Technology
milhayser | August 18, 2013Windows takes a lot of crap from fanboys, and Apple products do the same, but while our prejudices can be well-founded it's always worth taking an honest look at the opposition. With its Windows Phone mobile OS, Microsoft has built a very fun and functional platform that in some ways exceeds the user experience of Android and iOS.
Microsoft's presence on mobile platforms somewhat changes its historical relationship with hardware. In the days when you were a PC person or a Mac person, one advantage of the personal computer was an open hardware standard, allowing not only for custom computer…
gregladen | August 14, 2013Or, at least, I'm surprised that this earlier implemented solution has not been mentioned in all the discussion about NSA spying.
Richard Stallman invented an approach to obviating the NSA's attempts to spy on email. He included it in emacs, the world's greatest text editor. Here how it works, from the manual. The "M" is the "alt" key (for all practical purposes) and "M-x followed by a word implements the command attached to that word.
32.6 Mail Amusements
M-x spook adds a line of randomly chosen keywords to an outgoing mail message. The keywords are chosen from a list of words that…
gregladen | August 6, 2013Every year the federal government wastes tens of millions of dollars a year, possibly hundreds, supporting old versions of the Internet Explorer browser (below version 9).
Web development teams typically use 30%-40% of their time (or more) adapting sites to display properly in these browsers.
There is no good reason for the US to waste time and money supporting this old, flawed technology. Alternatives such as Firefox or Chrome, which render pages properly, are available at no cost and are easy to install. Citizens with older computers can be redirected to use these.
By publicly stopping…
kbonham | August 5, 2013
Can you be skeptical about GM but believe in climate change? So asks Alice Bell in The Guardian. The answer is of course, "Yes," but you can also be a fundamentalist Christian while believing in evolution and being a great scientist, so being able to hold two things in your brain at the same time is not a useful measure of logical incompatibility. One can be right about one thing and wrong about the other.
But let's get to the real issue raised in Bell's piece, the use of the term "anti-science" to describe opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs):
When people use the term "anti-…
carlyo | July 15, 2013By Mark Modzelewski
Washington, DC, July 15, 2013 – Science Spark has teamed with Michigan Technological University (Michigan Tech) to support the University’s Mind Trekkers traveling science festival as it heads out across America. The Mind Trekkers tour will culminate at the USA Science & Engineering Festival, supported by presenting host sponsor Lockheed Martin.
The traveling festival offers children of all ages the opportunity to engage in hands-on science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) activities. The first stop will be the National Scout Jamboree, July 15-24, 2013 at the…
carlyo | June 14, 2013ENGINEERING.COM, with its mission to inform, inspire and entertain the world's engineers -- and future engineers -- is returning as a key sponsor of the USA Science & Engineering Festival and Expo in 2014.
Widely known for having its fingers directly on the pulse of the fascinating, ever-evolving realm of engineering innovation, ENGINEERING.COM will help expand the scope and reach of Festival excitement, education and inspiration by serving once again as the event's official videographer, which will include capturing the bevy of high-profile activity taking place during Expo finale…
jtoney | June 12, 2013This post was co-authored by Ali Arab, Ph.D., an assistant professor of statistics at Georgetown University.
We are living in a global society driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship. Success depends upon free access to information and unfettered research by scholars. Yet targeted academic boycotts are increasingly common, throwing more and more roadblocks on the way to progress.
Earlier in May 2013, the decision by the world-renowned British cosmologist Stephen Hawking to withdraw from a major academic conference in Israel reignited discussions among scholars on whether or…
kbonham | June 12, 2013A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk for
Tonight, I'm presenting at the Science In The News (SITN) Spring lecture series. If you're in the vicinity of Boston, you can come watch at 7pm in Pfizer Auditorium, located in the Mallinckrodt Chemistry Lab, 12 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138.
If you can't show up in person though, SITN is now broadcasting live via google hangouts. Check out this page for details, and I'll try to upload the video feed here around 6:30 ET.
Start about 22min in
gregladen | June 10, 2013I hope it is very very good because if not the fact that it looks exactly like a trash can I just bought at Target could make it a laughing stock.
It is assembled in the USA. That's a good start!
Here's a question for the true geeks: What prior RAM had the same speed as the fastest flash/hard drive storage of today's computer?
In case that video was not visible for you here's part of it via Youtube:
illconsidered | May 31, 2013Coal-fired electricity production is bad on so many levels.
You'd think humans could learn from history, but sadly, no, and no. The childhood asthma statistics alone should be enough. Coal burning power plants are a leading producer of asthma causing pollution. And then there's the mercury...and the mountain-top removal, and the waste products..and, well, when do we say "enough"?
carlyo | May 30, 2013Popular Science, one of the leading sources of news in technology, science, gadgets, space, green tech and more, is returning as a key Americium Media Partner with the Festival!
