If you’re serious about pursuing an extended education in science, you may want to set your sights on one of the U.S. campuses that have been identified as having the best science graduate programs. In April, US News&World Report released the results of their 3-year study that ranked the best science schools in the nation.
One of the current questions for the future of space exploration is whether to return to the moon, or just head to Mars.
Should we return somewhere we’ve been before? Or just strike out toward someplace totally new? Is there any benefit to going back to the moon? Can we make it to Mars without building up our endurance and scientific knowledge on the moon first?
There are intelligent, well-connected, even famous, proponents on both sides.
I have often found reference to medieval and early modern folks most helpful in debugging things that have bugged me since I did science when I was a student in the Sixties (for me they did
not swing). One particular bunch are the Oxford Calculators, also known as the Merton scholars. As the
Wikipedia article states:
The Principle of Maximal Aging - Capturing the Essence of Relativity
The hunt for dark energy is on and ways to find it, such as
weak gravitational lensing and
baryon acoustic oscillation, hold great promise but are as yet unproven.
Supernovae studies, which depend on measuring the redshift and brightness of distant Type Ia supernovae, are the most reliable.
Cats have a reputation for being smart but dogs deserve more respect, says canine researcher Stanley Coren, PhD, of the University of British Columbia, who spoke on dog psychology (seriously) today on the topic “How Dogs Think” at the American Psychological Association’s 117th Annual Convention.
They can also understand more than 150 words and intentionally deceive other dogs and people to get treats, Coren says. He is the author of more than a half-dozen popular books on dogs and dog behavior, and reviewed numerous studies to conclude that dogs have the ability to solve complex problems and are more like humans and other higher primates than previously thought.
Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny.
1. Greek fire ain't what it used to be. If you're a student of history, you know that Greek fire (πῦρ θαλάσσιον) was popularized by the Byzantines, mostly against Arab navies. We don't know what it consisted of because the recipe was lost to antiquity but it made enough of an impression that various other cultures copied it. Naptha? Saltpeter? No one can be sure.
Greek fire was not an ingredient but instead an entire system. It required special processing to make and was compressed so that the liquid shot out. Thus it required expert handling as well.
If you’re a Twit... [um, no...] if you like Tweety... [still no...] if you’re a Twitter user [there, that works] you might have been frustrated on Thursday, when Twitter had service problems. So, apparently, did Facebook and LiveJournal, all three hit with denial-of-service attacks Thursday morning. Here’s Twitter’s status message from around 7 A.M.
Do guys like Bernie Madoff do what they do because of greed ... or ego? A Florida State professor says it's the latter. It makes some sense because it takes a certain drive to become CEO of a large company and that takes a certain self-confidence.
But is it more than just determination and grit and confidence? Narcissism is the claim Wayne Hochwarter, the Jim Moran Professor of Management in the Florida State University College of Business, is trying to make.
The Struggle for Existence was the title Charles Darwin gave to Chapter Three of On The Origin of Species, and he went to some trouble to explain exactly what he meant by this struggle. Throughout the chapter we find:
“I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.”
...
“there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence,”
...
