CircleCount helps you better understand Google+

2013-05-23 17:56:31 (0 comments, 2 reshares, 13 +1s)

Super Science Circle - May 2013 Edition

Need more science in your Google+? Well, here's all the science you can handle! Enjoy my latest, heavily curated edition of the Super Science Circle.

Please share this circle... for Science!

For the uninitiated, I maintain a circle of 450+ people who are active on Google+ and regularly post on Google+. In this circle you'll find scientists, journalists, astronauts, educators, and science enthusiasts. By importing this circle into your own circles, you'll immediately gain a vibrant and fascinating feed of amazing science stories.

I recognize that it might be too much science, so I suggest you create a brand new temporary circle and evaluate the people in the circle. Only transfer the keepers to your permanent circles. Then, when I update the circle next month, rinse and repeat.

Are... more »

2013-05-23 16:31:54 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 12 +1s)

Linda Connor contact prints on printing-out paper from vintage glass plate negatives of Solar Eclipse from the collection of The Lick Observatory 1893-1910, prints made 1977-1996
via - goo.gl/p5bfS

2013-05-22 02:43:36 (2 comments, 2 reshares, 37 +1s)

The Complex Structure of Bucket Orchids
#ScienceEveryday  

Orchids of the genus Coryanthes have evolved along with orchid bees, and depend on each other for reproduction. Male bees are attracted to an pheromone laced wax produced under the orchid’s helmet. The wax is stored by the male and are used in courtship. However, the helmet is slippery and bees sometimes fall into the fluid filled bucket below.

Once in the bucket, their wings are wet, which prevent them from flying. The walls of the bucket are smooth and lined with downward pointing hairs, preventing the insect from escaping through climbing. A small opening towards the front of the flower is the only way out.

As the bee climbs through the narrow opening, they must press their bodies against sticky pollen packets. These are essentially glued to the bee’s body as it tries to escape. Inorde... more »

2013-05-18 17:50:13 (21 comments, 33 reshares, 136 +1s)

Beautiful ‘flowers’ self-assemble in a beaker fun with chemistry

"Spring is like a perhaps hand," wrote the poet E. E. Cummings: "carefully / moving a perhaps / fraction of flower here placing / an inch of air there... / without breaking anything."

These minuscule sculptures, curved and delicate, don’t resemble the cubic or jagged forms normally associated with crystals, though that’s what they are. Rather, fields of carnations and marigolds seem to bloom from the surface of a submerged glass slide, assembling themselves a molecule at a time.

By simply manipulating chemical gradients in a beaker of fluid, Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and lead author of a paper appearing on the cover of the May 17 issue of Science, has found that he can control the growthbehavio... more »

2013-05-17 20:33:27 (4 comments, 2 reshares, 25 +1s)

Oh Gallifreyans It’s funny, because as I was watching this scene I found myself wondering how many times I’d told people a story very much like this.  via - goo.gl/B3uyE

2013-05-12 22:03:38 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 29 +1s)

The science of rockets explained through soda bottles and slow motion photography. Jem Stansfield witnesses the awesome power of rockets with the Bloodhound land speed record project. Great clip from BBC 1 science series, Bang Goes the Theory.

2013-05-12 20:43:58 (4 comments, 8 reshares, 36 +1s)

At the intersection of science and art, Dr. Kai-hung Fung is using CT scans to build 3d models of the inside of the human body. He got the idea after noticing a CT scan of a woman’s nose resembled an orchid, and realized that medical images could be art as well. Hong Kong–based radiologist Dr. Kai-hung Fung discovered something within himself: an artist.

