Science & Society
I just got an invitation to attend Science Foo Camp in August 07, a unique meeting organized by Nature, O'Reilly and Google. Based on what I heard from last year's attendees this will be an amazing opportunity to bounce ideas around.
I'd like to hear more from others who are going or who attended last year.
As before, we will be inviting around 200 people who are doing particularly interesting work in a wide range of scientific disciplines, as well as in areas of technology and culture that influence, and are influenced by, science. The aim is to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas,…
Screens that not only display images but also generate their own power are on the horizon.
One of the new display technologies will be suitable for cellphones, making their batteries last far longer than they do now. The other could lead to selfpowered electronic billboards.
The development of the novel screens is revealed in two recent patent documents. Motorola of Schaumberg, Illinois, has been granted a patent (US 7206044) on a liquid crystal display that incorporates a solar panel. The self-powered billboard appears in a patent application filed by Nokia of Espoo, Finland (US 2007/…
Was Chris De Burgh's sexy "Lady in Red," perhaps, ovulating? A new UCLA and University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire study finds evidence that women put more effort into their clothing and grooming during their most fertile periods.
"Near ovulation, women dress to impress, and the closer women come to ovulation, the more attention they appear to pay to their appearance," said Martie Haselton, the study's lead author and a UCLA associate professor of communication studies and psychology. "They tend to put on skirts instead of pants, show more skin and generally dress more fashionably."…
The mouth is a tough environment, which is why dentists do not give lifetime guarantees. Despite their best efforts, a filling may eventually crack under the stress of biting, chewing and teeth grinding, or secondary decay may develop where the filling binds to the tooth. Fully 70 percent of all dental procedures involve replacements to existing repairs, at a cost of $5 billion per year in the United States alone.
Now, however, scientists at the American Dental Association’s Paffenbarger Research Center, a joint research program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST),…
Consumers may claim they don't like diet soda because of the taste of artificial sweeteners, but Shelly Schmidt, a University of Illinois professor of food chemistry, thinks people are also influenced by a subtle difference called "mouth-feel." Think body, fullness, thickness; regular soda contains high-fructose corn syrup, diet soda doesn't.
What makes these scientists think mouth-feel is the culprit? For one thing, artificial sweeteners have been greatly improved and extensively studied. "Taste profiles for artificial sweeteners now closely match the one for sucrose, which humans describe…
Want to keep kids thin? Clore Laboratory at the University of Buckingham is supplementing infant formula and other baby foods with leptin,the hunger hormone. Researchers say it could provide permanent protection from obesity and diabetes into adulthood and could be on shop shelves soon.
Those who take the foods early in life should remain permanently slim. 'Like those people who are lean by nature even though they overeat ? like we all do – they will tend to be inefficient in terms of using energy,' says Mike Cawthorne, who heads the Metabolic Research group at Clore.
Cawthorne's group…
Runners in today's London Marathon may be tempted to down several litres of water to keep their cool and achieve their best time, but large fluid intake does not achieve either, according to a sports scientist from the University of Exeter.
With today's temperatures expected to reach 19 degrees, the average runner will potentially lose almost a litre of sweat every hour and reach a body temperature of over 39 degrees, two degrees above normal. The sporting community has long assumed that drinking large amounts of water helps to keep the body's temperature down, which improves performance. A…
A thin film of carbon polymer which conducts electricity and runs on solar power could be the basis for a revolution in the way we light our homes and design clothes.
An international research project has begun that could help bring to mass-market organic light emitting devices (OLEDs), which could have far reaching technological implications and cut the cost of lighting by billion of pounds each year.
Because the devices are thin and flexible, lighting and electronic display screens could for the first time be created on almost any material, so that clothes and packaging can display…
If your meat needs to be plumped up, try some collagen injections.
Injecting meatballs with collagen can help the meat to retain the important nutrients iodine and thiamine, a new study by researchers from the Agricultural University of Poznan in Poland shows.
During the processes of storing and cooking, pork meatballs tend to lose a percentage of iodine and thiamine. Adding collagen fibre or collagen hydrolysate saturated with potassium iodide to meat makes it more stable than potassium iodide introduced using iodized table salt. The collagen enhancement works on fresh meat before cooking…
Cash |
Anyone can tell you, the surest test of your science chops is your ability to make a kid understand it. Science, at its most fundamental, can be understood by anyone if explained properly. Science is, for the most part, conceptual. The math is relatively unimportant as long as you understand why things work the way they work.
I bring that up because it's not always kids doing the learning. Most science questions I can answer pretty easily. I have a broad base of knowledge and one of those brains that recalls everything. In the age of Google that's relatively unimportant. Today, sub-literate…