science

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RIP, Mars Phoenix Lander

Yesterday, NASA announced that the Mars Phoenix Lander has died. Okay, they said that the lander had "ceased communications" and that the lander had "finish[ed] successful work," both of which are merely euphemisms for its tragic death after five months of lonely toil on Mars. The Mars Phoenix Lander's death is not unexpected. It landed in a polar region of Mars, because that's where the ice is. But it's also where it gets real darn cold during the Martian winter, and at this point, Phoenix (and its... READ ON

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Explaining the "Dark Labyrinth" of Particle Physics

Garrett Lisi is a physicist...and a surfer who lives in a van down by the beach. In his TED Talk from February, he described a way of understanding the world (as a large thing) by looking at the tiniest things we can find. How does the world work at tiny scales? How does the Large Hadron Collider help us figure this out? How is a coral a pretty good metaphor for the patterns of subatomic particles? Lisi explains all of this in surprisingly followable language. (I did find myself rewinding and... READ ON

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Who Was Dr. Frankenstein?

Was there a real Dr. Frankenstein? Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus is considered by many to be the first science fiction novel. It was written in 1816-1817, during a time when bringing the dead back to life was a... READ ON

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Evolving New Ways to Walk

Darwin@Home is a computer program created by Gerald de Jong to model evolution. While it aspires to be a general-purpose evolution platform, at the moment it does something pretty remarkable: it takes virtual creatures designed by humans and evolves them until they can walk. Because Darwin@Home's creatures are non-biological, they can have all kinds of strange body plans -- they aren't limited to the bodies we're familiar with in Earth-based biology. In the video below, de Jong shows a series of... READ ON

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Rodney Brooks Shows Off Awesome Robots

Rodney Brooks is one of my favorite scientists: he's brilliant, accomplished (his research led to the Roomba vacuum cleaner robot), and full of predictions. Brooks is a master of robotics, having designed a wide variety of robots over the years, and he also made a memorable appearance in one of my favorite documentaries (the title Fast, Cheap and Out of Control came from a research paper of his). So it's fair to say that I'm a fan. Brooks gave a TED Talk on robotics in 2003, and it's just been posted... READ ON

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Marvin Minsky on Emotion

Can we stop epidemics by stopping people from shaking each others' hands? Can we solve global overconsumption by making people smaller, or just getting rid of mostly everybody? If a "one child per family" policy means children's families are small, why not add dozens more parents to each family? Artificial intelligence maven Marvin Minsky tackles these "solutions" in a tongue-in-cheek TED Talk from 2003. Minsky makes an interesting point (in a roundabout way) about the nature of emotion and its role... READ ON

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Incredible Deep-Sea Creatures

Although the presentation was given ten years ago (the presenters start by cracking jokes about the then-current box office hit Titanic), ocean explorer David Gallo has some amazing video of animals and other interesting stuff in the deep sea. The thirteen-minute presentation is crammed full of video showing strange octopods, colorful jellyfish, beautiful tubeworms (including a worm fight!), and scary fish -- but there's also some really interesting video of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The vents are... READ ON

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One Mythbuster's Obsession With the Maltese Falcon

Adam Savage is best known for hosting the Discovery Channel program Mythbusters, but he's got a lot more going on than televised science experiments. He's a master builder and special effects guy for major movies, and he brings his craft to students (Savage teaches advanced model-making at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco). Oh, and he's obsessed with the dodo, which has been extinct for over 300 years. Savage, like any good obsessive geek, does his homework. In a talk (see below), he... READ ON

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How To Cook Eggs

I think most cooks would assume that they know how to cook an egg: put it in boiling water for 10-15 minutes. But French cook (and molecular gastronomist) HervÃ© This... READ ON

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The Arecibo Message

Let's say you're a human with a big radio transmitter, who wants to send a message to the putative aliens out there light-years away, listening by their radio receivers. What would your message say? How would you format it, since you don't have any concept of the recipient's language or cognitive abilities? What would be most interesting and salient to a completely unknown civilization? Given the limits of the exercise, there are only a few known factors about the recipient: you can assume that the... READ ON