May 2012
1 post
5 tags
Turing Centenary Celebration
The site for the Turing Centenary Celebration is a little headache inducing: http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/
Still worth checking out, headache or not. Of particular interest:
Turing Tapes Challenge: games based on the mathematical theory of cyclotomic polynomials.
Alan Turing’s Life in Posters
Turing Test Opera
Head to the sidebar on the left for other fun links.
April 2012
0 posts
2 tags
The Black Queen Hypothesis →
There was a new hypothesis published in mBio this week, if you’re in the mood for a bit of evolution talk.
Boiled down, the theory is this: If an organism can eliminate a function and get another organism to do that work instead, it confers a selective advantage. The two organisms cozy up next to each other and one organism gets a free ride.
The name comes from the game of...
March 2012
4 posts
2 tags
The Reality of Life as An Adjunct Professor →
The Adjunct Project is working to draw attention to the current situation of adjunct faculty in the U.S. The individuals who do the bulk of the teaching at our universities are paid very little compared to the number of hours they work and their level of education. These jobs are usually short-term appointments with minimal benefits.
As much as PhDs carp about the tenure track life, there are...
2 tags
Optimum temperature for using a banana to drive a... →
Reading Japanese might enhance this article but it isn’t necessary, I think. Seriously, it is about using a banana to hammer in a nail. What more do you need?
3 tags
Raising Funds for Clean Safe Water Worldwide →
February 2012
1 post
7 tags
The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories →
A possible drug treatment for PTSD:
For example, in a recent experiment, Sacktor and scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science trained rats to associate the taste of saccharin with nausea (thanks to an injection of lithium). After just a few trials, the rats began studiously avoiding the artificial sweetener. All it took was a single injection of a PKMzeta inhibitor called zeta-interacting...
January 2012
3 posts
5 tags
How long is the longest-running lab experiment? →
You can actually watch the longest-running lab experiment in history live on a webcam. Note: it is not as exciting as you might think.
The experiment has been in progress for 85 years:
The pitch-drop experiment—really more of a demonstration—began in 1927 when Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, set out to show his students that tar pitch, a...
5 tags
The Man Who Studies The Fungus Among Us →
A discussion with fungal researcher Nicholas Money about his new book Mushroom.
“As a biologist, there’s so much to revel in, when we really study the fungi,” he tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross. “This is a fantastic kingdom of microorganisms, and far more interesting than the animals and the plants.”
4 tags
Science Can Neither Explain Nor Deny the... →