Oct

8

NASA Images

October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment

NASA_Images

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive, a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

Oct

8

The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners List

October 8, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Improbable Research 2008 Ig Nobel Prize Winners

Complete list of 2008 Ig Nobel Prize winners:

NUTRITION PRIZE

Massimiliano Zampini of the University of Trento, Italy and Charles Spence of Oxford University, UK, for electronically modifying the sound of a potato chip to make the person chewing the chip believe it to be crisper and fresher than it really is.

Reference: “The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips,” Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, Journal of Sensory Studies, vol. 19, October 2004, pp. 347-63.

PEACE PRIZE

The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) and the citizens of Switzerland for adopting the legal principle that plants have dignity.

Reference: “The Dignity of Living Beings With Regard to Plants. Moral Consideration of Plants for Their Own Sake” http://www.ekah.admin.ch/en/topics/dignity-of-creation/index.html

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE

Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, for measuring how the course of history, or at least the contents of an archaeological dig site, can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo.

Reference: “The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach,” Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and José Carlos Marcelino, Geoarchaeology, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2003, pp. 433-60.

BIOLOGY PRIZE

Marie-Christine Cadiergues, Christel Joubert,, and Michel Franc of Ecole Nationale Veterinaire de Toulouse, France for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat.

Reference: “A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),” M.C. Cadiergues, C. Joubert, and M. Franc, Veterinary Parasitology, vol. 92, no. 3, October 1, 2000, pp. 239-41.

MEDICINE PRIZE

Dan Ariely of Duke University, USA, for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.

Reference: “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” Rebecca L. Waber; Baba Shiv; Ziv Carmon; Dan Ariely, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 5, 2008; 299: 1016-1017.

COGNITIVE SCIENCE PRIZE

Toshiyuki Nakagaki of Hokkaido University, Japan, Hiroyasu Yamada of Nagoya, Japan, Ryo Kobayashi of Hiroshima University, Atsushi Tero of Presto JST, Akio Ishiguro of Tohoku University, and Ágotá Tóth of the University of Szeged, Hungary, for discovering that slime molds can solve puzzles.

Reference: “Intelligence: Maze-Solving by an Amoeboid Organism,” Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, and Ágota Tóth, Nature, vol. 407, September 2000, p. 470.

ECONOMICS PRIZE

Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer’s ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings.

Reference: “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?” Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan, Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 28, 2007, pp. 375-81.

PHYSICS PRIZE

Dorian Raymer of the Ocean Observatories Initiative at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA, and Douglas Smith of the University of California, San Diego, USA, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.

Reference: “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.

CHEMISTRY PRIZE

To Sharee A. Umpierre of the University of Puerto Rico, Joseph A. Hill of The Fertility Centers of New England (USA), Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard Medical School (USA), for discovering that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide, and to Chuang-Ye Hong of Taipei Medical University (Taiwan), C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang (all of Taiwan) for discovering that it is not.

Reference 1: “Effect of ‘Coke’ on Sperm Motility,” Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson, New England Journal of Medicine, 1985, vol. 313, no. 21, p. 1351.

Reference 2: “The Spermicidal Potency of Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola,” C.Y. Hong, C.C. Shieh, P. Wu, and B.N. Chiang, Human Toxicology, vol. 6, no. 5, September 1987, pp. 395-6. [NOTE: THE JOURNAL LATER CHANGED ITS NAME. NOW CALLED "Human & experimental toxicology"]

LITERATURE PRIZE

David Sims of Cass Business School. London, UK, for his lovingly written study “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations.”
Reference: “You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations,” David Sims, Organization Studies, vol. 26, no. 11, 2005, pp. 1625-40.

May

5

Open Access Directory (OAD)

May 5, 2008 | 1 Comment

Press Release: Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists - for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal “declarations of independence” - and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.

