How can today's wired, multitasking scientists ever compete with the great scientists of the past? One feature of Darwin's work as a scientist was that it proceeded slowly, very, very slowly. He wrote massive groundbreaking books, compiled huge amounts of data on orchids, barnacles, and Galapagos animals, but all over a long period of time. Scientists in Darwin's day had hours to kill on long voyages, took long walks out in the field, and waited while their scientific correspondence leisurely wended its way across oceans or continents.

Even in the first half of the 20th century, great scientists are famous for what they accomplished on long walks, hiking trips, and train rides. Niels Bohr would walk for hours around Copenhagen and come up with groundbreaking ideas, while Werner Heisenberg spent weeks every year hiking in the mountains. Even Richard Feynman, working in our more modern (but still pre-internet) era, insisted on long blocks of time to concentrate; he likened his thought process to building a house of cards, easily toppled by distraction and difficult to put back together.

Does that mean the kind of science we do in our overscheduled, multitasking world will never be the same as it was in the past? Certainly in one sense it won't - earlier generations of scientists had one distinct advantage we don't have today: Servants.

Prof. Camillo O. DI CICCO, M.D. XIth Congress of the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology, Prague. The first studies of the disease go back to 1846 by B.C. Brodie, which describes a picture of lipomatosis symmetrical disseminated with interest of the neck in the job " Clinical Lectures on Surgery, Delivered at St George's Hospital " Philadelphya, Lea and Blanchard (pub) 1846 Pp 201-210. Subsequently such picture was described from Huguier (1855)), Founder (1863) and Vermeuil (1888). In the same year Otto W.

Com uma envergadura dos membros anteriores de 25 cm (contra os quase 10 metros do Quetzalcoatlus), o novo pterossáurio chinês é um extremo, na sua pequenez, da variedade de formas de répteis gigantes do mesozóico.

I asked a friend of mine why she was a good boss. “I was nurturing,” she said. A big study of managers reached essentially the same conclusion: Good managers don’t try to make employees fit a pre-established box, the manager’s preconception about how to do the job. A good manager tries to encourage, to bring out, whatever strengths the employee already has. This wasn’t a philosophy or value judgment, it was what the data showed. The “good” managers were defined as the more productive ones — something like that. (My post about this.)

The reason for the study, as Veblen might say, was the need for it. Most managers failed to act this way. I posted a few days ago about a similar tendency among scientists: When faced with new data, a tendency to focus on what’s wrong with it and ignore what’s right about it. To pay far more attention to limitations than strengths. Here are two examples:

Heterogeneity provides stability, say scientists from the Universities of Fribourg and Bonn, whether this is in a shower, in power grids or even on the stock market.

It's a big reason why the electrical grid does not break. When Al Gore had the brilliant idea to have everyone watching his Live Earth concerts shut off their lights as a symbolic gesture, he had to be reminded that the surge when people turned the lights back on would put a lot of people in danger. The grid could not take it.

In the shower example, showers in youth hostels can be risky when there is not enough hot water for everybody. If only one visitor turns up the hot tap during the early morning shower, everyone else is threatened by an icy gush of water. This unwanted form of hydrotherapy is particularly likely to happen when all the shower taps have the same possible settings, in other words if cold and hot water can be adjusted to exactly the same amount in all showers. But if the water taps in each shower have their individual quirks, the risk of extreme fluctuations is less.

As a book junkie, I love to get and give book recommendations. Here is my Darwin Day recommended books list:

What Evolution Is, Ernst Mayr - My favorite brief, single-volume primer on evolution for non-specialists.

A new approach to the cooling of buildings across the developing world that needs nothing but wind and sun to operate has been devised by engineers in India. Writing in the International Journal of Sustainable Design, the team explains the concept of a combined solar chimney and wind tower system that can reduce the temperature of incoming appear by 5 degrees Celsius.

Jyotirmay Mathur of the Mechanical Engineering Department, at the Malaviya National Institute of Technology, in Jaipur, together with architect and urban designer Rajeev Kathpalia of Vastu Shilpa Consultants, in Ahmedabad, point out that the development of energy-efficient, and even passive, cooling systems for buildings is essential in the light of environmental pressures and costs. In the past, they point out, building designers had to rely on natural ways and means for maximising comfort inside buildings.

An international team of cosmologists, leaded by a researcher from Paris Observatory, has improved the theoretical pertinence of the Poincaré Dodecahedral Space (PDS) topology to explain some observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). In parallel, another international team has analyzed with new techniques the last data obtained by the WMAP satellite and found a topological signal characteristic of the PDS geometry.

The last fifteen years have shown considerable growth in attempts to determine the global shape of the universe, i.e. not only the curvature of space but also its topology. The « concordance » cosmological model which now prevails describes the universe as a « flat » (zero-curvature) infinite space in eternal, accelerated expansion.

From medicine to make-up, plastics to paper - hardly a day goes by when we don't use titanium dioxide.

Now researchers at the University of Leeds have developed a simpler, cheaper and greener method of extracting higher yields of one of this most useful and versatile of minerals.

In powder form titanium dioxide (TiO2) is widely used as an intensely white pigment to brighten everyday products such as paint, paper, plastics, food, medicines, ceramics, cosmetics - and even toothpaste. Its excellent UV ray absorption qualities make it perfect for sunscreen lotions too.

As computers become more complex, the demand increases for more connections between computer chips and external circuitry such as a motherboard or wireless card. And as the integrated circuits become more advanced, maximizing their performance requires better connections that operate at higher frequencies with less loss.

Improving these two types of connections will increase the amount and speed of information that can be sent throughout a computer, according to Paul Kohl, Thomas L. Gossage chair and Regents’ professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.