Kai-hung Fung - goo.gl/OE8ik     via Slate - goo.gl/WvWzS

#ScienceSunday   | +ScienceSunday 

2013-05-09 23:15:47 (12 comments, 62 reshares, 67 +1s)

Chemicals in/or the scent of a sharpie marker trap ants by disrupting their pheromone trails   #ScienceEveryday  

Trail pheromones are semiochemicals secreted from the body of an individual to impact the behavior of another individual receiving it. Trail pheromones often serve as a multipurpose chemical secretion in which, it leads members of its own species towards a food source, while representing a territorial mark in the form of an allomone to organisms outside of their species. Specifically, trail pheromones are often incorporated with secretions of more than one exocrine gland to produce a higher degree of specificity. Considered one of the primary chemical signaling methods in which many social insects depend on, trail pheromone deposition can be considered one of the main facets to explain the success of social insect communication today.

Video (about as long ast... more »

2013-05-09 20:34:37 (15 comments, 5 reshares, 33 +1s)

To knock or not to knock? That is the question
via - http://psychcomedy.com/

2013-04-30 21:48:45 (9 comments, 16 reshares, 35 +1s)

Mantis shrimp-photoreceptors    #ScienceEveryday  

Mantis shrimp are beautiful creatures. They also have perhaps the most incredible eye structure in the entire animal kingdom. Human beings have binocular vision, because we have two eyes which work together. Mantis shrimp eyes are compound, composed of up to 10,000 individual lenses. They’re also segmented into three parts, so each individual mantis shrimp eye has trinocular vision, meaning that just one eye has better depth perception than both of ours together.

Mantis shrimp also have hyperspectral vision. Where the photoreceptors (cones) in human retinas come in three types, corresponding to red, green, and blue light, mantis shrimp have 12 different types of photoreceptor (some species have 16). This means that mantis shrimp can see a much more colourful world than we do, as well as being able to see bothultr... more »

2013-04-30 06:15:35 (131 comments, 243 reshares, 597 +1s)

Stone confined sunsets (° ⌓ °)

Fire Opal-Mexico - When the light refracts just so. . .

via: http://japan.digitaldj-network.com/articles/5942.html

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zircons/

2013-04-27 18:24:32 (8 comments, 13 reshares, 72 +1s)

Petrified wood - here opalized wood, is basically fossilized wood that has had it’s organic matter replaced by a mineral such as agate, bit by bit over a long period of time, as it decomposes. The wood structure is maintained, but the wood fibers are slowly changed into stone. Sometimes a jasper, quartz, pyrite or even opal can be found fossilized in wood.The example here is quite stunning. #ScienceEveryday  

For more images and a link to video:
via - http://www.opalauctions.com/auctions/investment-opal/item-326346

2013-04-19 19:38:53 (2 comments, 72 reshares, 58 +1s)

How does a puffin hold so many fish in its mouth at once? The bloggers over at TYWKIWDBI did some research, and found the second photo:

An Atlantic puffin (Fratercula arctica) shows off its tongue, which is specially adapted to allow it to carry many fish in its bill at one time. Atlantic puffins typically carry about 10 fish in their bills at one time, using their tongues to hold their catch against spines on their palate.

Pretty amazing adaptation! 

http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-puffin-holds-all-those-little-fish.html

2013-04-17 01:45:52 (1 comments, 5 reshares, 32 +1s)

Polar Mapping of Structures in the Universe

This poster represents a flight through space and time. We start (from top to bottom) at the most distant galaxies seen when the Universe was very young (Hubble deep field), then an interacting pair of galaxies, the Magellanic cloud, a star cluster, two planetary nebulae (Helix and Cat’s eye) and finally at the bottom a human eye. We used a polar mapping in order to ‘unwrap’ spherical objects into a horizontal band. Each pair of objects is joined together by a similar structure represented as a bright horizontal band. The three bands then correspond to the galactic center of a galaxy in the Hubble field and the interacting galaxy, the center of a bright star in the Magellanic cloud and a star cluster and the last band corresponds to the white dwarf in the Helix and Cat’s eye nebulae.