May

1

Telegraph: Top Ten Greatest Experiments

May 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Top Ten Greatest Experiments. ‘George Johnson celebrates the great thinkers whose home-brewed experiments transformed our world: A few years ago, while reading stories about superstrings vibrating in 10 dimensions or quantum computers solving problems in parallel universes, I began to feel nostalgic. I love these grand speculative theories and admire their creators, but sometimes the layers of abstraction are piled so high that they induce vertigo. I felt a need to get back to the ground.

I also found myself lamenting how much of science has become a team sport. The experiments so often celebrated in the newspapers - sequencing the genome, proving the existence of the top quark, discovering a new planet by analysing the wobble of a distant star - cost millions of pounds and are carried out by crews that have grown to the size of small corporations.’ [continue reading]

Mar

15

Time on Cancer

March 15, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Time: Cancer. ‘While more people die of heart disease in the U.S. than cancer, cancer is still one of the most feared diagnoses a person can receive. There are good reasons for this. Cancer’s ability to cause pain is notorious and some of the treatments used to fight the disease can themselves make you very sick. Fortunately, not all cancers fall into such extreme categories. And while no cure is in sight, a lot of progress has been made in prevention, treatment and controlling cancer pain as well as the side effects of treatment.’

Jan

22

TEAM 0.5: The World’s Most Powerful Microscope

January 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Debut of TEAM 0.5, the World’s Best Microscope. ‘TEAM 0.5, the world’s most powerful transmission electron microscope capable of producing images with half angstrom resolution (half a ten-billionth of a meter), less than the diameter of a single hydrogen atom has been installed at the Department of Energy’s National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The TEAM Project (TEAM stands for Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscope) is led by Berkeley Lab in a collaboration with DOE’s Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the Frederick Seitz Materials Laboratory of the University of Illinois, and two private companies specializing in electron microscopy, the FEI Company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and CEOS of Heidelberg, Germany.

Now that TEAM 0.5’s basic systems are operational, additional components and facilities are being completed and tuned, including a state-of-the-art control room display that shows the sample under the microscope on a flat panel resembling a wide-screen, high-definition TV. After a long series of rigorous tests and adjustments, TEAM 0.5 will become available to outside users by October, 2008.’

TEAM Project Homepage. ‘(…) In 2009, exactly 50 years later, a group of scientists will meet the Feynman challenge with delivery of the TEAM microscope, an instrument to provide unprecedented opportunities to observe atomic scale order, electronic structure and dynamics of individual nanostructures.’

Jan

21

Rules of Thumb Database

January 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Rules of Thumb.Org. ‘A rule of thumb is a homemade recipe for making a guess. It is an easy-to-remember guide that falls somewhere between a mathematical formula and a shot in the dark. A farmer, for in­stance, knows to plant his corn when oak leaves are the size of squirrels’ ears. An economics profes­sor knows from sad experience that inviting more than 25 percent of the guests for a univer­sity dinner party from the economics depart­ment ruins the conversation. Rules of thumb are a kind of tool. They help you appraise a problem or situation. They make it easier to consider the subtleties of the topic at hand; they give you a feel for a subject.

A rule of thumb turns information you have into information you need. The goal of this website is to gather every rule of thumb on earth into one gargantuan, easily searchable online reference database that will be accessible from anywhere in the world and continue to grow forever.’

Jan

20

On the Road to an Antitumor Vaccine

January 20, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Polymeric Nanoparticles for Tumor Vaccines. ‘The quest for an effective antitumor vaccine has received a boost from the results of work aimed at developing a nanoparticle that delivers tumor antigens to the immune system cells that trigger antibody production. The results of this effort, led by Shinsaku Nakagawa, Ph.D., and Naoki Okada, Ph.D., of Osaka University in Japan, were published in the journal Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications.

Vaccines are complex preparations of proteins and other materials designed to produce maximal immune response to those proteins. One factor that determines a vaccine’s potency is the ability of this mixture to trigger a recognition event between the protein antigen and immune system cells known as antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Using the biocompatible polymer poly(y-glutamic acid), the investigators were able to create self-assembling nanoparticles that entrap proteins as they form. The resulting nanoparticles were relatively stable, releasing their protein content over the course of a month. The investigators also demonstrated that they could freeze-dry these nanoparticles and reconstitute them without altering the functionality of the entrapped protein, a desirable property for any vaccine vehicle designed for use outside of major medical centers.’

