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February 2008 Archives
DIY Arithmetic
by In my final DIY-themed post for the month, I thought I'd simply point to an extreme example of DIY - Doing fast and accurate mental arithmetic instead of using a calculator. Arthur Benjamin has an amazing show, showing off his talents as a "mathemagician".
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Yellow fever causes panic in Paraguay
by Yellow jack flies again.
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Junk Science
by So when we left off in my last entry we were talking about shooting satellites out of orbit and the ulterior motives of our government. Oh, and we were trying to figure out what this all had to do with DIY month here on the WIRED Science website. I think I figured out the, umm, correlation.
Target Practice
So the other day the Pentagon made the decision to shoot down an ailing spy satellite. Why exactly would they go through all the trouble of firing a missile (that costs millions of dollars) at what amounted to a school bus-sized piece of space junk? And what does it have to do with DIY month? Answers and conspiracy theories abound after the jump.
Impacts of the Science Blogosphere
by Science blogging may be gaining deserved influence. Here's another case in point.
DIY - Care For Your Microorganisms
A compost pile is a living, breathing community of microorganisms at work converting the organic matter you supply it with into various nutritional compounds. Knowing this is key to producing and using it correctly. Taking care of your compost pile well as it is being made for you by your microscopic friends (such as not letting it get waterlogged and turn into a pile of rotting stuff) is easy if you remember a few things.
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DIY - Fun with Microorganisms
There's a lot of science to be found all around us, without the need for expensive equipment to uncover much of it. Two favourite places of mine for this are the kitchen and the garden, and in this and the next post I'll talk a bit more about the latter. The topic is not plants per se, as it was last time, but an important link in the chain of which plants are part. I'm talking about making compost, one of those often-overlooked processes in nature that are crucial for the life-cycles on which we here on earth depend.
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Mapping Oceans Reveals Our Impact
by Nearly forty percent of ocean areas are strongly impacted by humans and only four percent can be considered pristine. A fascinating new study provides a snapshot of what we're are doing to our home... the implications of which we're now only beginning to understand.
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A Buggy Perspective
by When I was little, my concept of infinity was that our entire twinkling universe fit neatly inside of God's belt buckle. And standing next to God of course, was his Mum. From that world I'd zoom out again past their stars and suns and solar system, until all of that space fit inside a bigger God's belt buckle, who lived in a bigger world, with his bigger Mum. Infinity to my 5 year old mind, was essentially worlds existing endlessly & simultaneously within bigger worlds, and of course, bigger belt buckles.
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MRSA: a patient's view
A patient divulges the "ugly truth" about life with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
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Paper Geniuses
Give me an A4 sheet of white paper and you might get a few doodles, a paper airplane, or a snowflake-cum-doily if I'm feeling particularly creative. But for some folks, a simple sheet of paper can evolve into a mind-melting trip into another dimension.
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The Science Fair Problem
Lots of earnest kids may be trying to detect a heating effect from CO2 as science fair experiments. Neither they nor their teachers fully understand the principles involved, so they get null results. Is there a way to help them?
How can bee deaths affect your dessert?
A die-off of honeybees has hit several states in the U.S.; how does it relate to your ice cream?
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Do-It-Yourself Supercomputing
A little-known fact about me is that I once built a supercomputer from scratch and then used it to do supercomputing. Do-It-Yourself Month finally offers me an occasion to brag a bit.
James McCarthy on ScienceDebate2008
James J. McCarthy, President-elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography at Harvard University
on ScienceDebate2008.
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Do-it-yourself molecular biology
Learn a low-tech way to extract DNA!
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The Third Branch of Science?
Some people these days are saying that computing has become so important to science that it constitutes a third branch. Even though computationally intensive science is what occupies my time, I am not sure that this is the right way to think about it philosophically. To some extent computing brings the theoretical and computational branches closer together. People interested in climate modeling whether as skeptics or as enthusiasts should consider how this works.
Teleportation Friday!
So I've two timely snippets on teleportation in my newly minted Teleportation Friday! series...
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The World's Thinnest Notebook
As readers know, I've been searching for a laptop that's small, lightweight, compact, and easily portable--not as a primary computer for data, but rather a writing tool for travel and coffeehouse composition. Well folks, I've converted to Mac. Officially. This post comes straight from my new MacBook Air...
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DIY: A Presidential Debate on Science and Technology
It's official. Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Barack Obama have been invited to ScienceDebate2008. We're so close to seeing this through and now more than ever, we need your help! The time has come to get involved...
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DIY that turns into DII
Some of the most pleasing forms of DIY are the simplest. When the DIY turns to DII, it's a good old-fashioned win-win situation.
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A microbiology giant passes away
A hero in biology has died.
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Finding DIY Solace in iPod Battery Replacement
by It's Spotlight on DIY month here at WIRED SCIENCE Digital, so I thought I would revisit one of my first attempts at taking something apart and fixing it up. Over a year ago, the hacking bug bit me. Though I spent 4 years at MIT among some of the best hackers in the world, I never got the urge to take anything apart in an effort to make an improvement, make it cool, or just to see what was under the hood. I admired my hacker friends at school, and often took advantage of their concoctions (my favorite being the homemade DDR system in our lounge). In a sense, the hacking bug finally caught up to me out of necessity: due to my music obsession I needed an operational iPod without having to shell out a couple hundred dollars for a new one.
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DIY dinner
Seeing as it's DIY month here on Wired Science, I was thinking we could delve into a few Molecular Gastronomy recipes. After all, nothing perks up the taste buds like a scrumptious hydrocolloid dinner! That said, Khymos.org is a fantastic resource for those of you who'd like to experiment with the "science of cooking". Download the digital cookbook here, and try your hand at making everything from Frozen parmesan air to Spherical mango ravioli, to White sangria in suspension!
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Bleed Blue, Live Green
If you watched the Duke basketball game last Thursday night, you probably noticed our normally blue Cameron Crazies sporting bright GREEN T-shirts... Why?
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Climate Models Don't Predict Climate
We know the radiative properties of the atmosphere are changing as a result of human activity. We know that such changes are a primary factor in how the atmosphere behaves. We have, therefore three choices (you can pick all in combination, or just one, but you can't pick none of them) 1) accelerating climate change 2) large cutback in emissions and 3) artificial mechanisms to remove greenhouse gases from the air. The climate models don't really have much to say about how much, when, or how, which are really the big questions. So what are the models for?
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