All kids by nature, are keen to learn 

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso once declared "Cada niño es un artista. El problema es cómo seguir siendo un artista una vez que hemos crecido" ( Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up! ). A combined study in Cognition suggests that, every child is a natural scientist too. So, it is simple, we just remain eager, enthusiastic and continue to discover, learn and share. "All children are scientists somehow it gets lost", says a world renowned scientist learn more..

"  IF you are 12  or older, you can now roll up your sleeve for COVID-19 vaccine  "

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understanding a past (mass) inoculation ::

An Egyptian pillar (1580-1350 BC) portrays a priest with a withered leg, suggesting that polio had existed for thousands of years before the polio pandemic (1916 - 1955). In mid 1950s a mass inoculation of school children against polio was made possible by Dr. Salk (using the vaccine he invented). It began in Pittsburgh as some 5,000 students were vaccinated. Polio is the common name for poliomyelitis, which comes from the Greek words for grey and marrow, referring to the spinal cord, and the suffix –itis, meaning inflammation. Poliomyelitis, shortened, became polio. For a time, polio was called infantile paralysis, though it did not affect only the young. Salk conducted the first human trials on former polio patients and on himself and his family, and by 1953 was ready to announce his findings. Adults were also often afflicted, including (that time) future president Franklin D. Roosevelt (served as the 32nd president from 1933 until his death 1945) who in 1921 was stricken with polio at the age of 39 and was left partially paralyzed. (After FDR's death, physicians argued that he actually suffered from Guillain-Barre Syndrome. It could be the most famous misdiagnosis in history). " To educate a man in mind, and not in morals is to educate a menace to society'   said President Theodore Roosevelt (26th president from1901 to 1909 ).  Without guiding principles one will not have a moral compass. With no moral compass, all paths will seem of near equal value. On the flip side: When asked who owned the patent on his vaccine against polio virus, Jonas Salk responded, " the people I'd say, there is no patent "  Learn more..

have I been pwned?

Massive databases of user accounts seem to get hacked daily. The number of exposed accounts and passwords usually encrypted weakly has risen into the billions. That appears to be changing, in part due to new laws in effect or about to be in the European Union and some U.S. states, including California, that impose penalties on delays in notification. But it’s also due to one Australian man’s accidental rise to the top of the account disclosure hack ecosystem. Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned has data from over 305 breaches and 77,000 selective dumps (called “pastes”) that total over 5.3 billion account records Learn more..

math looks & feels the same in the brains of girls and boys :: 

Couple of years back a study (by CMU) found that children's brains function similarly regardless of their gender.  CMU sudied 104 children from ages 3 to 10 found similar patterns of brain activity in boys and girls as they engaged in basic math tasks. The new study came from earlier research by Cantlon that found boys and girls as old as 8 had very similar abilities when it came to perceiving numbers and grasping elementary mathematics concepts.

A cyber-attack forced fuel pipeline to shut down ::

Learn how pipeline companies and other agencies protect against security risks like terrorism and cyber attacks. There are many ways to protect yourself. If you are running Windows 10 just enable “Controlled folder access”.  It is a security feature built-into Windows Defender designed to protect your files and folders from ransomware.  This video, shows the basic steps needed to enable it on your PC Learn more..

human organs on a chip ::

Microchips lined by living human cells that could revolutionize drug development, disease modeling and personalized medicine. Clinical studies take years to complete and testing a single compound can cost more than $2 billion. Meanwhile, innumerable animal lives are lost, and the process often fails to predict human responses, traditional animal models often do not accurately mimic human pathophysiology Learn more..

what is the human genome project really ::

In the 1970s The Sanger sequencing method enabled scientists to read the genetic code for the first time. It is based on the natural process of DNA replication. DNA sequencing is the process of determining the order of bases in a length of DNA. Its development has helped to dramatically advance our understanding of genetics. Its the 20th anniversary of the publication of the draft of the human genome sequence. A genome is an organism’s complete set of DNA, including all of its genes. Each genome contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism. In humans, a copy of the entire genome more than 3 billion DNA base pairs is contained in all cells that have a nucleus. The Human Genome Project (HGP) was the international, collaborative research program whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings Learn more..

