Thanks to our continuing success in Iraq, you might have noticed distinctly fewer limbs in today’s America. Hence this recent work published in the journal Nature is quite encouraging: Here we describe a system that permits embodied prosthetic control; we show how monkeys (Macaca mulatta) use their motor cortical activity to control a mechanized arm […]
As I’ve quipped before, everything in the Universe secretly desires to be Iron. Why? Meet the nucleus: Protons and neutrons in an uneasy alliance. Neutrons, conveniently enough, are neutral in electrical charge. No problem rubbing two of them together. Protons, however, are positively charged. Remember, like charged objects don’t like sitting next to one another, […]
Nuclear power, long reviled as a dangerous source of energy, is on the verge of a comeback. That’s because a growing body of scientists, politicians and environmental activists see atomic energy as part of the solution for global warming and our ever-growing dependence on foreign oil, much of it from nations that, if not downright […]
I know that as a scientist, I am expected to loathe all imperial measurements–inches, cups, quarts, gallons and Fahrenheit. Whining about the United States’ failure to embrace the metric system? Default behavior for dim bulbs seeking to seem sophisticated. You know what? I don’t like metric measurements for many daily tasks. Why? Factors! The metric […]
(Salim Virji) Who doesn’t love the platypus? This is a creature bizarre enough to make marsupials feel better about themselves. The platypus, lactates (mammal!) and lays eggs (reptile!), grows fur (mammal!) and venom (reptile!). This might be the single most interesting creature, from an evolutionary point of view, on the planet. About 315 million years […]
My week is ending poorly. Rather than go into a lengthy whine about crappily designed and maintained websites, the evil of both the SAX and DOM XML parsers in Python and “what, you can only do one miracle at a time” management, I’d rather present you with an appropriately glum bit of my knowledge. Thus, […]
Ready? Prepared to have your mind blown? (cartoon via xkcd) Ideas are tested by experiment. That’s all there is to science. This is the only bar an idea must be taller than to take the ride of science as a legitimate hypothesis. An untestable, unknowable, incomprehensible supernatural force is required for the existence of living […]
In the past few months, I bet you’ve seen at least one ad like these. When I first saw these ads, I was impressed. Most direct-to-consumer drug advertising is loathsome, filled with moronic non sequiturs–what does kayaking have to do with a nucleoside analog used to treat herpes–or simply build up anxiety about a problem, […]
Have you heard Obama’s Cooper Union Speech? You should. The key except: A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s why we’ve put in place rules of the road: to make competition fair and open, and honest… I think that […]
The deadly, fraudulent, heparin sold by a Chinese manufacturer to Baxter shares much with the deadly, fraudulent, wheat gluten and gluttonous, fraudulent, financial crisis. These frauds are not accidents, slips of care, but rather deliberate attempts to game tests of quality, to turn garbage into gold. The toxic wheat gluten was doped with melamine, in […]