This animation of a "walking" protein inside a cell is going viral, and I became briefly obsessed with figuring out what's going on here. Behavior that looks conscious and deliberate can't, of course, be deliberate or conscious at the subcellular level. It's just as fascinating, though. What it is: A kinesin protein hauling a vesicle... Continue Reading →
Psychology researcher and author Shawn Achor gave this quite funny TED talk in 2011, with five quick, science-based ways to increase happiness daily that he explains further in the video and in a blog post: Scroll to the bottom of this post for links to most of those research papers and others. Achor talks about... Continue Reading →
Got lucky with the light out at my folks' place the other evening.
This whole talk is great, but at 6:24 you'll see the holy-schnapps moment: Taking a photo with your fingers. http://youtu.be/YrtANPtnhyg?t=6m24s That's Pranav Mistry in 2009 explaining how his invention "sees" your gestures through a camera and uses a little LED projector to give you a "screen" to work on. Because the talk is two years... Continue Reading →
Utterly flabbergasting, this is. (Yoda would agree... no, wait, Yoda probably has one of these in his kitchen.) A recent Economist issue discussed 3-D printing with a cover image of a working violin they said had been created on such a printer. Not the strings and some other parts unsuited to plastic, but the body... Continue Reading →
Sunlight reflects off a methane lake on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Holy wow. The lake is called Kraken Mare, and it's in Titan's northern hemisphere, which began to come back into daylight in August after 15 years of night. (This pic was taken July 8 by the Cassini spacecraft.) All this according to NASA's release... Continue Reading →
Yesterday's NYT had a very interesting story about biologists discovering evidence that humans are naturally helpful to each other -- very young humans, before our parents presumably whap it into us. Of course if we didn't cooperate to some degree we'd have croaked long ago... and if we weren't kind of warlike, we wouldn't have... Continue Reading →
Pretty interesting. Facebook announced today that it tracks the aggregate mood of the country, based on the negative or positive words that millions of Facebookers use in their updates. The blog where I first read of it, ReadWriteWeb, does some interesting probing into possible ramifications of this and of the data that Facebook is NOT... Continue Reading →
Of course the travel guide says it's incredibly hot (2000C) on the day side and super-cold (-200C) on the night side, but it's still the first rocky planet confirmed outside our own solar system. The planet, CoRoT-7b, orbits the star CoRoT-7 in the Monoceros, or Unicorn, constellation. The names all get more sensible when you... Continue Reading →
Super-heavy element 112 was created a decade ago in a particle accelerator, and only four atoms of it have ever been observed. Yet high school science classes will still have to memorize it, no doubt. They temporarily named it ununbium, but are still searching for a real name.
sue's news 