Sequencing LilBub's Magical Genome ::

Daniel Ibrahim vividly remembers where he was the first time he came across this  bug-eyed, toothless, tiny cat called Lil Bub, the internet-breaking Queen of Cute. It was September 2014, in Berlin, when the molecular geneticist found himself watching a documentary online. First thing the next morning he bounded over to the office of his fellow Max Plank Institute postdoc Dario Lupianez, who now heads a lab at the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology. “You’ve got to see this,” Ibrahim told him, pulling up the video. Specifically, the part where Lil Bub’s veterinarian examines her X-rays and points to her dense leg bones, curving bizarrely like the contour of an Erlenmeyer flask. They looked exactly like a human case of osteopetrosis, a rare genetic limb malformation disorder that the pair of scientists were studying. “We should really sequence this cat,” said Lupianez Learn more..

first noise cancelling technology ::

Dr. Amar Bose was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for more than 45 years.  As a professor at MIT, he’d tell his engineering students the most important attribute an engineer can have is imagination. Bose’s personal imagination is legendary. Not only was he one of MIT’s most beloved professors, but he used his company, the Bose Corporation, to bring the world a long string of innovative products , including the first noise cancelling headphones.Those headphones are a good illustration of Bose’s theory about imagination..  Learn more..

It Takes Ganas !

While working on Tabular Integration realized that the method was made famous by an awesome teacher, anyone who took a Calculus class from Mr. Jaime Escalante would name him as that teacher who taught them the real meaning of the word 'GANAS!". In English: Its Desire, urge ( from the Spanish verb ganar, to win or gain). The term was popularized among English speakers by the LA mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante.  His high expectations of his LA barrio students changed the paths of their lives Learn more..

understanding the ageing process ::

Ever since the discovery of telomerase 35 years ago (which lead to a Nobel Prize in 2009) the scientific community has been excited by the results of subsequent studies which showed that the enzyme could not only be a key to reversing aging but provide a possible treatment of diseases like cancer, where malignant cells continue to divide indefinitely. Research for treatment of telomere diseases leads to a major breakthrough in reversing aging. Our chromosomes have tiny caps on the ends, which are called telomeres, just like plastic tips on the end of our shoe-laces. These protective sequences of DNA prevent the fraying of the DNA code of the genome, but the problem is that they get a little shorter every time the cell divides, until the cell can no longer divide and dies. New technology in stem cell biology is to take skin cells from patients with genetic blood disorders and return them to an embryonic-like state, wherein they regain the ability to form any type of cell in the body. Scientists then study this process of going back to an embryonic-like state, and then see how the cells develop into different tissues (blood cells, muscle, nerves) will lead to a better understanding of what is going wrong in cells carrying these disease-causing mutations Lear more..

Program a living cell ::

Bio-engineers couple of years back created a programming language for bacteria. It allows anyone to rapidly design complex, DNA-encoded circuits that add new functions to living cells. For example: design bacterial cells that can produce a cancer drug when they detect a tumor or create yeast cells that can halt their own fermentation process if too many toxic byproducts build up. The complexity of cells and their ability to process information has a lot in common with computers. Researchers are applying concepts of computer programming to biological research, creating a rigorous framework for triggering actions within a cell. Though the complexity of cells and their ability to process information has a lot in common with computers, cells, unlike computers, weren't created by humans. So better understanding how they operate, and how to program them, will truly be a moonshot effort Learn more..

A.I  algorithms in biology ::

The most significant advancement thus far in the field is that of “deep learning,” a subcategory of machine learning that attempts to mimic the way the human brain learns new concepts. A simple definition of deep learning is when a system or algorithm is given a large dataset, and told to look for patterns, without being programmed how to differentiate between the patterns. Through advances in AI and machine learning, computers are finally able to understand things at a much deeper level than humans ever could. So how can we apply engineering principles for better diagnostics, even engineer new biological circuits for example Learn more..

A.I for oceans by code.org

Computer science is about so much more than coding! Learn about artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, training data, and bias, while exploring ethical issues and how AI can be used to address world problems. Enjoy Code.org's first step in a new journey to teach more about AI. When you use the AI for Oceans activity you are training real machine learning models. This new activity engages students ages 8 and older to learn about artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, training data and bias, while exploring ethical issues and seeing how AI can be used to address global issues.To celebrate the #CSforGood theme, students will learn how artificial intelligence could be used to help classify fish from trash to clean our oceans. To start, the activity guides students to provide training data to teach a bot called “A.I.” to classify items as either fish or trash Learn more..