Image - Miguel A. Aragon CalvoSpace i... more »

2013-04-16 15:07:02 (5 comments, 1 reshares, 25 +1s)

Your argument is invalid : )

Left to right - +Ed Yong, squid, +Carl Zimmer.  Photo Alex Warneke

via https://twitter.com/Alex_Warneke/status/297771286527111168/photo/1

2013-04-08 22:40:23 (8 comments, 7 reshares, 26 +1s)

The idea that a painting is not complete until the viewer responds to it was conceived of by Alois Riegl. He determined that as art evolved, you see there's a conscious attempt on the part of the painter to paint people who look at you, who interact with you.

The painting, the Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci is generally considered one of the greatest masterpieces in western art. And the reason it's so great is for the same reason we talked about before. It has a great deal of ambiguity. And ambiguity is what brings out difference of interpretation. It makes - it contributes to work being great. And with her, one of the very specific points of ambiguity is the nature of her facial expression. Is she smiling or is she not? And there's been endless discussions about this. And we want to understand why does that ambiguity arise? And there are two major interpretations. One... more »

2013-04-03 22:08:29 (4 comments, 19 reshares, 52 +1s)

Microscopic Expressionism

British photographer and professor Rob Kesseler captures the exotic microscopic detailing of various flora. merging the worlds of art and science, Kesseler’s depictions of the natural world were initially inspired by medieval stylistic illustrations and dutch flower paintings - slowly evolving to reveal the ornate and mesmeric structures of the various plant material he examined. 

To create the eclectic visual imagery - original samples are spluttered with a fine coating of gold and then photographed on a scanning electron microscope. These images are then manipulated using subtle washes and layers of color to amplify their forms and display the intricate anatomy of pollen, seeds, fruit and leaves with breathtaking clarity. the micrograph artwork is directed solely by nature’s mystery and peculiarity - its richness and complexity- and mostpalp... more »

2013-03-31 23:39:16 (5 comments, 61 reshares, 69 +1s)

Math:Rules - Strange Attractors on Behance 

Math, Science, Digital Art, Illustration #ScienceSunday  | +ScienceSunday 

The darkest art known as Chaos Theory is perfectly embodied in the form of its strange attractors: vast looping trajectories of variables that, when plotted, conjure gorgeous yet insidiously disruptive patterns. Chaotic Atmosphere’s Math: Rules series pays tribute to the beautiful form of chaos and its inevitable collapse of all our efforts to predict it.


More via: http://www.behance.net/gallery/MathRules-Strange-Attractors/7618879

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2013-03-27 11:09:06 (12 comments, 2 reshares, 42 +1s)

Speed-of-light fluctuations prompted by ephemeral vacuum particles

Vacuum is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. When observed at the quantum level, vacuum is not empty, but rather, filled with continuously appearing and disappearing particle pairs such as electron-positron or quark-antiquark pairs.

Two forthcoming research papers question whether or not the nature of a vacuum remains static. In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud, located in Orsay, France identified a quantum level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values. As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, like the speed of light, may not be a constant after all, but fluctuate.

Meanwhile, in another study, Gerd Leuchs and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto, from the Max Planck Institute in Germany,... more »

2013-03-21 01:00:19 (21 comments, 795 reshares, 140 +1s)

Mapping a Living Brain, Neuron by Neuron

It looks like an oddly shaped campfire, but it is activity of individual neurons across a larval fish brain. It is the first time that researchers have been able to image an entire vertebrate brain at the level of single cells.

Brain function relies on communication between large populations of neurons across multiple brain areas, a full understanding of which would require knowledge of the time-varying activity of all neurons in the central nervous system. Here we use light-sheet microscopy to record activity, reported through the genetically encoded calcium indicator GCaMP5G, from the entire volume of the brain of the larval zebrafish in vivo at 0.8 Hz, capturing more than 80% of all neurons at single-cell resolution. Demonstrating how this technique can be used to reveal functionally defined circuits across the brain, we identify... more »

2013-03-15 16:54:39 (7 comments, 13 reshares, 31 +1s)

