How could you choose avoiding a little pain over understanding a magic lightning machine?
One of my favorite of all time.
I'm Tal Atlas. I'm currently finishing up my masters in microelectronic materials after getting a Physics BS at Colorado School of Mines. I'm a hobbyist photographer and Rails programmer. This is a collection of random things I find intresting from across the web.
All posts tagged science.
Looking back over human history, rationality has been the anomaly. Being rational takes work, education, and a sober determination to avoid making hasty inferences, even when they appear to make perfect sense. Much like infectious diseases themselves — beaten back by decades of effort to vaccinate the populace — the irrational lingers just below the surface, waiting for us to let down our guard.
Every year, life-threatening illnesses deprive the economy of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of lost work time and productive output. Investment in medical research will cut that loss dramatically. The University of Chicago economists Kevin M. Murphy and Robert H. Topel recently estimated that reducing cancer deaths by just 1 percent would provide a $500 billion benefit to the economy in productivity gains and lower health care costs. What we sometimes call “human capital” and what I call “people power” is the most important infrastructure there is.
So here’s my plea to Congress: Stand up to cancer. Stand up for people fighting serious disease. Stand up and help restore America’s economy. Stand up and help build a prosperous and healthy future for our people by giving the NIH $10 billion for research. Stand up to create jobs, fight illness and deliver hope.
So here’s my plea to Congress: Stand up to cancer. Stand up for people fighting serious disease. Stand up and help restore America’s economy. Stand up and help build a prosperous and healthy future for our people by giving the NIH $10 billion for research. Stand up to create jobs, fight illness and deliver hope.
—
Patrick Swayze: I’m Battling Cancer. How About Some Help, Congress?
You look at that $10B compared to many other things the Congress funds and it looks like pennies. This kind of money dedicated to science would have an incredible impact. I really hope we once again realize how important science is. It is what allowed us to win WWII, The Cold War, and become the last (and fading) superpower. (via peterwknox)
But who knows what happens if you make a [cue creeeeeepy music] RED MATTER black hole. Maybe in those all kinds of weird things can happen, like Firefly was never canceled and the finale of Battlestar made sense. Crazy!
— Phil Plait in a super awesome analysis of the physics of Star Trek. It’s a little long but pretty awesome, especially his suggestion for a better way to destroy Romulous.
The first time you do something, it’s science. The second time, it’s engineering. The third time it’s…just being a technician.
— Clifford Stoll (via challenged confessions)
When a reporter at the New York Times made a little mistake in an article about Boron, Conan O’Brien was furious.
While this comes off a little pretentious to me any time I can tag something funny and science I love it.
Bionic Contacts
The University of Washington’s Babak Parviz has created a prototype “bionic” contact lens that creates a display over the wearer’s visual field, so images, maps, data, etc., appear to float in midair. The lens works using tiny LEDs, which are powered by solar cells, and a radio-frequency receiver.(via nickmcglynn)
The future is now.
Hello everyone, I have some exciting videos that I want to share with you! Using a high-speed camera setup in the lab, we can finally capture the details of the water dancing on these amazing superhydrophobic surfaces. We discovered that even when the surfaces had the same contact angle for stationary water droplets, their ability to resist the wetting of impacting droplets could be totally different. In the following three videos, the contact angles of a stationary droplet on all three surfaces are ~150 degree. When an impacting droplet (with the same impact speed) hits on the surfaces, the droplet can either stay on the surface.
Look at the way the water droplet spreads, recoils, breaks into satellite droplets, and completely lifts off… that’s what we really want for an impacting-droplet resistant surface! You might wonder what we can do with a cool thing like this? Imagine applications that involve high speed water droplets, such as wind turbine blade, airplane wing, or even just your car in motion. These are just a couple of the exciting possibilities that we are looking at.
(via make)
men reported spending less time to complete tasks when they used the deep website compared to women. They also worked faster on the deep website than they did on the wide site.
(via perelson)
