Anyone can help discover new stuff in Galaxy Zoo- but why do people bother in the first place? In the podcast "Why Go to the Zoo?", Jordan Raddick responds with some unexpected insight into why people donate their time for open science.

Anyone can contribute to science these days-- and you don't even need to know any science!  You can run the SETI@home screensaver, to help try to tease out potential alien signals in radio data.  You can do protein folding, hunt for comets, search for solar flares, all from the comfort of your home.

Despite several social psychological theories that suggest otherwise, failing to meet educational goals does not result in depression, say sociologists from Floria and Kansas State Universities.

Their study in American Sociological review indicates that making no attempt to achieve extravagant educational goals is, in fact, the way to encourage depression.

The authors used two national studies of youth, the National Longitudinal Study and the Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (ADD Health), both of which track respondents over a period of time, to test whether unrealized expectations are associated with depression in adulthood.

Researchers have long been puzzled by large societies in which
strangers routinely engage in voluntary acts of kindness and respect even though there is often an individual cost involved.

Evolutionary forces associated with kinship and reciprocity can explain such cooperative behavior among other primates, but the same isn't true for large societies of strangers.

A new study published today in Science suggests that the cooperative nature of each society may be explained in part by religious beliefs and the growth of market transactions. The study also found the extent to which a society uses punishment to enforce norms increases and decreases with the number of people in the society.

A Penn State physicist is looking at how songbirds transmit impulses through nerve cells in the brain to produce a complex behavior, such as singing.

The research will help scientists gain insight into how the human brain functions, which may lead to a better understanding of complex vocal behavior, human speech production and ultimately, speech disorders and related diseases.

The findings were presented this week at the American Physical Society's March meeting in Portland.

Songbirds are particularly well suited for studying speech production and syntax -- the rules of syllable or word sequence -- because there are more similarities between birdsong and human speech than one may initially think.

Baird : The Wonder Of Television

The following article was scanned by me from
"The Wonder Encyclopedia For Children"
Odhams, 1933.

Apart from minor adjustments to layout and removal of page references it is verbatim.
I present it here as a view from the past, when television was a brand new scientific achievement being presented as a new wonder to children and using the latest photographic illustration techniques. 

John Logie Baird describes broadcast television in his own words.

-----------------------------------------

THE WONDER OF TELEVISION

Electric Eyes that Scan the World

By J. L. BAIRD

Textbooks are not mere non-fiction books. Whereas you can feel free to doubt what ispresented in a typical non-fiction book (mine excluded), textbooks are a record of the true facts and principles in a field. Textbooks, you see, should not be questioned.