This is frigging awesoooooome Kreb's Cycle recycled
#ScienceEveryday  

TCA (Kreb's) Cycle Rap - Wilson Lam (Macklemore - Thrift Shop Parody)

I’m gonna pop some caaaarbs, only got a lil’ glucose in my pathwaaaay

bY: 1MaginAZN

Lyrics:

[Hook]
I'm gonna pop some carbs
Only got a lil' glucose in my pathway
I - I - I'm lazy, lookin' for some CoA
This is frigging awesome

[Verse 1]
Now I got some glucose; hell yeah, I'm in that prep phase
I'm so pumped; doin' work with hexokinase
Glucose to the glucose with a number six phosphate
PGI to that fructose 6-phosphate (dayum)
ATP, ADP, phosphofructokinase E,
1,6-bis, FBP, adolase, two GAP;
GAPDH with some PGK & PGM,
3-P to the 2-Phosphoglycerate, and then
(Enolaaaaaaaassseeee)PE... more »

2013-03-15 14:32:12 (123 comments, 406 reshares, 678 +1s)

The 150 Things the World's Smartest People Are Afraid Of

Need a few more things to ponder? Each year, the online magazine Edge asks top scientists, technologists, writers, and academics to weigh in on a single question. This year, that query was "What Should We Be Worried About?", and the idea was to identify new problems arising in science, tech, and culture that haven't yet been widely recognized. And the list is long - very long. There are some 150 different things that worry 151 of the planet's biggest brains. The answers run as you might expect to a wide variety of topics and ideas. 

*What keeps the smartest folks in the world awake at night? summarized to the bite sized:

1. The proliferation of Chinese eugenics. – Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist.

2. Black swan events, and the fact that we continue to rely onmo... more »

2013-03-12 01:40:48 (9 comments, 75 reshares, 61 +1s)

Joi Ito of MIT Media Lab:

There are nine or so principles to work in a world like this:

1. Resilience instead of strength, which means you want to yield and allow failure and you bounce back instead of trying to resist failure.

2. You pull instead of push. That means you pull the resources from the network as you need them, as opposed to centrally stocking them and controlling them.

3. You want to take risk instead of focusing on safety.

4. You want to focus on the system instead of objects.

5. You want to have good compasses not maps.

6. You want to work on practice instead of theory. Because sometimes you don’t why it works, but what is important is that it is working, not that you have some theory around it.

7. It disobedience instead of compliance. You don’t get a Nobel Prize for doing what you aretol... more »

2013-03-12 00:10:51 (3 comments, 7 reshares, 19 +1s)

Futurama ride

General Motors promotional film follows a young boy (presumably Fry) as he rides the Futurama 2 ride at the 1964- 65 New York World's Fair. Science and tech ideas and dreams from the past. (7:17)

2013-03-09 20:57:19 (107 comments, 288 reshares, 875 +1s)

#ScienceEveryday  Forbes: goo.gl/TsyBx

2013-03-09 19:32:09 (2 comments, 4 reshares, 32 +1s)

A DNA Lesson, From the Expert’s Pen
#ScienceEveryday  

Francis Crick’s letter to his 12-year-old son Michael announcing the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure 60 years ago this week.

Article NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/science/a-dna-lesson-from-the-pen-of-francis-crick.html?_r=2&

Letter - 4 page document: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/02/26/science/crick-letter-on-dna-discovery.html?ref=science

The letter, to be auctioned at Christie’s on April 10, with a value the auction house estimates at $1 million to $2 million, is an unusual combination of the historic and the everyday.

Photo below, Francis Crick with his son, Michael, around 1942.

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2013-03-07 21:13:52 (2 comments, 10 reshares, 41 +1s)

Our brains, and how they're not as simple as we think

Neuroscience has entered the public consciousness, and changed the way we talk about ourselves. But much of what passes as knowledge is inaccurate. Neuroscience has given us great insight, but misusing neuroscience can do great harm.

