If you want something done right, do it yourself. Or, if you're tired of waiting for someone else to do it, give it the ol' college try yourself. So saith two local governments, anyway.
Two unrelated stories caught my eye, and I thought them interesting enough to share. I'm willing to bet you have examples of such local action in your region. The first deals with my hometown (and current place of residence), the charming Hennepin County in Minnesota. The second comes from that bastion of fun and civilization among Iowa's corn- and soybean fields, Iowa City (where I lived for a lovely summer while on a biochemistry fellowship).
Imagine no teen pregnancy, I wonder if you can...1
Science comedian Brian Malow ties much of science to growing up in a happily dysfunctional family. He asks:
What if the driving force behind the evolutionary patterns of homo erectus was moms telling their kids to “Stand Up Straight?”
Once when I was 10, he tells us, I asked my dad why the sky was blue. He said go ask your mom. She said, “Because I said so.” I never asked her a science question again.
Since China becomes ever more important also for academia and science, here insights into difficulties that are not widely mentioned. I started with the language barrier, and there were points that need to be explained further.
My first point was that if you usually speak German or some such language, learning Spanish is just one more language while Mandarin equals learning three new languages: Written characters, spoken Mandarin, and Pinyin Romanization.
NPR, National Public Radio, is in a tough spot - they are constantly accused of liberal bias (and, let's be honest, they have never done a story on how taxes hurt poor people or how much better the environment is than 40 years ago, so there is something to that perception (1)) and no one who gets taxpayer money likes being a political football and having people in government asking what they do with the money but that is the price of taking government money.
New research by archaeologists from the University of York says that Neanderthals were a lot more compassionate than their reputation as brutish cavemen.
How do you chart the 'compassion' of early humans?
Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki have won 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing new, more efficient ways of linking carbon atoms together to build the complex molecules that are improving our everyday lives - palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis.
Basically, it allows researchers to make chemicals easier. Carbon-based (you called it 'organic' in college) chemistry is the basis of life and has allowed man to explain parts of the world using natural laws but also provided a stable foundation for functional molecules, which led to revolutionary materials like plastics.
Obviously some things about the Sun's relationship to Earth are known - if we get too close or too far away all life disappears. But other aspects, like the activity of the Sun related to heating and cooling, are less clear.
It has long been knownthat the Sun's activity waxes and wanes over an 11-year cycle and that as its activity wanes, the overall amount of radiation reaching the Earth decreases. A new study looked at the Sun's activity over the years 2004-2007, when it was in a declining part of its 11-year activity cycle.
Evolutionary detectives have used century-old bits of DNA from museum specimens to find a place for the extinct passenger pigeon, Ectopistes migratorius, in the family tree of pigeons and doves, identifying for the first time this unique bird's closest living avian relatives.
