House of Straw
Use six straws to create the classic house shape (a rectangular body with two straws forming the roof, all laying flat on the table). Bet that you can make four equal triangles by moving only three straws. Try it! To all but the most creatively freethinking, this is impossible. The trick is to go 3D—pick up the three straws that make the bottom and sides of the rectangle and replace them so that one end of each straw is rooted in a corner of the triangle with all three moved straws touching above the center of the original triangle, like a tent or teepee—four, equal triangles, each the size of the original roof.

Paper Match

Astronomers have unveiled a new atlas of the inner regions of the Milky Way - that's our home galaxy, if you're from someplace else - and it's peppered with thousands of previously undiscovered dense knots of cold cosmic dust, the potential birthplaces of new stars. Using observations from the APEX telescope in Chile, this survey is the largest map of cold dust so far.

This new guide for astronomers, known as the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL) shows the Milky Way in submillimetre-wavelength light (between infrared light and radio waves. Images of the cosmos at these wavelengths are vital for studying the birthplaces of new stars and the structure of the crowded galactic core. 

Do friends wear the same clothes or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, part of the reason they became friends or, once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors? 

Social scientists don't know for sure and are still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn't keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences. 

But the virtual world of "Second Life" does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have tried to use this information to study how "gestures" make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

For some thousands of years “logic” was viewed as the “theory of inquiry” – “inquiry into inquiry” if you will. This was almost certainly the case with Plato, definitely the case with Aristotle, and by and large true throughout the history of Western thought right up to the revolution in symbolic logic that occurred with Frege, Dedekind and Peano in the late 19th Century. However, with these changes the notion of logic came to be swallowed up by formal and symbolic concerns.

Logic as the theory of inquiry was lost sight of leaving mathematical logic as the sole claimant to the title of “Logic.”

Ecological Niche Modeling is a great tool for conservation biology, phylogeography and evolutionary biology. However, as Jeff Lozier and colleagues point out in a paper in the Journal of Biogeography that the models are only as good as the data they are based on.

The basic premise of the ENM approach is to predict the occurrence of species on a landscape from georeferenced site locality data and sets of spatially explicit environmental  data layers that are assumed to correlate with the species’ range.

NEW YORK, July 2 /PRNewswire/ --

- Members Given Access to Live Web Stream of TEDGlobal 2009 Conference

The TED Conference is again making available its popular Associate Memberships, which will provide a virtual front-row seat at the upcoming TEDGlobal 2009 conference via a private, live web stream of all its main stage events.

The TEDGlobal 2009 conference will explore The Substance of Things Not Seen. Speakers this year include world-renowned philosophers, scientists, religious leaders, entertainers, artists, musicians and technologists. The event will take place July 21-24 in Oxford, U.K.

NEW YORK, July 2 /PRNewswire/ --

- The Destination For Beauty Business Innovation

HEEMSTEDE and SCHIPHOL, The Netherlands, July 2 /PRNewswire/ -- The Healthcare & Science division of Thomson Reuters has released a new version of the program EndNote(R) for Windows, the bibliographic software, used by millions of researchers, librarians and students all over the world. EndNote X3, including EndNote Web, is a software program that helps to make research easier and more efficient. EndNote X3 offers new possibilities to create, import, manage and group references. It also includes an improved full text locator for online databases. The unique Cite While You Write(TM) technology is now integrated with Microsoft Word 2003/2007, Apple Pages'09 and OpenOffice.org Writer 3. The new version also supports chemistry styles.

A Science Of Human Language - Part #9

MERIGNAC, France, July 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Cortix, the market leader for Internet site creation in France and Europe, is expanding its product range in June 2009 with 50 new site models specially designed for microbusinesses and SMEs. The objective: to meet the needs of the customer group, made up of small businesses, artisans and independent professionals, who continue to invest in the development of their website despite the difficult business environment. Currently, Cortix has a catalogue of over 200 available products.