We have ten fingers and ten toes (or, most of us do. Exceptions include the noted alpinist Reinhold Messner, who has only three toes and seven fingers. Luckily, this leaves him with ten total digits and thus Messner presumably has little inherent, morphological difficulties with the decimal system). Because of our built-in base-10 bias and the fascism of our system of mathematics education, we humans have come to view the decimal system as the only logical way to count. We count to nine and then as we raise our second thumb, we stick a placeholder in the next column to the left.

But computers don’t conform to the evolution of human bone structure. They can only count to two. (Technically, they can only count to one, starting at zero.)

This is binary.

Aside from Earth, Saturn's largest moon Titan looks to be the only place in the solar system with copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface. But that's not the only similarity our home and Titan share. A team of planetary astronomers recently announced that the two share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog.

The team discussed their findings in a recent paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters as well as in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union's 2009 Fall Meeting in San Francisco.

A new study featured online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that depression patients are unable to sustain activity in brain areas related to positive emotion. The authors say The study challenges previous notions that individuals with depression show less brain activity in areas associated with positive emotion. Instead, the new data suggest similar initial levels of activity, but an inability to sustain them over time.

During the study, 27 depressed patients and 19 control participants were presented with visual images intended to evoke either a positive or a negative emotional response. While viewing these images, participants were instructed to use cognitive strategies to increase,

In order to benefit from their natural resources, states need fewer regulations, lower taxes, and stronger private property rights, according to a new study by a Florida State University economist. The study offers an empirical analysis weighing the economic growth rates of resource-dependent states against the Economic Freedom of North America index (which operates on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the freest) to determine the level of economic freedom required for states to benefit from natural resource development.

Research suggests that in regions lacking policies consistent with free markets, private-property rights and a stable and fair legal system, natural resource dependence can weaken economic growth — a phenomenon known as the "resource curse."

A group of paleontologists has discovered a venomous, birdlike raptor that thrived some 128 million years ago in China, and is the first reported venomous ancestor in the lineage that leads to modern birds. The discovery is documented this week  in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The dromaeosaur or raptor, Sinornithosaurus (Chinese-bird-lizard), is a close relative to Velociraptor. It lived in prehistoric forests of northeastern China that were filled with a diverse assemblage of animals including other primitive birds and dinosaurs.

According to an upcoming study in the March Issue of Alcoholism: Clinical&Experimental Research, alcohol and marijuana use may be explained by the same genetic factors, lending support to the notion that there are common mechanisms underlying all addictions, the authors say.

Researchers examined 6,257 individuals (2,761 complete twin pairs and 735 singletons) listed in the Australian Twin Registry, 24 to 36 years of age.  Alcohol and marijuana use histories were gathered in telephone diagnostic interviews and used to derive levels of alcohol consumption, frequency of marijuana use, and DSM-IV alcohol and cannabis dependence symptoms.

Researchers studying climate change during the early Pliocene have concluded that slow changes such as melting ice sheets amplified the initial warming caused by greenhouse gases, and that a relatively small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels was
associated with substantial global warming about 4.5 million years ago.  The findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Obese women may be putting themselves at greater risk of breast cancer by not undergoing regular screening. According to new research by Dr. Nisa Maruthur and her team from The John Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA, seriously obese women are significantly less likely to say they have undergone a recent mammography than normal weight women, especially if they are white. Maruthur's findings are published online this week in Springer's Journal of General Internal Medicine.

Yesterday morning Venice awoke in the middle of a snowstorm. It is a very rare phenomenon to see snow in sizable amounts in the island, and the times that I have seen four inches build up on the ground are probably no more than a handful.

But the morning was also marked by another phenomenon -less unusual, but still rare: a strong acqua alta. The sea rose to 1.15 meters above its average level, and flooded calli and campi with up to ten inches of water.

Two days ago, there was a post on backreaction about the naturalness in science, which is considered by many as a fundamental concept. The point of view expressed in the post is quite easy to grasp : naturalness is not a justified argument in any sense (edit : see the comment of the autor below).