“Descartes’ Bones” addresses a ghoulish subject. The great man’s physical remains have been dug up and reburied several times since he died in Sweden in 1650. Initially they were moved for the purpose of repatriating him to his native France, but the story becomes stranger as it escalates.
Hundreds of new marine species and previously uncharted undersea mountains and canyons have been discovered in the depths of the Southern Ocean, Australian scientists said Wednesday.
The air traffic control tower at Academy Airport here offers a panoramic view of the runways, the terminal, the three windsocks and, off in the distance, the outlines of downtown’s biggest buildings. Except that none of it is real.
While developing his new game Spore, Will Wright indulged in his lifelong interest in astrobiology and drew from the work of Jill Tarter over numerous visits to the SETI Institute. In this video Salon, Wright and Tarter meet to ask each other questions about gaming and science, the value of scientific revolutions, and advanced life in the universe.
What if you built the whole mass of western europe in 20 years? What if 400 million farmers then moved in? What would it look like? How would it work? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else …?
‘China has the world’s fastest urbanization. 930,000,000 Chinese will be living in cities before 2030. This means one new Beijing every year for 35 years.’
Most people are worried about the health of the economy. But does the economy also affect your health?
Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers have developed a new prenatal blood test that accurately detected Down syndrome and two other serious chromosomal defects in a small study of 18 pregnant women. If confirmed in larger trials, they say, the test would offer a safer and faster alternative to invasive prenatal tests such as amniocentesis that pose a small risk of miscarriage.
Fascination with what lies beneath the earth seems to have been shared by many different cultures. In the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth centuries, however, the emergence of new technologies made it possible for the first time to dig into the earth on a scale that had been previously unimaginable. Whether undertaken in the service of science or in the name of public works, these colossal excavations dispelled many longstanding myths. Nevertheless, the subterranean imagination did not simply disappear. Instead, it reconfigured itself around a new set of ideas, fantasies, and fears.
Below, two articles that mention a recent study about online reading habits.
Apparently no one reads full paragraphs anymore, we all just skim text looking for the little nuts of information, our collective habits follow an “F” shaped pattern where we read
“horizontally across the first few lines of text, then halfway across for a few more, and finally vertically the rest of the way down the page.”
Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind - The Chronicle of Higher Education
Is Stupid Making Us Google? - The New Atlantis
Is this good or bad? Are you still reading?
I’ve been waiting for something like this to come out for a long time…a flexible display (you can bend it), about the size of an 8.5×11″ piece of paper. You can read the newspaper, you can read your business documents, no backlighting, E ink technology, sticky notes, touch screen, etc…now we just have to wait till January.