Saturday, March 1st, 2008
Seed magazine published a wonderful crossover article between the worlds of biology and engineering "Algorithmic Inelegance"
The complexity of developmental regulation isn't a product of design at all, and it's the antithesis of what human designers would consider good planning or an elegant algorithm. It is, however, exactly what you'd expect ...
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Monday, February 12th, 2007
Some graphics from An Inconvenient Truth have been posted to Flickr. Copyright has most certainly been violated here but I suspect Gore would prefer the message spreads and perhaps this will inspire more folks to check out the movie.
This graph showing a sharp rise in CO2 has generated a lot ...
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Friday, January 19th, 2007
The indispensable New Scientist reports that
the distribution of dark matter has been mapped in 3D for the first time, revealing how the mysterious substance has evolved over the lifetime of the universe. The results confirm that dark matter provided the scaffolding that allowed ordinary matter to clump together to ...
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Friday, December 29th, 2006
This is a stunning picture assembled from photographic data from the Cassini space mission to Saturn and Titan. What is truly remarkable is that the Earth is (barely) visible through the rings (a little Where's Waldo challenge for you) in this photo.
This picture was voted the best astronomy picture of ...
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Monday, September 11th, 2006
All those years I spent listening to rock music on my headphones while studying were not in vain. Reported in the Times Online: "Researchers at a Scottish university believe that the sound of guitar-based rock such as Jimi Hendrix, AC/DC and the Red Hot Chili Peppers improves concentration and boosts ...
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Friday, September 1st, 2006
An article in Wired "From Crypto to Jazz" explores the connection between music and math through the music of saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. Read the article and listen to the music samples. Very cool.
Fittingly, the author Alexander Gelfand, is as much of a polymath as I have ever met. His interest ...
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Thursday, June 22nd, 2006
I follow a number of interesting blogs, but few are as consistently interesting as information aesthetics. They have really clued me in to the importance of presentation in making information come alive. It also emphasized the absurdity that throughout my science education, lots of emphasis was put on converting data ...
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Thursday, March 16th, 2006
New Scientist reports on DNA Origami:
A map of the Americas measuring just a few hundred nanometres across has been created out of meticulously folded strands of DNA, using a new technique for manipulating molecules dubbed "DNA origami".
According to the map's creator, Paul Rothemund at Caltech in Pasadena, US, DNA origami ...
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Tuesday, March 7th, 2006
Coffee enriches my life in so many ways: socially, gustatorily, as a surrogate for other vices, but most of all by fighting the somnolescence induced by a historical avoidance of any kind of regular sleeping pattern. Not being a morning person, my business probably would cease to function if ...
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Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
Science News reports that experimental evidence continues to mount that mammals who exercise demonstrate both better cognitive abilities and regenerative healing of nervous tissue.
When they dissected the rats' brains, Gage's team found changes similar to those that they'd seen in the previous study's mice: The runners had more new neurons ...
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