​Lets make a machine learN ::

In 2019 UCLA researchers developed a deep learning GPU-powered device that can detect cancer cells in a few milliseconds, hundreds of times faster than previous methods. Earlier in 2019  Imperial College London announced a landmark use of AI to support the treatment of ovarian cancer, using data to develop more accurate prognoses. Here in America,  year before that Facebook and NYU School of Medicine collaborated on the fastMRI project  (aiming to make MRI scans up to ten times faster). AI has the potential to automate certain parts of the radiology process, playing the role of the second ‘reader’ of data once it has been scanned, alleviating staffing pressures and potentially narrowing the margin for error. So, are you ready to write your first  lines of machine learning code? Six lines of Python is all it takes to write your first machine learning program! Lets see what machine learning is and why it's important. Then, we'll follow a recipe for supervised learning (a technique to create a classifier from examples) and code it up with Python Learn more..

one good thing from 2020 ::

We know for proteins, looks are everything a protein’s function is determined by its 3D shape. Early attempts to use computers to predict protein structures in the 1980s and 1990s performed poorly. Twenty-five years ago, scientists created an international competition to compare various methods of predicting protein structure — something of a "protein olympics," known as CASP, which stands for Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction. An AI network developed by Google (offshoot of DeepMind) made a huge leap in solving one of biology’s greatest challenges, finding a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. The program AlphaFold, outperformed in a biennial protein structure prediction challenge CASP (Acronim for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. The results were announced one month ago. Scientists in some sense feel the problem is solved. The ability to accurately predict these protein structures from their respective amino acid sequence would accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and is a huge boon to biology and medicine. AlphaFold has already helped find the structure of a protein that has vexed labs for a decade. Scientists think AlphaFold might not obviate the need for existing laborious and expensive methods (like X-ray crystallography and, in recent years, cryo-electron microscopy) yet, but AI will make it possible to study living things in new ways Learn more..

Lets keep it real - calculus in action ::

We see Math in real world first - when we go out to eat with our friends and try to figure out our portion of the bill and add a tip. Once you get into calculus though, it seems like the practicality of math declines but this is not true. There are many examples of calculus in real life.  The relationships between limits, derivatives, integrals and series are everywhere. For example 'limits' are all about trends. What we really do in limits for a given model, is we graphically or algebraically analyze the trend to determine the value (if any) the function approaches. For instance, we can talk about end behavior, what number the model is approaching at large positive or negative values. We can also talk about what number the model approaches even if it isn’t defined Learn more..

real world use of conic sections ::

We all ask ourselves after a math class if its going to be used in real life or have any impact on us as humans. Here is an example of one such question.  We all know that a conic section is: it is the intersection of a "plane" and a "double right circular cone". By changing the angle and location of intersection we can produce a circle, ellipse, parabola or hyperbola. Now, lets look at some real world applications of parabolas, hyperbolas, ellipses, and circles. lets looks at some real world applications Learn more..

what is cyber-security really?

Cyber-security is the practice of defending computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic systems, networks, Internet Of Things and data from malicious attacks. It's also known as information technology security or electronic information security. CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Education Program.  At the center of CyberPatriot is the National Youth Cyber Defense Competition. In the rounds of competition, teams are given a set of virtual images that represent operating systems and are tasked with finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities within the images and hardening the system while maintaining critical services in a six hour period  Learn more..

happy earth day

Each year, Earth Day April 22, marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.The height of counterculture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” won the Album of the Year. War raged in Vietnam and students nationwide overwhelmingly opposed it. At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news Learn more ..

what is hachi - moji dna ::

In 1942, Schrödinger predicted that no matter what genetic polymer life uses, its informational building blocks must all have the same shape and size. Hachimoji meets this prediction. Scientists have successfully added four new bases to create what they are calling “hachi-moji DNA”. The synthetic DNA includes the four nucleotides present in Earth life, but also four others that mimic the structures of the informational ingredients in regular DNA.  Hachi-moji DNA uses hydrogen bonds just like natural DNA to link its two new pairs--S with B and P with Z—and the bases are also capable of appearing next to each other. Because DNA is read in triplets of bases called codons, each of which codes for a particular amino acid, this significantly increases the number of potential codons compared to the previous approach: 512 compared to conventional DNA’s 64. The bases pair reliably, the structure remains stable regardless of the sequence of bases, and they’ve demonstrated that it can be copied into RNA learn more..

