What If… exhibition at the Science Gallery in Dublin
A nice comment from Kat Austen of the New Scientist’s Culture Lab:
Many of the exhibits are heavily dystopian, and address questions on scientific or medical ethics that must be asked in our bio-technological age. Both the installation that posits using pigs and other animals as life support machines and Future Farms - where people use their own bodies to grow stem cells for medical procedures - evoke the kind of discomfort you feel when you watch a news story about an impoverished parent resorting to selling their own kidney just to put their child through school.
What Earth Would Look Like With Rings Like Saturn
This image comes from an interview with astronaut Nicole Stott and author Bruce Sterling on what its really like living aboard the International Space Station.
J. Richard Gott on to when, given the opportunity, he would travel in time. When asked why, he replied:
Because that’s how long homo sapiens have been around. I’ve done some thinking about time not just in terms of travel or physics, but in relation to how long things last—things like the Berlin Wall or Broadway plays or the human species. In 1993, I published a paper inNature that applied one of the most famous postulates in science, the Copernican principle, to time.
The Copernican principle is simply the idea that your location in the universe is not special. Most likely your last name falls somewhere in the middle ninety-five percent of the phone book, not right at the beginning or the end, which would be special. And most likely you’re living sometime in the middle ninety-five percent of the length of the human species. Otherwise you’d be in a special position and that’s just less likely.
Using some simple math, I predicted with ninety-five percent confidence that the human race would last at least another 5,100 years, but less than 7.8 million years. Now, that’s a wide range, but an important one. The fate of our own species is supremely important to us. Some people predict we’ll die out in the next hundred years if we aren’t careful; others think we’ll just last indefinitely. Neither is likely. In any case, we’d better not be complacent. The Earth is littered with the bones of extinct species…
My estimates of the future longevity of the human species are based entirely on our past longevity as an intelligent species—the only one we know—and make no assumptions that our fate will be similar to that for other species. However, my estimates give us a total longevity (past plus future) quite comparable to that observed for other mammal species, whose average longevity is 2 million years.
Why the coincidence? Well, if we remain confined to Earth, we are subject to the things that routinely cause other mammal species to go extinct. That’s why I am so concerned about the space program. So far, the space program is very brief, and the Copernican principle predicts it will probably go out of business sooner rather than later. And clearly we would increase our chances of surviving if we colonize space.
We perform best when no one tells us what to do.
In Duncker’s famous “candle problem” illustrating Functional Fixedness (1945), subjects are asked to attach a candle to wall in a way to prevent wax from dripping on the table- given only a candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks. Some subjects tried to tack the candle to the wall, others tried to melt the wax on the side of the candle to stick it to the wall. Neither of these worked. The solution is shown here.
IBM scientist Henry Markam responds to the hype:
… what IBM reported is a scam — no where near a cat-scale brain simulation […] I am absolutely shocked at this announcement. Not because it is any kind of technical feat, but because of the mass deception of the public.
(via Futurismic)
While the USA still leads the world in the number of scientific papers published yearly, China has quickly surpassed Germany and Japan, who used to occupy 2nd and 3rd place.
(via Corpus Callosum)
The Bizarre and Brilliant World of Knitted Science
From Discover Magazine, this image is one of several in a gallery of knit and crochet science ‘visualizations.’ This is a knit brain created by psychiatrist Karen Norberg.
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