Jan

16

Scientific American on Science 2.0: An Experiment

January 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?: Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not.

‘Welcome to a Scientific American experiment in “networked journalism,” in which readers—you—get to collaborate with the author to give a story its final form.

The article is a particularly apt candidate for such an experiment: it’s a feature story on “Science 2.0,” which describes how researchers are beginning to harness wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies as a potentially transformative way of doing science. The draft article appears here, several months in advance of its print publication, and we are inviting you to comment on it. Your inputs will influence the article’s content, reporting, perhaps even its point of view.

So consider yourself invited. Please share your thoughts about the promise and peril of Science 2.0.—just post your inputs in the Comment section.’

Related: Columbia Journalism Review: Journalism 2.0 on Science 2.0 - How the Web is shaping next-generation reporting. ‘Web 2.0 - the “second generation” Internet of user-oriented social networks, wikis, blogs, and information-tagging devices - has spawned at least two progeny since Tim O’Reilly coined the term in 2004: Journalism 2.0 and Science 2.0.

Scientific American made conjoined twins out of them last week with its latest experiment in networked journalism: an article about networked science. Last Wednesday, the magazine’s Web site published a 2,700-word story by veteran freelancer Mitch Waldrop titled, “Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?” An introduction explains, however, that the piece is a work in progress, and invites readers to post comments and questions that will be incorporated into a final version, which will be published in the May issue of the magazine.’

Jan

16

Touch the Invisible Sky: NASA Unveils Cosmic Images Book in Braille

January 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment

NASA Unveils Cosmic Images Book in Braille for Blind Readers. ‘At a ceremony today at the National Federation of the Blind, NASA unveiled a new book that brings majestic images taken by its Great Observatories to the fingertips of the blind.

Touch the Invisible Sky is a 60-page book with color images of nebulae, stars, galaxies and some of the telescopes that captured the original pictures. Braille and large-print descriptions accompany each of the book’s 28 photographs, making the book’s design accessible to readers of all visual abilities.

The book contains spectacular images from the Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope and powerful ground-based telescopes. The celestial objects are presented as they appear through visible-light telescopes and different spectral regions invisible to the naked eye, from radio to infrared, visible, ultraviolet and X-ray light.’

Jan

11

All About Richard Feynman

January 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Feynman Online. ‘This web site is dedicated to Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988), scientist, teacher, raconteur, and musician. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb, expanded the understanding of quantum electrodynamics, translated Mayan hieroglyphics, and cut to the heart of the Challenger disaster. But beyond all of that, Richard Feynman was a unique and multi-faceted individual.’

Jan

11

Journal Citation Impact Forum

January 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Thomson Scientific Launches Journal Citation Forum Dedicated to Discussion About Citation-Based Research Evaluation: From H-index to Impact Factor, Citation Impact Forum Hosts Expert Commentary and Scholarly Discussion About Citation-based Research Evaluation.

‘Thomson Scientific announced on January 8 the launch of its Citation Impact Forum, an online forum promoting scholarly discussion about all facets of citation-based research evaluation — from Thomson Scientific’s own influential Journal Impact Factor to emerging citation metrics, such as the h-index.

“The online format provides a modern-style roundtable discussion,” said Jim Testa, Thomson Scientific’s director of editorial development. “A running discussion on the topic of evaluation methods gives users around the world the benefit of information straight from Thomson Scientific. Additionally, we will use the invitation-only monthly forums to interact directly with the research community as well as to provide a way for the members of that community to interact with each other.”

The Citation Impact Forum will feature interviews with and commentary from industry leaders — bibliometricians, researchers and publishers — about scholarly evaluation. By becoming a registered member of the Forum, users have the added ability to join invitation only forums where they can participate in discussions by sharing their own thoughts with other members. Registered members can also recommend future Forum discussion topics.’