The surface of our planet is nice and cool. (A little too cool, this time of year.) But not all that far beneath us, it’s anything but. In fact, says Chris Marone, Penn State professor of geosciences, enough heat emanates from the interior of the planet to make 200 cups of hot coffee per hour …
Tag: science
You’ll never walk alone
Scientists have identified 182 species of bacteria that regularly live on our skin, and estimate the total number of species of bacteria on our skin numbers around 250. No need to go “yuck,” though: “Without good bacteria, the body could not survive,” added Dr. Zhan Gao, a scientist in Blaser’s lab involved in the study. …
I haven’t been playing many computer games recently…
…but obviously I should: Video games that contain high levels of action, such as Unreal Tournament, can actually improve your vision. Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that people who played action video games for a few hours a day over the course of a month improved by about 20 percent in their …
Ocean planets on the brink of detection!
But not, alas, any kind of ocean planets that could be the planet I conjured up for Marseguro (if that ends up being its title), my new SF novel I’m still anxiously awaiting editorial reaction to. Still, this is a pretty cool concept and would make a great setting for some kind of SF story: …
Lazarus, Elvis, zombies and Jimmy Hoffa
Elvis lives! Well, kind of. Way back in 1991 I wrote a column on taxonomy–which is not, as you might suppose, the scientific study of taxes. (And yes, I used that same joke 16 years ago.) It’s just barely possible you don’t remember that original column, so first, a quick taxonomy refresher. Taxonomy is the …
Robert A. Heinlein’s legacy lives on:
This NASA story, about how the Moon bears witness to the early history of the solar system, and could tell us whether “extinction events” caused by heavy bombardments from outer space really recur every 26 million years on Earth as some have hypothesized, is headlined “The Moon is a harsh witness.” Somebody there has read …
Electric sheep and the androids who dream of them:
“Biomimetic Technologies Project Will Create First Soft-Bodied Robots .”
Farming mutates into pharming:
“Genetically modified chickens lay drugs in eggs.”
Dual-task interference
You can see them a kilometer away. You notice the car driving a) slowly or b) erratically or c) both. And then you get closer…and can see the cellphone glued to the driver’s ear. Everyone pays lip service to the notion that cellphoning while driving is a bad idea…and yet some people still do it. …
It’s the most unhappy day of the year
Yep, today has been scientifically proven to be the unhappiest day of the year. So cheer up! It’s all uphill from here. Into a stiff breeze. On ice. On a bicycle.
Storing an entire image on a single photon
It gets into that whole wave/particle quantum thing: a team led by associate professor John Howell at the University of Rochester passed a single photon through a stencil bearing the letters UR. But since a photon is both a particle and a wave, as a wave, it passed through the entire stencil and thus captured …
Why talking on a cellphone while driving is stupid:
Neural Bottleneck Found That Thwarts Multi-tasking. A couple of excerpts: “While we are driving, we are bombarded with visual information. We might also be talking to passengers or talking on the phone,” Marois said. “Our new research offers neurological evidence that the brain cannot effectively do two things at once. People think if they are …
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