The Genius Of Georg Ohm

Much of the genius of Georg Ohm is forgotten.  He is remembered mostly as the scientist who defined the relationship between electrical resistance, electric force and electric current.  Not only do writers generally ignore Georg Ohm's many other contributions to physics: they give an all-too-brief outline of Ohm's law and then move on.   Thus they miss the opportunity to explain the simplicity of the physical reality and the elegance of the mathematics behind Ohm's Law.

Is the entire country of Mexico anti-science?

TED talks declined from ‘must-see-every-single-one’ to less interesting than liveleak.com, even from a science and technology perspective - seen a chicken plugger? Superfast slot cars? Bubble Vortices anybody? So it is worthwhile to point out interesting TED talks whenever one happens to still come along.

A previously unnamed species of horse fly has been named in honor of American pop singer Beyoncé Knowles. Beyoncé just had a baby but this horse fly business is probably the best gift of all. 

Well, maybe not, the baby might be more important to her, since she and husband Jay-Z had bulletproof glass and bodyguards put in place at the Upper East Side Lenox Hill hospital where the delivery occurred and I bet the fly doesn't have any bodyguards at all.  

On January 10, 2012, President Obama announced appointments to the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities.

[Their] monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist - George Monbiot

Want to know where a huge amount of taxpayers' money invested into science goes?

Straight into the pockets of publishing companies' shareholders.

It's often the case that when something claims to cure everything, a little skepticism is warranted.  We have dozens of articles here on Resveratrol but over time the titles began to reflect growing disbelief it could be that perfect.  By the time it received gushing endorsements from Dr. Oz. and the other Four Horsemen of the Alternative (Gupta, etc.) we were crafting titles like Resveratrol - 2009's Miracle Compound Du Jour.

Who do you think will win the Republican presidential nomination? Obsession with this question possesses the entire United States. Today a brief search on Google for “GOP primary prediction” returned close to 40 million results. Over the past few months, the news media has been a continuous spin cycle of talking heads, pontificating pundits, bleating politicians, and outraged citizens, all converging on the topic of who will eventually be crowned the Republican candidate for the American presidency. The amount of effort expended on this process is staggering—even though many people felt that the probable outcome was more or less obvious from the start.

A long time ago, in an ocean far, far away . . .



I'm sorry, I couldn't resist! I just couldn't resist. But of course it's not really true. Argentina and the British-owned Falkland Islands have been fighting over their squid resources since "a long time ago", but this latest news is hot off the press. And the ocean may feel "far, far away" to those of us in the northern hemisphere, but it's very close to home for all the squid fishermen in the Southern Ocean, and the civilians who depend on the economies they support.

Not to play favorites but there is one area where physics has the life sciences beat: sharing.  With preprints and data, the newest findings zip around the globe, before peer review, and science does not collapse.