evo-devo ( Evolutionary developmental biology) ::

Development is the process through which an embryo becomes an adult organism and eventually dies. Through development, an organism's genotype is expressed as a phenotype, exposing genes to the action of natural selection. It may come as a surprise, but the genetic ingredients that assemble us are strikingly similar to those that assemble a fly. So why do we and flies look so different as adults? The answer lies in where, how, and for how long those ingredients "turn on" during your embryonic development. The intricacies of this early stage of life are now being revealed thanks to the new field of "evo devo," short for evolutionary developmental biology. One of the titles of a well known Book in the field " Endless Forms Most Beautiful " is a direct quote from Charles Darwin's poem. Yes, you heard me right, he produced a lyrical crescendo in the last paragraph of "The Origin Of Species". The book by Sean Carroll as a whole is a popular writing, rather than a scientific journal. Good read for any one into developmental genetics. It provides a lucid account of the field about ten years ago. It clearly explains  role played by the small number of master genes in the embryology of different life forms is just fascinating Learn More..

live in 3 hours :: Upcoming LIVE News Briefing on Mars ingenuity's (Helicopter’s) First Flight

Join the Mars Helicopter (Ingenuity) news briefing to hear all about Ingenuity’s historic first flight. Tune in at 1:00 P.M Central Time today. Channels that will carry the live broadcast include:  Jet Propulsion Lab's YouTube Channel.  Ingenuity is a technology demonstration to test powered flight on another world for the first time. It hitched a ride to Mars on the Perseverance rover. Visit NASA's Tech Demo page to ​Learn more.. 

microproteins key to some cellular processes ::

As the tools to study biology improve, researchers are beginning to uncover details into microproteins, small components that appear to be key to some cellular processes. The lab of Salk Professor Alan Saghatelian, along with Uri Manor, director of the Waitt Advanced Biophotonics Core Facility, recently showed that the 54-amino acid microprotein PIGBOS contributes to mitigating cell stress. The work, published in the journal Nature Communications, indicates that PIGBOS could be a target for human disease. The term microproteins refers to peptides and small proteins translated from small open reading frames (smORFs). Advances in genomics and proteomics technologies reveal that mammalian genomes harbor hundreds to thousands of previously unannotated microprotein-coding smORFs. As a large and completely unstudied fraction of the genome, assignment of functions to smORFs and microproteins represents a major opportunity to gain new insights into biology Learn more..

The  World of  Molecular Machines  ::

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh have made the first reversible synthetic molecular motor. Like the molecular motors found throughout biology (e.g. to move muscles, power mechanical motion and pump ions), the synthetic motor works by capturing random displacements that occur during Brownian motion and directionally releasing them. The system consists of a small ring mechanically locked onto a larger ring – a catenane The small ring can be made to move around the larger one by applying a series of chemical reactions. Remarkably, the sense of rotation (clockwise or counter-clockwise) is governed solely by the order in which these reactions are carried out Learn more..

what is captcha & The Turing test ::

CAPTCHA is an acronym for " Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart ". It is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. Luis von Ahn is a Guatemalan entrepreneur (About Country:Guatemala) and a Consulting Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He is known as one of the pioneers of crowdsourcing. Wartime code-breaker Alan Turing is crowned the most iconic figure of the 20th century. A Turing Test is a method of inquiry in artificial intelligence (AI) for determining whether or not a computer is capable of thinking like a human being. The test is named after Alan Turing, the founder of the Turning Test and an English computer scientist, cryptanalyst, mathematician and theoretical biologist. The Turing test was originally called the "imitation game" by Alan Turing in 1950 Learn more.. 

single neuron can compute XOR logical operation ::