Vaughan Bell's article at The Guardian detailing how modern neuroscience’s creep into popular culture has turned complex science into headline cliches. Scientific concepts have always washed in and out of popular consciousness but like never before, the brain has become part of contemporary culture.


FOLK NEUROSCIENCE Popular misconceptions:

■ The "left-brain" is rational, the "right-brain" is creative 
The hemispheres have different specialisations (the left usually has key language areas, for example) but there is no clearrati... more »

2013-03-04 22:43:26 (8 comments, 32 reshares, 83 +1s)

Surface Tension terrific shot with shadow
#Scienceeveryday  

A wasp at rest atop the water, held up by surface tension. The cohesive force of the water molecules sticking to each other is stronger than the force of the insect being pushed down by gravity. This works because it spreads its weight out over a large surface area.

surface tension: goo.gl/0mFqa

via reddit: goo.gl/3URUr

2013-03-03 21:38:36 (4 comments, 16 reshares, 34 +1s)

NASA's Aquarius Sees Salty Shifts

The colorful images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River’s mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA’s Aquarius instrument.


Video and more via NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/aquarius/news/data-first-year.html

2013-02-27 18:39:58 (4 comments, 9 reshares, 45 +1s)

Scientific revolution has stalled, here's how to kickstart it


According to Caltech professor emeritus and microelectronics pioneer Carver Mead, the scientific revolution that got under way at the start of the 20th century has been stymied by big egos. This was his message before an international crowd of scientists gathered this week in San Francisco. To illustrate the point, Mead told the story of how Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser and maser, took his ideas to the leading quantum-mechanics theorists at the time, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Though Townes was eventually proven right, Bohr and Heisenberg initially doubted his theories.

The theories of special relativity and quantum mechanics, which began a revolution in our understanding of nature, have stalled due to the routine method of scientific investigation. By isolating variables,... more »

2013-02-24 18:01:32 (15 comments, 65 reshares, 141 +1s)

Marine Snow, amazing planet.
Mesmerizing excerpt from BBC’s The Deep Sea
#ScienceSunday  | +ScienceSunday 

At 200 meters, we leave the Photic Zone and enter the first layer of the deep sea – the Twilight Zone. At this depth, there’s less than 1% of the sunlight at the surface, the pressure has increased twentyfold, and the temperature has dropped to 4º — but we find a world of extraordinary beauty

Descending 200 meters into the dark of the deep sea reveals some weird and wonderful creatures.

via goo.gl/t3WtE

2013-02-24 00:13:13 (11 comments, 25 reshares, 58 +1s)

Calvin and Hobbes Photoshopped into Real Life Scenes
These are awesome. 

Redditor Nite4awk has created a smile-worthy set of photoshopped images that plant "too smart for his own good" Calvin and his partner-in-crime tiger, Hobbes, in a wide variety of real-life scenes.

All time favorite cartoonist of all time, Bill Watterson. And easily Gary Larson coming just a bit behind. 

Hi-res image gallery : goo.gl/O4Z0a

2013-02-10 19:30:24 (7 comments, 33 reshares, 93 +1s)

A structure in the early universe at z ~ 1.3 that exceeds the homogeneity scale of the R-W concordance cosmology. or Z~1.3 An implausibly large structure

A paper describing the largest structure in the Universe (a collection of quasars) may cast new light on homogeneity.
paper at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6256
video below (10:30)

#ScienceSunday  | +ScienceSunday 

2013-05-19 04:49:10 (10 comments, 9 reshares, 42 +1s)

Schrodinger’s Parrot, might be attacked by the Schrodinger’s cat. Or possibly not. #ScienceSunday  

Well, he's...he's, ah...probably pining for the fjords 

ININ' for the FJORDS?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got 'im home?

