Scientific American
oracknows | May 18, 2016Contrary to what some of my detractors think, I don’t mind criticism of my viewpoints. After all, if I never encounter criticism, how will I ever improve? On the other hand, there are forms of criticism that are what I would call less than constructive. One form this sort of criticism takes is obsessive repetition of points that have already been addressed and failure to pay attention to how they were addressed. This is the sort of criticism that will eventually provoke an exasperated shrug of the shoulders or even an angry—dare I say Insolent?—retort.
Another way criticism can get on one’s…
carlyo | April 24, 2014Discover the STEM Power of Lockheed Martin at the USA Science & Engineering Festival Expo in April
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to pilot the F-35 or a flying robot? Or how cold it is in Antarctica (a region known as the most frigid place on Earth)? In addition to what the next big thing in batteries is, and can medicine really be personalized for every individual? At Festival Expo 2014 you'll experience the answer to these and other questions in unforgettable ways with founding and presenting sponsor of the Festival, Lockheed Martin through exciting interactive,…
carlyo | March 17, 2014Renowned publication Scientific American is returning to the Festival as a key Media Sponsor, ready to wow students, teachers and the public with a wide assortment of activities based on content from the magazine as well as other divisions of its parent company, Macmillan Science & Education.
Under the theme, ¨Helping Curious Minds Achieve Great Things," Scientific American's exhibit is set to inspire visitors across a broad spectrum, from K-12 learners and teachers to college students to the general science enthusiast. The activities are designed to inspire a lifelong journey of…
gregladen | October 13, 2013UPDATED:
Happy to announce that @Dnlee5 post is now back up: http://t.co/XVentvp35T #SciAmBlogs
— Bora Zivkovic (@BoraZ) October 14, 2013
This is a very interesting and important question, and it probably requires more context than I have the ability or time to give, but I think it is worth putting on the table.
If you look at the twitter hashtags #standingwithDNLee and #IstandwithDNLee (which, interestingly, have distinctly different groups of people using them, which itself is worthy of study ... perhaps an example of Tweet Drift?) you'll be able to catch up if Twitter does not drive you…
denialism | October 19, 2012Scientific American evaluates the candidates on their answers to Sciencedebate 2012 and evaluates ideology-based denialism as a whole:
Today's denial of inconvenient science comes from partisans on both ends of the political spectrum. Science denialism among Democrats tends to be motivated by unsupported suspicions of hidden dangers to health and the environment. Common examples include the belief that cell phones cause brain cancer (high school physics shows why this is impossible) or that vaccines cause autism (science has shown no link whatsoever). Republican science denialism tends to be…
illconsidered | September 10, 2012Further to my mention of Ken Caldiera's recent Scientific American article "The Great Climate Experiment" the other day, I wanted to call attention to this passages as well:
the vast oceans resist change, but change they will. At no time in Earth’s past—with the possible exception of mass-extinction events—has ocean chemistry changed as much and as rapidly as scientists expect it to over the coming decades. When CO2 enters the oceans, it reacts with seawater to become carbonic acid. In high enough concentrations, this carbonic acid can cause the shells and skeletons of many marine organisms…
jhalper | July 12, 2012Rose Eveleth talks to Assaf Vardi today on the Scientific American Expeditions blog:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/expeditions/2012/07/11/you-wanted-to-know-who-are-these-scientists-introducing-assaf-vard
sastyk | August 11, 2011First, check out my guest post at Scientific American Blogs as part of their "Passions of Food Day" Blog Fest.
Also, just keeping you all updated (as much as I can within the confidentiality guidelines), we got our first call about a foster placement, in this case a group of five children. It isn't clear that we would be asked to take all five - we might be asked to take 3, 4, or 5, depending on different possible scenarios. It isn't at all clear whether we would take all five children (which is more than we hand planned to accept, although we do feel strongly about keeping siblings…
kcollins | October 4, 2010A BIG shoutout to one of our Sponsors, Scientific American for a recent blog post covering the USA Science and Engineering Festival. Thanks for helping us get the word out to all of your readers! Check out the full article here.
Mark your calendars: for two weeks in October, the U.S. celebrates science with a nationwide effort. Festivities kick off on October 10 with a concert of science songs performed by 200 children and adults at the University of Maryland. Events follow on each day--see the calendar here--and culminate in the free, two-day Expo on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.,…
razib | August 25, 2009Kambiz Kamrani of Anthropology, normally a rather staid blogger, has posted something titled Science Suffers From The Idiots At Scientific American. It's in reference to this widely circulated editorial, Fossils for All: Science Suffers by Hoarding. I can't really summarize it, and I think the title certainly does invite you to read the whole post at Anthropology.net
rallain | April 22, 2009Some time ago I was looking for materials to possibly build a foucault pendulum. Of course the first step is google. There was a site that suggested two old issues of Scientific American, and it happens that we have tons of old Scientific Americans in the store room. I found the two that I needed. I will talk about foucault pendulum in second, but let me show this picture.
This is a device to prevent elliptical motion of the pendulum. Part of it has a ring of nickel. Now for the quote:
"The nickel ring, perhaps appropriately, should have the dimensions of a U.S. five-cent piece, with a…
ddobbs | April 3, 2009What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of long-form, slow-bake, "mainstream" journalism and the idiom we call the blogosphere? As per Bora, the meaning of these terms are shifting as we speak. Last night, using my recent story and blogging on PTSD as a point of focus, I put in my latest two cents on this subject at my talk -- actually a long conversation with host and audience -- at the NYU Science, Health and Environmental Program's "Inside-Out" lecture series.
This was a crowd of writers, journalism profs, and journalism students, and I think we were all surprised at how many…
ddobbs | March 16, 2009Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom.
Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap."
These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…
ddobbs | March 14, 2009
My story in the April 2009 Scientific American story, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap", just went online. Here's the opening:
In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest
period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.
[snip]
"Clinicians aren't separating the…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009
A European nightcrawler, ready to make trouble
Eartthworms, it seems, are the new decimator, at least in Midwestern hardwood forests . Scientific American has the story:
Long considered a gardener's friend, earthworms can loosen and aerate the soil. But the story is different in the Great Lakes region. The last Ice Age wiped out native earthworms 10,000 years ago, and ever since the Northeast forest has evolved without the crawlers, Hale says. But now earthworms are back, a product of fishers who toss their worms into the forest, of off-road vehicles and lumber trucks that carry them in the…