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June 2008 Link Archives
Blake writes about why science blogs don't teach us physics, an interesting view both for it's physics implications and general blogging implications. It's long but totally worth it.
Shuttle Extended to Install AMS
This sounds borderline good. I'm impressed that the senate was convinced to approve the extra mission to install the AMS and that they're suggesting $2 billion more in NASA budget than the White House suggests for next year. Obviously not impressed that this will uproot many existing plans to retire the shuttle which will cost money in an already-bloated system. All-in-all, a win for any science that comes from the AMS, at least.
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A downright fascinating piece in the new yorker about phantom pains and itches. Atul Gawande, author of "Better", a book I have on my shelf waiting to be read, does a really excellent job writing about interesting medical phenomona and science in general.
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NOVA's scienceNOW brand (currently a podcast) is being brought to TV by Neil deGrasse Tyson, one of my favorite public faces of science. It starts tomorrow, June 25th.
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A couple days late to the Big Picture party, here's a particularly nice group of higher resolution photos from various robots on Mars. The Big Picture, a Boston Globe photoblog, is one of the most fantastic new photoblogs out there.
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They dug up some chunks of white substance one day and it was gone the next. Sublimation of ice, they think! Very excited for when they can toss some of this stuff into the TEGA oven and confirm it.
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Curiously, two polymers (usually just a fancy word for plastics, but natural amber also falls into this category) next to each other conduct electricity via interactions in the small space between them. Apparently the space between materials "conducts electricity much better than standard semiconductors." This doesn't necessarily translate to "new semiconductor material" - not yet, at the very least.
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This is a really fascinating piece about an architect who built a number of puzzles into an $8.5 million house he was redoing. I've always wanted to build puzzles like this for other people. And not necessarily physical puzzles like he's done (although that is cool - just requires a lot more skills) but lots-of-knowledge based puzzles.
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Another Diet Coke and Mentos Study
Okay, we get it. Diet Coke and Mentos. Nucleation and a chemical reaction. Can we stop beating the horse now?
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This is so good! IEEE Spectrum has an entire issue devoted to the singularity, the idea that our lives will start changing drastically due to the (predicted) coming of effectively-conscious computers, popularized by Ray Kurzweil and sci-fi writers around the globe.
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Put a Little Science in Your Life
Brian Greene's recent op-ed in the NYT identifying our transition from "little scientists" to (mostly) non-scientists. Not without a brief mention of how his book helps a soldier in Iraq make it through the day.
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