A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?

The Professor, the Bikini Model and the Suitcase Full of Trouble
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?

Originally posted on Google+ · March 9, 2013

Nice going, 20th century!

Read some pull quotes and a link to the new paper in Science:  http://kottke.org/13/03/new-graph-shows-unprecedented-global-warming-over-past-11000-years

Originally posted on Google+ · March 9, 2013

Using a series of 1:50 gear reductions, this motor, spinning at 200 RPM, will produce one revolution per every couple trillion years at the output shaft.

The output shaft is embedded in concrete.

Arthur Ganson’s “Machine with Concrete”
The gear train on Arthur Gansen’s sculpture is driven at 200 rpm, and after stepping down 12 times, turns at a rate of less than one revolution per two trillion years. The final gear is embedded i……

Originally posted on Google+ · March 9, 2013

I've been following this for awhile, and it's good to see them out releasing a "product".

MetaMed uses doctors and professionals who understand statistics and the state of research to help you with your medical issues.

By using doctors and researchers who understand statistics and how to evaluate the relative importance of research findings, MetaMed provides a diagnosis, treatment recommendations, and referrals to doctors in their network who can provide the treatments best for a specific patient. MetaMed provides “evidence based medicine” rather than vague suggestions solely based on domain-general knowledge.

Why is such a thing needed?

Many doctors and medical professionals lack a basic understanding of statistics. For instance, in one study, sixteen out of twenty HIV counselors said that there was no such thing as a false positive HIV test (Gigerenzer et al 1998). Another study found that British general practitioners rarely change their prescribing patterns, and when they do, it’s not in response to evidence (Armstrong et al 1996). Gigerenzer and others have shown that statistical illiteracy is ubiquitous among patients and doctors. Many confuse sensitivity and specificity, and most physicians do not understand how to compute the positive predictive value of a test. This can cause them to overestimate the probability of someone having a disease, say breast cancer, by an order of magnitude or more.

MetaMed — Personalized Medical Research Backed by Peter Thiel and Jaan Tallinn | Accelerating Future
Doctors, like other experts, have limited domain knowledge. The average primary care visit is only 11 minutes, a figure which hasn’t changed since the 1930s, with four minutes of that being the patien…

Originally posted on Google+ · March 9, 2013

I've posted about tardigrades before: https://plus.google.com/117177689300294532641/posts/AwRFDAak3D7

In case anyone missed NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day yesterday…

Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate. That's because tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA and reduce their body water content to a few percent. Some of these miniature water-bears almost became extraterrestrials recently when they were launched toward to the Martian moon Phobos on board the Russian mission Fobos-Grunt, but stayed terrestrial when a rocket failed and the capsule remained in Earth orbit. Tardigrades are more common than humans across most of the Earth. Pictured above in a color-enhanced electron micrograph, a millimeter-long tardigrade crawls on moss.

Originally posted on Google+ · March 7, 2013

So, NOW it's come to this. A seven-year-old suspended from school for crudely fashioning his breakfast pastry into a gun-like shape and brandishing it in the most menacing fashion a gun-shaped pastry can be wielded.

7-Year-Old Student Suspended For Waving Around A ‘Gun’ Made From A Pastry | Techdirt
So, it’s come to this. Oh, wait. I’ve already used that opening, back when I thought the pinnacle of guns-n-schools overreaction had been approached, if not actually surmounted. Let’s start again. …

Originally posted on Google+ · March 7, 2013

I really enjoyed this article-or-post-or-story-or-whatever-you-wanna-call-it about the people involved in helping fix a problem with the plumbing in someone's new-to-them house.

I'm not sure if that's because I've spent most of my life in blue-collar work but now spend most of my time programming and reading science textbooks or if it's just the enjoyable writing style, but hopefully you'll enjoy it too!

This is where I differ in temperament and expertise from people like Rick and Tom. At the first sign of distress from Rick, I assumed that our perfect new house was ruined. In my head, we’d already burned it down, collected the insurance money, and gone back to renting a squat in some crooked slumlord’s tax write-off. Of course, I am also the kind of person who assumes that when the Check Engine light comes on in my car, my only options are to either put more oil in it or drive it into the river. Looking under the hood of things is comically ineffectual for a person like me; I might as well be reading a foreign language. I don’t “drop in a new carburetor” or “slap up some drywall” or “irrigate the soil bed.” I pound nails into walls so I can hang pictures from them, and poorly.

Adventures At The Intersection of Homeownership And Sewage
It started with black dirt around the basement’s floor drain, discovered just a couple weeks after my wife and I moved into the house we’d just bought. Beca

Originally posted on Google+ · March 7, 2013

For example:

What is the input , what is the output ? Explain like i am five, for 1 kg of meat , what is needed?

The input are largely animal cells (muscle, fat and a couple other types – taken from a donor animal through a biopsy) and cell culture media (a soup in which the cells grow made of amino acids, vitamins, minerals, salts, sugars) and then energy to run the process. Output is muscle tissue that is then matured/conditioned until it is processed into meat products.

or…

Does it taste the same as regular meat?

_I've tasted it as have my colleagues. We've only been able to have small bites since we're still working on getting the process right.
I cooked some pieces in olive oil and ate some with and without salt and pepper. Not bad. The taste is good but not yet fully like meat. We have yet to get the fat content right and other elements that influence taste. This process will be iterative and involve us working closely with our consulting chefs._

I’m Andras Forgacs, CEO of Modern Meadow – a company at the forefront of 3D-printed meat and leather. AMA! : IAmA
At [Modern Meadow](http://www.modernmeadow.com) we’re developing technology to 3D-bioprint meat and leather. In fact, we’ve already made some, wh…

Originally posted on Google+ · March 7, 2013

I'm not normally a fan of the type of science articles posted in mainstream press…they're normally too "human-interest-y", but for some reason I didn't mind that in this article.

Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God particle.”

If his rivals were right, it would mean a cascade of Nobel Prizes flowing in the wrong direction and, even more vexingly, that Dr. Sharma and his colleagues had missed one of nature’s clues and thus one of its greatest prizes; that the dream of any physicist — to know something that nobody else has ever known — was happening to someone else.

Chasing the Higgs: How 2 Teams of Rivals Searched for Physics’ Most Elusive Particle
At the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, two armies of physicists struggled to close in on the Higgs boson, the Great White Whale of modern science.

Originally posted on Google+ · March 7, 2013