I’m always fascinated by the biases that people have. I’m not talking about things like racism specifically, but the root cognitive malfunctions that cause people to draw the wrong conclusions from the evidence they have. Consumerist points to a study that highlights another example…
If you use coupons in a store, your fellow shoppers are probably negatively judging you as being cheap, according to a new study.
Sharks own. I would like to see a ninja, a pirate, and a shark battle it out. I think that even if the shark lost the battle, it would win the war because it can have children without having a mate!
Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.
Quantum mechanics is weird. One of the attempts at explaining how come it is so weird is the Many Worlds Interpretation, which states that every possible way history could have turned out, actually has in seperate parallel universes.
The problem between all the interpretations of quantum mechanics is that no one has been able to determine which one reflects what actually happens.
Now Frank Tipler, a physicist at Tulane University in New Orleans says he has hit upon a way in which these interpretations must produce different experimental results.
Wired has a neat time-lapse video showing a fish embryo developing during it’s first 24 hours. I’ll post the video below. If you want to read more about what’s actually happening head on over to the brief description they provide.
With a newly developed microscope that uses a sheet of light to scan a living organism from many different dimensions, scientists were able to track the complex cellular organization of a zebrafish embryo as it grows from a single cell to 20,000 cells.
Time-Lapse: Zebrafish Embryos Developing
Acupuncture. Ha. (Scroll down a bit for the acupuncture article.)
In this week’s eSkeptic, Skeptic magazine’s very own Skepdoc, Harriet Hall M.D., punctures the acupuncture myth and tells you why “almost everything you’ve heard about acupuncture is wrong.”
This seems quite crazy, but if it works it seems like it would be quite a tool for law enforcement.
Scientists at the world-leading Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester – where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys- are developing techniques which may one day allow police to work out someone’s surname from the DNA alone.
I’m a cup-1/4-full-of-ice kinda man myself, and the data shows I’m right!
Depending on whom you ask, either ice-fiends are suckers who pay for frozen water or ice-avoiders are cheapskates with a perverse attachment to warm fountain syrup. To settle this once and for all, we went to a local cineplex and bought three Cokes with varying amounts of cubes at 4 smackaroos each. Then we broke out our thermometers and measuring cups. The cold, hard data says it all.
Newsweek looks at recent research on anti-aging drugs. It’s actually fairly exciting to think about. I’ve been interested in the field after reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near. Also of interest on the subject is the work of Aubrey de Gray.
Link to Can We Slow Aging? – Newsweek: International Editions – MSNBC.com
Here’s some pics I took of the surrounding areas after the recent ice storms here in Missouri. All of these were taken in St. Francois County.
Hilarious. It’s an overview of WWII written as if it was an RTS game and you’re reading the in-game chat.