If you've ever been an engineering student, taught engineering or hired a young engineer, this will sound familiar: tales of students splitting up group projects so they don't have to work together or a student stating he didn't bother with the directions but still got the right answer or students who do the whole project an hour before class.
Expert engineers waiting to happen? Maybe some day, but that stuff irks hiring managers in the real world, where huge mistakes and sloppy work bring on costly overruns and maybe lawsuits.
Do you think high fructose corn syrup makes you fatter than sugar? You're not alone. In the culture wars, they like lines blurry and corporations who got rid of corn syrup have been using that as a marketing claim.
Three top researchers say they have corrected inaccuracies and misunderstandings concerning high fructose corn syrup's impact on the American diet and examined how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) considers this sweetener in light of the upcoming 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans in their session, 'High Fructose Corn Syrup: Sorting Myth from Reality', at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) Annual Meeting in Anaheim, California.
More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron, on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes.
The researchers located what they believe to be caribou-hunting structures and camps used by the early hunters of the period.
"This is the first time we've identified structures like these on the lake bottom," said John O'Shea, curator of Great Lakes Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology and professor in the Department of Anthropology. "Scientifically, it's important because the entire ancient landscape has been preserved and has not been modified by farming, or modern development."
Do you have what it takes to be Scientific Blogging's alpha geek? Well it’s time put your geek where your mouth is…IF YOU CAN!
But first a warning: yes, you could Google for these answers, but then, deep down, you’ll know you’re a bad person. Then again, you might win a free
Geeks’ Guide to World Domination. So you’ll have to balance total loss of self worth with free geek schwag. It’s up to you.
Email your answers to
geekoff@gmail.com. DON'T COMMENT YOUR ANSWERS or you will allow slackers to water down the winner’s pool, thus decreasing your chances of receiving said geek schwag (and you’ll get moderated,
It is a well-known fact that it is much easier to measure a physical quantity than to correctly assess the magnitude of the uncertainty on the measurement: the uncertainty is everything!
A trivial demonstration of the above fact is the following. Consider you are measuring the mass of the top quark (why, I know you do it at least once a week, just to keep mentally fit). You could say you have no idea whatsoever of what the top mass is, but you are capable of guessing, and your best guess is that the top mass is twice the mass of the W boson: after all, you have read somewhere that the top quark decays into a W boson plus other stuff, so a good first-order estimate is 2x80.4= 160.8 GeV.
According to research presented on Monday, June 8 at SLEEP 2009, in the presence of free access to food, sleep restricted subjects reported decrease in appetite, food cravings and food consumption; however, they gained weight over the course of the study. Thus, the finding suggests that energy intake exceeded energy expenditure during the sleep restriction
Results indicate that people whose sleep was restricted experienced an average weight gain of 1.31 kilograms over the 11 days of the study. Of the subjects with restricted sleep who reported a change in their appetite and food consumption, more than 70 percent said that it decreased by day 5 of the study. A group of well rested control subjects did not experience the weight gain.
Trains, planes, buses and automobiles are more than just exhaust, when it comes to the full scope of environmental damage. There is a full life-cycle of processes associated with getting from Point A to Point B that we have difficult quantifying but in an article published today in Environmental Research Letters, researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, say they have created a framework to help us calculate the true environmental cost of travel.
Both boys and girls have issues but boys are getting a raw deal, according to Judith Kleinfeld, professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in the US.
It's commonplace to hear about gender-specific issues involving girls but when there are concerns about issues primarily affecting boys, responses tend to veer toward sexism. Issues impacting boys have been neglected by policy makers, she says. Her review of issues characterizing American boyhood, how they compare to those affecting girls, and the lack of initiatives in place to address them was published in the June issue of Springer's journal Gender Issues.
Activists tend to point to someone else's job and say it's for the good of the planet that it disappear. But everyone need to cut back, including climate scientists, says a researcher who, ironically, regularly flies north to study the health of caribou.
Scientists studying the impact of climate change on the Arctic need to consider ways to reduce their own carbon footprints, according to postdoctoral fellow Ryan Brook in the June issue of Arctic, the journal of the University of Calgary's Arctic Institute of North America. Brook calls on scientists to show leadership by examining and sharing ways to reduce the impact of working in polar regions.
