plot" series I wish to go back to the basics. So I picked a graph which allows me to illustrate a general concept, something about particle physics (but we could say physics in general, and actually extending to other exact sciences) which is a source of endless awe for me: the fact that some functions exist, in the infinite-dimensional space of all real functions of a real variable, which describe some specific feature of our world.
As health care costs continue to rise and more people want more services for less money, it will be important that doctors engage in evidence-based medicine.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have determined that the majority of primary care providers continue to recommend annual cervical cancer screening, though cervical cancer screening guidelines recommend a combination of a Papanicolaou test and an HPV test, known as an HPV co-test, for women 30 years of age and older.