In the 1940s and ’50s, a picture began to dominate neuroscience: that of the “dumb” neuron, a simple integrator, a point in a network that merely summed up its inputs. around the same time, researchers realized that a single neuron could also function as a logic gate, similar to those in digital circuits. Traditionally, the XOR logic operation has been thought to require a network solution.(Its output is only 1, when one of its input is 1). In their 1969 book Perceptrons, the computer scientists Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert offered a proof that single-layer artificial networks could not perform XOR. That conclusion was so devastating that many computer scientists blamed it for the doldrums that neural network research fell into until the 1980s. Over the past few decades research has shifted to individual neurons, they seem to handle much more computational responsibility than what we thought it could.  But, now it seems individual dendrite compartments can also perform a particularly complicated operation XOR (Exclusive OR). It was previously thought it was unsolvable by a single individual neuron. It may also prompt some computer scientists to reappraise strategies for artificial neural networks, which have traditionally been built based on a view of neurons as simple, unintelligent switches. The latest evidence comes from a new type of electrical signal from upper layers of the human cortex. Computational model studies show tiny compartments in the dendrite arms of cortical neuron can each perform complicated operations in mathematical logic. 

dementia research and there's an app for that! ::

Alzheimer's  disease is a massive global health threat. It currently affects 47 Million people worldwide, a number that will triple by 2050. No one has ever survived dementia, there is no cure and research on the condition is very far behind other diseases. Dementia attacks the brain and robs people of their navigational skills and their memories. Our ability to share language, moments and memories is what makes us who we are. Lets learn about what the 'Amylois cascade hypothesis' is, then learn the new study that links Porphyromonas gingivalis  as the the root cause of Alzheimer’s disease and learn about this new game which diagnoses Alzheimer's disease using Big Data  Learn more..

Slime Molds - smart without brains ::

Something scientists have come to understand is that slime molds are much smarter than they look. They are slime molds: gelatinous amoebae that have little to do with the kinds of fungal mold that ruin sourdough. Biologists currently classify slime molds as protists, a taxonomic group reserved for "everything we don't really understand," One species in particular yellow Physarum polycephalum (taxonomy) can solve mazes, mimic the layout of man-made transportation networks and choose the healthiest food from a diverse menu, all this without a brain or nervous system Learn more..

personalized approach to cancer therapy ::

Cancer is a collection of diseases with many causes. This heterogeneity (diverse in content) limits the efficacy of standard approaches that give the same treatment to large subpopulations of patients. The promise of a personalized approach to cancer therapy lies in expanding opportunities for treatment by identifying patients who are likely to respond but who do not meet the traditional selection criteria, and in predicting patients who will not respond so they do not endure unnecessary adverse effects or costs. Standard approaches to matching cancer patients with therapy have been coarse, relying on tumor histology (what the tumor looks like under a microscope), the tumor tissue-of-origin, and a handful of molecular markers. Making headway on the promise of personalized cancer therapy requires making connections between key problems in cancer biology, statistics, and computer science Learn more..

treat "failure" like a scientist: another "data point"

How does a scientist treat failure? And what can we learn from their approach? When a scientist runs an experiment, there are all sorts of results. Some are positive and some are negetive. Each result is a piece of data that can ultimately lead to an answer and that’s exactly how a scientist treats failure: as another data point (in statistics - a data point or observation is a set of one or more measurements on a single member of a population).  This is much different than how society often talks about failure. For most of us kids, failure feels like an indication of who we are as a person. In popular culture failing a quiz or a test means we are not smart enough. Failing to make a club or team means we are not talented or hardworking. Failing to get a grade often means we don’t have what it takes. Failing in a art class often means we are not creative. But for a scientist  a negative result is not an indication that they are a bad scientist. In fact, it’s quite the opposite, proving a hypothesis wrong is just as useful as proving it right because you learned something along the way Learn more..

what is recursion  ::

Recursion is a widely used concept in computer science used to solve complex problems by breaking them down into simpler ones. Recursion is a process by which a function calls itself directly or indirectly'. The corresponding function is called as recursive function. Using recursive algorithms, certain complex problems can be solved quite easily. Base condition in recursion: In a recursive function, the solution to the base case is provided and the solution of the bigger problem is expressed in terms of smaller problems. The role of the base condition is to stop a recursive function from executing endlessly, once a pre-specified base condition is met, the function knows it’s time to exit. Every recursive program must have a base case to make sure that the function will terminate at some point. Missing the base case results in unexpected behavior. Simply put, the idea behind recursion is to represent a larger problem in terms of one or more smaller problems and add one or more base conditions that stop the recursion from looping endlessly Learn more..

what is a electric starter motoR ::