The Norwegian Blue prefers keepin' on it's back! Remarkable bird, id'nit, squire? Lovely plumage

Bets down be prepared to pay up! via http://scienceisbeauty.tumblr.com/

Classic sketch The Parrot Sketch

2013-02-06 23:52:13 (6 comments, 13 reshares, 30 +1s)

MIT's Laboratory for Chocolate Science delicious science

Founded in 2003, the MIT Laboratory for Chocolate Science is a student club dedicated to the appreciation of chocolate in all its myriad forms. The club hosts tastings, truffle-making seminars, lectures of fair trade, scientific demonstrations and numerous other events involving the enjoyment of and indulgence in all things chocolate.  

Learn more about LSC: http://chocolate.mit.edu/

2013-02-03 07:02:06 (13 comments, 54 reshares, 55 +1s)

Paramagnetism Liquid oxygen displaying induced magnetic properties on a magnet #ScienceSunday  

The oxygen molecule (O2) has lone pairs of electrons (the ones that aren't in the middle of the two O's) that, when placed into a magnetic field, orient themselves in the direction of the field and cause the oxygen to become magnetic. This is called paramagnetism.

video Tales from the Prep Room - Paramagnetism of Liquid Oxygen

Paramagnetism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramagnetism

2013-01-30 18:52:24 (4 comments, 8 reshares, 26 +1s)

Psychologist Richard Wiseman joins celebrated RSA Animate illustrator Andrew Park to unveil new evidence that shows that RSA Animate videos not only entertain, but educate in a surprisingly effective way. (18:35)

Cognitive Media: http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk
Richard Wiseman: http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/about-me/
RSA Action and Research Centre: http://www.thersa.org/action-research-centre

2013-01-28 19:51:57 (2 comments, 6 reshares, 37 +1s)

Co-Discoverer of Evolution by Natural Selection: Alfred Russel Wallace Letters Online   #ScienceEveryday  

Alfred Russel Wallace may not be a name as well-known as Charles Darwin, however London's Natural History Museum is one of many institutions that believes it should be. A hundred years after his death, the Natural History Museum (NHM) is hoping to address this and to make 2013 the year of Wallace. By doing so, it hopes to publicly reinstate the Victorian as the co-discoverer of one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. http://goo.gl/JHCKi

For an insight into the life of Wallace, the Natural History Museum's Wallace Letters Online website is now open to the public. goo.gl/9C8AT

2013-01-26 22:26:37 (3 comments, 0 reshares, 22 +1s)

Brings out the cosmic nine year old in me. 
I'm not so sure about Amy however. . .
. . . . . Dinosaurs!

2013-01-26 18:06:43 (16 comments, 88 reshares, 71 +1s)

A water droplet lands on a piece of molten sodium - you know the rest!
#ScienceEveryday  when it's not #ScienceSunday  

The video is worth a watch too. Linked to start 3.45 in for a frame by frame with an audio description by Professor Martyn Poliakoff.

Sodium v Water (slow motion) - Periodic Table of Videos

2013-01-25 22:54:04 (10 comments, 28 reshares, 92 +1s)

Solar Palette   #ScienceEveryday  

If you look at the Sun (which you shouldn’t, ever), you just see white light (for the second or so before your retinas are permanently scorched. That’s a mixture of all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum that our eyes respond to, between 390 and 700 nanometers (or about 3,900 to 7,000 angstroms). And there is a lot we can learn about the Sun by viewing it in that range, from studying its undulating surface swirls to its rotation.

But scientists at places like NASA can learn even more by extending their “eyes” beyond the visible.That’s what this new mosaic from the Solar Dynamics Observatory shows us. It represents all of SDO’s detectable wavelengths and the ions and temperatures that those wavelengths represent. Viewing each of those can tell us a deeper, richer story of the solar physics at work in and on thefusion-powere... more »

2013-01-25 07:42:15 (5 comments, 10 reshares, 35 +1s)

Our atmosphere acts as a lens, distorting the sun as it crosses the horizon. Col./Cmdr. +Chris Hadfield now also brilliant space-poet.
via goo.gl/E9P0y

2013-01-25 06:05:18 (8 comments, 8 reshares, 19 +1s)

Lawrence Krauss arguing for differential pay scales for teachers 

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." So wrote George Bernard Shaw in his 1903 Maxims for Revolutionists. Shaw, who humorously dismissed secondary education as "sequestration and imprisonment of children so as to prevent them being a continual nuisance to their parents," had great contempt for the British education system of the early twentieth century. This contempt, in fact, has resonated throughout history, and certainly has its adherents today.

