If you don't think there's anything to learn by observing a bunch of drunk college students while they watch football and yell at the TV, you're missing out on a valuable cultural lesson.
By studying the emotional reactions of college football fans to their favorite teams' on-field performances, communication experts say they have gained important insights into the relationship between entertainment and human emotion.
Ohio State University researchers studied fans of two college football teams as they watched the teams' annual rivalry game on television. They found that fans of the winning team who, at some point during the game, were almost certain their team would lose, ended up thinking the game was the most thrilling and suspenseful.
Drug resistant infectious organisms pose a very serious threat to society, and are perhaps one of the biggest challenges that medical researchers face in their fight to keep people healthy.
Despite the trouble that antibiotic resistance has caused for modern medicine over the years, researchers at the University of Gothenburg are taking on an innovative project that may help put this evolutionary phenomenon in check.
RuBisCo Stars, Frank Drake and the "Riddle of Life"
December 4, 2009.
A story in the local newspaper related how a pit bull was turned into the animal shelter after having been found abandoned in a ditch with all of its teeth filed down to the exposed roots, emaciated by starvation (weighing less than 40 pounds), and having just given birth to 9 puppies that morning. The mother also had a few pressure sores from where bones rubbed against skin. All the puppies still had the umbilical cords attached and were wet.
This level of human cruelty and stupidity is beyond understanding and one wonders what could be done to bring such behaviors under control.
Sunday Science Book Club
The Voyage of the Beagle, by Charles Darwin
We are aware of the large and small. We can, for example, taste and smell the earthy but invisible Streptomyces coelicolor. This soil-dwelling bacterium might have been in the first rock on Earth. Some estimates mention a time that was almost 3.8 billion years ago.
Here is the Streptomyces coelicolor chromosome as it was mapped by S. D. Bentley et al. in 2002.
Over vast expanses of time, powerful tectonic forces have massaged the western edge of the continent, smashing together a seemingly endless number of islands to produce what we now know as North America and the Pacific Northwest. Intuition tells us that the earth’s crust is a permanent, fixed outer shell – terra firma. Aside from the rare event of an earthquake or the eruption of Mount St. Helen’s, our world seems unchanging, the landscape constant. In fact, it has been on the move for billions of years and continues to shift each day.
Ever wonder why the slow moving sloth has a slightly greenish hue? Ever consider the sloth at all? Well, perhaps not. Location, location, location, is the mantra for many of us in our macro world, but it is also true for the small world of algae.
Co-ordination of flight requires tremendous brainpower, and co-ordination of active flight, with the constant shift in the shape and location of massive wings, even more so. Nature is extremely parsimonious, not frittering away investment in any organ where it is not needed.
One of the key points that perpetually surfaces in the Intelligent Design debate is comparing animate with inanimate objects and attempting to draw comparisons or conclusions1. This becomes more pronounced when we begin to consider the role of less tangible elements, like intelligence, and begin considering how such a thing would manifest in a machine. In effect, it's the problem of determining what life is and how does it differ from everything else.
Often we look at complex machinery and associate meanings or parallels to biological systems, however this is an incorrect perspective. No matter how sophisticated the machine is, it is invariably only a tool and as such needs to be examined from that viewpoint.