Why are we even calling it an “electric” starter motor? The answer to that is because, long time ago cars did not have electric starters you had to actually put a crank into front of the engine and you physically turn that crank and had to manually crank the car (which was attached to the crank shaft of the car which in turn produced enough momentum to start the car). The first electric starter motor was invented by GM engineers Clyde Coleman and Charles Kattering. The self-starting motor was first installed in a Cadillac ( Model 30 ) on February 17, 1911.  Legend has it that the electric starter emerged from Charles "Boss" Kettering's workshop after a friend of his died as the result of a broken arm he incurred while crank starting his car.  Charles Kettering's electric starter basically got rid of the crank and became standard equipment first in Cadillacs in 1912. Hand crank remained a feature of many cars into the 1930s, well after Cadillac had introduced Kettering's electric "self-starter" on the 1911 model. Some French cars still were able to be hand crank started through the 1960s. Kettering found the company Delco and headed R&D at General Motors from 1920 to 1947 Learn more.. 

JULIA ROBINSON AND HILBERT'S TENTH PROBLEM ::

Inspiring life story of the pioneering American mathematician Julia Robinson (1919-1985) charts her major contribution to solving one of the 20th century's most vexing mathematical questions " Hilbert's Tenth ". For mathematicians, the only thing more exciting than proving a theorem is proving that it can never be proven.  These anti-proofs, if you will, stand firmly against all future progress of humanity and state, “No matter how clever you become, what new branches of thought you invent, you’ll never be able to do this.  Sorry about it.”  The most famous of these is Kurt Gödel’s 1931 Incompleteness Theorem, but just behind it in the annals of mathematics is the 1970 proof by Yuri Matiyasevich that Hilbert’s famous Tenth Problem will never be solved, a proof that might never have happened without the almost other-worldly mathematical insight of Julia Robinson.  Every December 8 for years, Julia Robinson blew out the candles on her birthday cake and made the same wish: that someday she would know the answer to Hilbert’s 10th problem. Though she worked on the problem, she did not care about crossing the finish line herself. “I felt that I couldn’t bear to die without knowing the answer,” she told her sister Learn more..

Barbara's Discovery of controlling elements ::

When Barbara McClintock went to Cornell University, women weren’t allowed to major in genetics. Instead, she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in botany and joined an elite group of researchers who studied the properties of corn at the cellular level. Modern genetics might be seen as a hardcore scientific discipline by the public, but it has nothing on the old-school way of doing things. In the early 20th century, back before the discovery of the beautifully twisted structure of DNA, genes were not much more than abstract concepts and techniques for manipulating them were non-existent. A good geneticist in those days was therefore a patient person, who was able to observe and collect data over many weeks, months and years to gradually piece together the rules and secrets of heredity. You didn’t become a geneticist for instant gratification, but because your passion overrode the crushing tedium of your work. Barbara McClintock, born in 1902 in Connecticut, USA, was undoubtedly a good geneticist. In fact, she may have been one of the greatest who ever lived. McClintock made multiple landmark discoveries in the fledgling field of genetics, some of which took decades to be recognised and appreciated. Rarely has the phrase “way ahead of her time” been so appropriate Learn more..

word of the day ::

efficacy pronounced eh·fuh·kuh·see is the ability, especially of a medicine - or a method of achieving something, to produce the intended result. Now that we know the exact meaning let us find out how is 'efficacy' of a vaccine determined? what is a Phase 3 clinical study? And how does scientific testing provide us with reliable evidence that vaccines not only work but are safe? Learn more.. 

what are mrna vaccines really ::

In short mRNA (messenger RNA) is the short-lived middleman molecule that, in our cells, conveys copies of genes to where they can guide the making of proteins. We all know that a German company called BioNTech, and another one in Massachusetts called Moderna has made mRNA vaccine technology work (apparently the companies had built platforms that, theoretically, could be used to create a vaccine for any infectious disease simply by inserting the right mRNA sequence for that disease) But, what are mRNAs: Messenger RNA is a type of RNA that is found in the cell. This particular one, like most RNAs, are made in the nucleus and then exported to the cytoplasm where the translation machinery (the machinery that actually makes proteins) binds to these mRNA molecules and reads the code on the mRNA to make a specific protein. So in general, one gene, the DNA for one gene, can be transcribed into an mRNA molecule that will end up making one specific protein. In the near future, researchers believe shots that deliver temporary instructions into cells could lead to vaccines against herpes and malaria, better flu vaccines and, if the covid-19 germ keeps mutating, updated coronavirus vaccinations, too. But researchers also see a future well beyond vaccines. They think the technology will permit cheap gene fixes for cancer, sickle-cell disease, and maybe even HIV learn more..

