May 2012
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April 2012
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March 2012
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Physicists conquering their demons
Over half a century ago, Rolf Landauer, a German-American physicist, introduced the idea that information is energy. In 1961 he was the first to argue that, when we erase a bit stored in a digital memory, that bit is transformed at some level into energy that is then dissipated by the circuit. Erasing the bit thus increases the entropy of the system—the system becomes more disordered, while...
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WatchWe talked recently about a growing trend in some areas of scientific research to outsource brain power to eager people around the world who are eager to contribute, known as citizen scientists.
Although todays subject matter is controversial, and is perhaps considered to be absurd to many scientists, searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is just one of the serious ongoing projects that...
February 2012
13 posts
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WatchOn the International Space Station, astronaut Don Pettit uses electrically charged knitting needles and water droplets to show how in microgravity conditions the latter can orbit the former. Although the orbits of the droplets and some of the features they exhibit are similar to those of planets around a central cylindrical body, electrical—not gravitational— interactions are at work...
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Decoding the way we think and speak
Most of us speak without thinking every day. Although that is how it seems, speaking actually involves a number of different steps to be performed by the brain every second: we need to think what it is we are trying to communicate, choose the right word to say, then pick the correct tense, and finally pronounce it in a way that the receiver will understand.
The neural computations required...
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Immunologists halt studies on airborne H5N1 virus
New research on an artificially induced mutation of the H5N1 flu virus that would allow airborne transmission has been stopped, after the decision by the two independent groups that conducted the studies, and the scientific journals involved, to only release an abridged version of their respective papers. Following an intense public debate that accompanied the announcement of the creation of the...
January 2012
12 posts
The cost of knowledge: researchers taking a stand...
The current science publishing model, though by now consolidated, is not without its flaws. Nobody would argue about the necessity of peer-reviewing in academic publishing, but discussions have been taking place about the opportunity of making behind-the-scenes conversations between authors and editors available to the public, as well as the importance of scientific papers being accessible to a...
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December 2011
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