In doing so, Popular Science joins a growing list of other top science media leaders who will be serving as Festival sponsors, including Scientific American, American Scientist, Sigma Xi, ENGINEERING.com, Forbes Wolfe, and PBS Kids, among many others.
Popular Science has been a major source of science and technology news since its award-winning magazine was founded back in 1872. Its online version, PopSci.com, was…
kbonham | May 14, 2013Ok, this is a little different, but it's annoying, so I'm going to talk about it.
Let me begin by saying I love the Union of Concerned Scientists. They've been wonderful advocates on climate change for decades; they are media savvy, they train scientists to be media savvy, and they push the media and policy makers alike to understand the scientific consensus. When it comes to climate change, I trust them over just about any other source.
Which is why it's so disappointing that they are so wrong on genetically modified organisms.
Several years ago, UCS decided to branch out into the science of…
carlyo | April 26, 2013Save the date: the USA Science & Engineering Festival Expo is just one year away! We are so excited to bring you the largest celebration of science & engineering for the 3rd time! Leading up to the Expo we will have affiliate events, the return of the Nifty Fifty (x3), contests, and school programs! The Festival week will kick off with the U.S. News STEM Solutions Conference, the launch of X-STEM Extreme STEM Symposium (Thursday, April 24) and Sneak Peek Friday (April 25)! The free and open to the public finale Expo will be the weekend of April 26-27, 2014!
The spotlight on STEM (…
jtoney | April 23, 2013It was an unexpected journey, from the George W. Bush Shake, the Barack Obama Hug to the Harlem Shake.
Appreciation from the President of the United States is one of the highest honors any American can receive. No, it wasn't me, but the best part is that it was one of our students.
I have been very fortunate in my own education having learned from two mentors awarded the National Medal of Science (Prof. Tobin J. Marks and Prof. Stephen J. Lippard.) Each received a hearty handshake from President George W. Bush. Perhaps some of my work in their labs helped get them there, along with a…
jtoney | April 6, 2013It is a feeling of unbelievable joy. We have all felt it, at one time or another. For me, it is at its most palpable in a concert or a sports event with tens of thousands of fans. Initially, everyone is milling about, chatting, texting, a thousand unconnected specks. Then there's a moment capturing everyone's attention - a touchdown, a band jamming with pure, raw energy - and, in an instant, everything changes. Those specks converge into a single, connected, joyous crowd. Differences, stress, arguments, angst, worries fade away.
Social media has figured out how to harness this ineffable…
cevans | March 12, 2013You certainly didn't hear it here first: today NASA, at a press briefing, announced that minerals analyzed by the Curiosity rover indicate that life might, in the galactic past, have survived on Mars. The rover's been poking around an ancient network of stream channels descending from the rim of Gale crater since September of last year; now, after drilling into the sedimentary bedrock nearby, it's hit on a treasure trove of life-supporting minerals: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and nitrogen. These mineral findings are really just icing on the cake, as the geological clues–…
pharyngula | February 26, 2013I just got back from this evening's Cafe Scientifique — where were you guys? — and I got to see lots of pretty pictures of halos and sundogs and light pillars. One of the nice things about living in Morris is that we actually get a lot of that weird atmospheric phenomena here, because we have lots of the raw material for them here: ice crystals. Vast drifting clouds of hexagonal crystals, flat and columnar, of various proportions, floating in the sky at various orientations to both refract and reflect light into our eyes.
I won't go into all the details, since you weren't there. And since…
gregladen | February 25, 2013I recently posted a simple Internet meme suggesting that if we subsidized solar energy like we subsidized fossil fuels that this could be good. I posted that on Google Plus an it engendered way over 300 comments, many of which attempted to explain, often rather impolitely, that solar energy was inefficient or in some other way bad. I'm pretty sure most of those comments come to us courtesy of the bought and paid for climate change denialist campaign, funded by Big Oil to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars to date. Most of the commenters were saying similar things, most of which…
cevans | January 20, 2013The cultural critic Walter Benjamin, in his seminal 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, argued that the "aura" of a work of art, that sense of special awe and reverence we feel, being in its presence, isn't inherent to art itself. Rather, it's a side-effect of its exclusivity, restricted exhibition, authenticity, or perceived value. With the age of "mechanical reproduction" (i.e. printed copies, films, and photographs), that aura disappeared, freeing art from its ties to the bourgeoisie and allowing mass audiences to, in a sense, "own" the work too. Take the Mona…