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Lessons from plants for happiness

Lessons from plants for happiness

Nov 14 2010 | comment(s)

Metabolism = anabolism-catabolism



In plant science metabolism is sum total of anabolic processes i.e. photosynthesis which make complex substances from simple molecules to catabolism i.e. respiration which utilizes complex molecules synthesised during anabolic processes and releases energy which help undertake plants its different functions.Plants always keep positive energy balance which allows them to grow . So is day to day life. Our inputs to life have to exceed the outputs to sustain growth and happiness.

Happiness is not much different . It’s a sum total of anabolism what we contribute to our home family, society, world and catabolism is what we remove from it.
At The Hazard Of His Ears

At The Hazard Of His Ears

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

At The Hazard Of His Ears

What has the hazard of a person's ears to do with science history?

The history of Arctic science, exploration and discovery is sprinkled with many as yet unsolved mysteries, many concerning the meanings of words in old documents.  In this, the first article in a short series, I present my thoughts on some of these mysteries for discussion.  By clarifying an obscure passage in an old document we may add to its credibility as a source of historical or scientific data.  Thus the solving of these mysteries will - I suggest - add to our knowledge of Arctic history, and hence of Arctic science.
Skulls in the mail - a science mystery

Skulls in the mail - a science mystery

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

Two human skulls were mailed to Brigham Young University recently, to a department that doesn't exist ("BYU Historical Department") with a return address that doesn't exist, "Jim Crow, Route 3-126, Augusta, Mont."   
Blog Tour: 1,001 Tips Come to Countering

Blog Tour: 1,001 Tips Come to Countering

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

When my husband and I first realized in 1994 that we were entering the world of special needs parenting, there were very few books as guidelines. When autism entered our vocabulary, the first thing I read was Bruno Bettelheim's The Empty Fortress.
Clinical Evidence Of Intuition: The Iowa Gambling Task

Clinical Evidence Of Intuition: The Iowa Gambling Task

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

In the Iowa Gambling Task, a participant is presented with four, facedown decks of cards. He or she can flip over cards from any deck. Most cards earn a reward and some cards incur a penalty. Of the four decks, some are better (contain more reward-earning cards) than others.

Over time, participants should learn which decks are best and start flipping cards only from the highest-paying decks. The test is thought to measure the emotional component of learning, or intuition—based on reward and punishment, participants begin to "feel" which decks are best and worst.
Neurotoxicity Of Anesthetics And Alzheimer's Disease

Neurotoxicity Of Anesthetics And Alzheimer's Disease

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

As life expectancies increase, so does the number of elderly people undergoing surgical procedures.    Recently, there has been growing about potential neurotoxicity of anesthetics and their role in post-operative cognitive decline.

Alzheimer's Disease(AD) is a devastating disease most commonly found in elderly people. It is manifested by severe memory loss, language problems, impaired decision making and affected activities of daily living.
Why Do Some Women Who Undergo In Vitro Fertilization Get Depressed?

Why Do Some Women Who Undergo In Vitro Fertilization Get Depressed?

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

In vitro fertilization (IVF) has brought children to millions who otherwise had difficulty conceiving so it should be a happy time.   Yet over 20% of women who undergo IVF report symptoms of depression.

The belief has been that the common denominator in women who undergo IVF - hormone therapy - is the culprit, but new Tel Aviv University shows that other factors have a large influence in who gets depressed and why and resolving those issues will make the success of the IVF greater.
Walking And Endurance: Why Children Tire More Easily Than Adults (And How To Calculate It)

Walking And Endurance: Why Children Tire More Easily Than Adults (And How To Calculate It)

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

Children have more energy than adults but why is it that when walking children tire first?   

Do kids,  and perhaps even shorter adults, walk differently from taller people or do they tire faster for some other reason?  Max Kleiber's work on resting metabolic rates for different sized animals found that the bigger you are the slower each gram of tissue uses energy, but how and why metabolism is regulated that has been a puzzle.
Limits To Science: God, Godel, Gravity

Limits To Science: God, Godel, Gravity

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

Stupid physicists, they are doomed. Spending their whole lives searching for a theory of everything, not knowing that some eighty years ago this was proven to be logically impossible. 

The internet is full with sentiments like the above. Many such posts refer to Stephen Hawking's 2002 Dirac lecture Gödel and the End of Physics.
Predicting The Internet, A How-to

Predicting The Internet, A How-to

Nov 13 2010 | comment(s)

The best way to discover whether someone is full of crap or not is to look at their past predictions.  If you're digital media expert Jim Griffin and you put your rep publically on the line predicting internet video in 2002, you're probably on the side of 'smart and right'.

Jim Griffin (onehouse.com) made a wager at LongBets that “A profitable video-on-demand service aimed at consumers will offer 10,000 titles to 5 million subscribers by 2010.”  He won, donating the $2000 prize to the EFF. Was this futurism, the random picking of potential paths by a random pundit? In his own analysis on a private list,
Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic

Apocalypse 1955: Growing Up Telepathic

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

“What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.”