For many educators and policymakers, this is an article of faith: the quality of teaching deeply impacts student outcomes. So what can we make of Shaw's do/teach dichotomy? For one thing, it can be interpreted as a matter of simple economics. To take up a teaching job means forgoing other potentially lucrative opportunities,... more »

2013-01-24 06:00:01 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 22 +1s)

A terrific example of rewarded diligence on the part of citizen science.
Kudos to 14-yr old Kirill Dudko! via goo.gl/5DPvl

#ScienceEveryday  

2013-01-23 22:48:51 (2 comments, 8 reshares, 25 +1s)

In a simple experiment, Dr Gustav Kuhn of Brunel University shows us the difference between what we actually see and what we think we've seen during a simple magic trick. 

How Magic Changes Our Expectations About Autism goo.gl/IN4Oq
In the vanishing-ball illusion, the magician’s social cues misdirect the audience’s expectations and attention so that the audience “sees” a ball vanish in the air. Because individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are less sensitive to social cues and have superior perception for nonsocial details compared with typically developing individuals, we predicted that they would be less susceptible to the illusion. Surprisingly, the opposite result was found, as individuals with ASD were more susceptible to the illusion than a comparison group. Eye-tracking data indicated that subtle temporal delays in allocating attention mightexplain ... more »

2013-01-19 19:41:54 (3 comments, 13 reshares, 37 +1s)

Short lecture (Infograph) by Kurt Vonnegut
on the 'simple shapes of stories.' 

Charted in the image, missing however in the video clip, Kurt on graphing Hamlet - due to a nearly a straight line - he declared that Shakespeare was a bad writer. The other missing, "Your life sucks and then damn - I'm a giant cockroach!" Curve starts low and just goes lower, which is appropriately kafkaesque. 

• Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories

Image Maya Eilam: http://mayaeilam.com/2012/01/01/the-shapes-of-stories-a-kurt-vonnegut-infographic/

via:http://martinaboone.tumblr.com/post/39155784038/the-shapes-of-stories-by-kurt-vonnegut-via-kami

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2013-01-17 20:20:22 (1 comments, 26 reshares, 31 +1s)

The winning entry in Scientific American's 2012 Iron Egghead video contest explains the evolutionary and biological function of adrenal glands, using only common objects. Quick, accurate, and humorous.^^

#ScienceEveryday  

2013-01-15 00:54:55 (5 comments, 25 reshares, 56 +1s)

Aaron Swartz via goo.gl/8Ia2G

2013-01-13 17:57:24 (0 comments, 1 reshares, 23 +1s)

Acedemic Jokes, like people and chemicals, grow old. . . .
Even in the freezer. :) #ScienceSunday  | +ScienceSunday 

2013-01-13 16:56:36 (6 comments, 3 reshares, 17 +1s)

A draft of the National Climate Assessment Report has been released. Let's just say ... things do not look good.

Long-term, independent records from weather stations, satellites, ocean buoys, tide gauges, and many other data sources all confirm the fact that our nation, like the rest of the world, is warming, precipitation patterns are changing, sea level is rising, and some types of extreme weather events are increasing.

Read the letter inviting public review here:
http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-letter.pdf

Read the executive summary chapter here:
http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-chap1-execsum.pdf

Download the full report (147 MB) here:
http://ncadac.globalchange.gov/download/NCAJan11-2013-publicreviewdraft-fulldraft.pdf

The video attached to this... more »