I am about to go to an informal
workshop on naturalism and its implications, organized by cosmologist Sean Carroll. The list of participants is impressive, including Pat Churchland, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Dan Dennett, Rebecca Goldstein, Alex Rosenberg, Don Ross and Steven Weinberg.
Three reasons why government can look less efficient than it really is:
1. Cherry-picking in privatization. Let’s suppose we could rank government agencies or services in descending order of productivity: 1, 2, 3, and so on, with agency 1 being the most efficient and productive. As a reality check, let’s note that such a ranking is indeed possible, in a rough way.
A Gemini Legacy image has captured the colorful and dramatic tale of a life-and-death struggle between two galaxies interacting. All the action appears in a single frame, with the stunning polar-ring galaxy NGC 660 as the focus of attention.
Tropical Storm Maria is moving away from Japan and strong wind shear is pushing its rainfall east of the storm's center, with no areas of heavy rain remaining in the tropical cyclone. The low-level center of the storm is now exposed and a wind shear greater than 30 knots (34.5 mph) continues to further weaken the storm.
Physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recently observed first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, composed of protons and neutrons we know today, from the odd, seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons that permeated the early universe some 14 billion years ago.
The RHIC physicists have been creating and studying this primordial quark-gluon plasma (QGP) for a while but the data they presented at the Quark Matter 2012 international conference from systematic studies varied the energy and types of colliding ions to create this new form of matter under a broad range of initial conditions, allowing the experimenters to unravel its properties.
An international research effort has resulted in an integrated physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome, which could lead to higher yields, improved pest- and disease-resistance and enhanced nutritional value of crops.
Most people regard journalists as biased, though it is most evident in the bias of journalists at places politically different from the consumer - in the US, MSNBC viewers regard Fox News consumers as biased while Fox News consumers regard everyone else as biased.
Science media does not have this issue because everyone votes the same way politically and it makes no difference; except on political issues that attract political demographics, like GMOs or climate change, science media can stick to science. What about sports? Can a sports journalist be biased?
They can. It just may not be evident when it comes to their sports coverage.
If suffer from arachnophobia, fear or spiders, you know that rationality does not enter into it. Imagining a huge and hairy tarantula crawling on your arm in a therapist’s office is not less scary than coming out of the shower and seeing a tiny spider.
Why are phobias so hard to shake? It's not as easy as extinguishing the fear response. Instead of trying to erase the memory of the fear provoking stimuli, creating new, competitive memory traces may be the solution.
People love Top 10 Lists. So a ranking system of the ten most important phytopathogenic fungi on a scientific and economic level should be a big hit. If you don't want to spend five more minutes reading, the rice blast fungus (Magnaporthe oryzae) is at the top of the list.
The results were tabulated by a survey of 495 international researchers about the most important phytopathogenic fungi. Each researcher chose three that they thought to be most significant and the most voted then formed the list.
The link between mathematics and music has always been there - our ears hear in frequencies and even before those frequencies were known in physics terms, ancient philosopher-scientists had determined that the language of math linked areas as remote as planetary motion and harmony. "There is music in the spacing of the spheres," wrote Pythagoras. The Pythagoreans didn't have irrational numbers, negative numbers or even a zero but they didn't need those for their kind of symbolism.