The much-revered writers of the Golden Age of science fiction can be quite rough around the edges, even downright embarrassing on occasion. The writing is hurried, the plots of plot-driven books are disturbingly inconsistent, and the characters are primarily stock types and authorial mouthpieces. To top it off, many of these novels are ambitious, earnestly offered as novels of big ideas. These ideas are usually sympathetic (tolerance, freedom, racial equality, escape from religious tyranny), but generally reduced to platitudes expressed in long, somnolent sermons by the your standard pointy-headed philosopher-scientist.
Science for dummies - now with more poop

Science for dummies - now with more poop

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

What is science?

Science is application of the scientific method to problems or questions, and then submitting the story to the scrutiny of others. It’s simple. It’s elegant. It’s self-correcting.It’s LOGIC.

BUT. What if your audience was never taught what the scientific method really is? What if want to teach it to a child for the first time? What if the person standing across from you is a dummy??

Duh, you use poop. Everyone has had experience with poop. People get poop. Poop is universal. (I would use sex, but there’s the thing about the little children and also human behavior is much more complex than poop.)

PRESENTING :

The scientific process in everyday life OR

"Minority Report" web browsing - Google wants to pre-cog what pages you want next

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

Philip K. Dick wrote over a hundred short stories, none better than "The Minority Report", where police were able to anticipate crimes rather than arrest people after the fact - leading to arrests before the fact for crimes people hadn't committed yet and a 1950s science-fiction discourse on the nature of free will.

In "The Minority Report" three unaccountable mutants sit in a room mumbling gibberish until a computer sifts through it and makes projections about parallel futures created by actions; when two predictions agree it is a majority report.  When a police commissioner finds out he is going to be arrested for a future murder, he goes out to find the minority report where he commits no crime.
Like women in high heels? Thank science

Like women in high heels? Thank science

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

Lady Gaga's massive 10-inch tapered heels, like her gender, may be just for show - she certainly couldn't walk around in them all day.  Even three inch heels are tough.   And men look silly in them; trust me, I know.

Blake Snow stumbles into the physics of high heels, proving once again women are tougher than men.  

Once properly inspired by a man telling women about high heels, you can take the advanced course, like these high heels for high tide:


Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor Instability And Using Fusion To Generate Electricity From Seawater

Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor Instability And Using Fusion To Generate Electricity From Seawater

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

New X-ray imaging capability at Sandia's Z accelerator may help remove an obstacle in efforts to harness nuclear fusion to generate electrical power from sea water.  More accurate simulations could lead to 'break-even' fusion in the future.

Magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor (MRT) instabilities are spoilers that arise wherever electromagnetic forces are used to contract - 'pinch' - a plasma, which is essentially a cloud of ions. The pinch method is the basis of the operation of Z, a dark-horse contender in the fusion race.   A pinch contracts plasma so suddenly and tightly that hydrogen isotopes available from sea water, placed in a capsule within the plasma, should fuse.
Just Another Enemy Of Science: Now Against GMO Food

Just Another Enemy Of Science: Now Against GMO Food

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

I posted an article critical of microwave ovens and nanotechnology. This adds to many posts critical of science and scientists. Am I another enemy of science? That last post told lay persons not to heat Ramen noodles in the microwave oven. She cannot understand why and neither do I know exactly why. Moreover, since most people are too lazy or busy to look into such petty differences as between still internally dry Ramen noodles and watery potatoes, you could charge me with implying that the general population should not use microwaves at all.
Availability Heuristic At Play In The Autism-Vaccine Wars

Availability Heuristic At Play In The Autism-Vaccine Wars

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

Writing balanced posts can be tricky, especially in relation to vaccines. Vaccines, like religions and politics, have become a hot-button topic in social discussions, and these three areas are absolutely polarized, definitely enter-at-your-own-risk sorts of discussions that can quickly turn to pissing matches. Ah, but they don't have to, I don't think, and not all disagreement is about that sort of thing.
James Webb Space Telescope delivers more bad news

James Webb Space Telescope delivers more bad news

Nov 12 2010 | comment(s)

As I wrote in While Webb Bleeds, Space Science Hemorrhages, U.S. budget skepticism is going to persist as long as every big project is years behind schedule and far over budget.    The nation that put a man on the moon has since seen fiascoes like the Superconducting Supercollider and now the James Webb Space Telescope.   
Criticism Of A Paper In Support of Run III

Criticism Of A Paper In Support of Run III

Nov 11 2010 | comment(s)

The arxiv is featuring a new paper by Darien Wood, member and spokesperson of the DZERO experiment and a distinguished physicist with lots of experience in hadron collider physics. The paper is titled "The Physics Case for Extended Tevatron Running" and it is an explanation of the benefits that a Run III until 2014 will bring to our knowledge of high-energy physics.
War on Science: White House editing damages its reputation for relying on science

War on Science: White House editing damages its reputation for relying on science

Nov 11 2010 | comment(s)

Blogging really only became a communications whirlwind when President George W. Bush was in the White House so, for the most part, science blogger outrage focused on his actions as President, and those of the Republican Congress.

Criticisms of Bush were so prevalent it seemed like Republicans must be anti-science because so many Democratic science bloggers said so (and there were no Republicans in science blogging to dispute it), with charges of reports being edited and various unpopular (and later, it turned out, not evidence-based) restrictions on areas like human embryonic stem cell research.