firefly algorithm ::

Algorithm is just a list of instructions, most often used in solving problems or performing tasks. Now that we know what an algorithm is lets try to understand 'firefly's' algorithm. Fireflies here in America tend to ignore each other doing their own thing flashing paying no attention to others. But in Southeast Asia places like Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia male fireflies have a tendency towards spontaneous order, they flash in perfect time together in synchrony. Firefly swarms are made of relatively unsophisticated individuals, they exhibit coordinated behavior that directs the swarms to their desired goals.  This usually results in the self organized behavior as a whole, and collective intelligence or swarm intelligence. Crickets and frogs communicate with cyclic sound much as fireflies do with cyclic light. Sometimes these sounds can spontaneously synchronize within a species in a process that is similar to how fireflies synchronize their flashes. Biological synchronization is not limited to insects and amphibians. The cells that make up the human heart's natural pacemaker, the rhythm keeper that controls the electrical signals that cause the heart to pump, display a propensity for spontaneous synchronization. Each cell can be thought of as an individual oscillator, in much the same way that a firefly can Learn more..

why ants don't need ant-man as their leader.. ::

In Ant-man Dr. Henry "Hank" Pym, remarks that ants can perform amazing feats, but they need a leader to tell them what to do. Pym wears a small device behind his ear that allows him to instruct the ants, it’s wrong. Ants don't march in lockstep, united in obedience to a single command. In the real world, the often random and apparently inept actions of individual ants, each without any sense of a common goal, combine to allow colonies to find and collect food, build nests,  form  trails  and  bridges,  defend  their  host  plants  from  herbivores or cultivate gardens-- all without supervision. Neither the queen nor any other ant can assess what needs to be done and give orders to others Learn more..

why proving Quantum supremacy a key milestone?

(and an update - a new island on the complexity maP)

We all know that google (Sycamore took only 200 seconds to perform a calculation that the researchers estimated would have taken a state-of-the-art supercomputer 10,000 years to compute) Alibaba & IBM spar over timeline for ‘quantum supremacy’. This phrase, coined by Physicist John Preskill in 2012, refers to the first use of a quantum computer to make a calculation much faster than we know how to do it with even the fastest supercomputers available. The calculation doesn’t need to be useful: much like the Wright Flyer in 1903, or Enrico Fermi’s nuclear chain reaction in 1942, it only needs to prove a point. Most of the time when people talk about quantum computing, classical computing is dismissed, like something that is past its prime. But that is not the case, this is an ongoing competition. Meanwhile at Austin, Texas a UT student made the problem into his senior thesis in 2018. He poked holes in  a particularly well-known quantum algorithm, which some computer scientists had famously suggested would require a quantum computer Learn more..

Patterns in nature: Morphogenesis, Structuralism ::

Nature is full of biological regularity the rows of an alligator’s teeth, the stripes on a zebra fish, the spacing of a chicken’s feathers. How do these patterns arise?  Think the stripes on a zebra. The stripes are a bold pattern but are not exactly symmetrical. Everyone can recognize that as a pattern, but no stripe is like any other stripe. Other times, it’s much more subtle but once you notice it, it’s clearly evident – like a lizard’s skin. A tiger's stripes (a pattern) is a strategy to blend in with shadows in grasslands and forest. Another system we find cropping up again and again in different places, both in the living and the nonliving world, is a pattern that we now call Turing structures. Yep! they are named after Alan Turing, the mathematician who laid the foundation for the theory of computation. He was very interested in how patterns form. In particular, he was interested in how that happens in a fertilized egg, which is basically a spherical cell that somehow gets patterned into something as complicated as a human as it grows and divides Learn more..

what is blockchain technology?

Blockchain is expected to be so influential over the coming years that some technologists foresee it ushering in a new type of Internet, one that stores and authenticates information about every asset, device and individual, opening the door to a range of new technological capabilities. Besides simply being the backbone of cryptocurrency exchanges, the most powerful uses of blockchain technology are yet to emerge. It's envisioned by many to become a decentralized, real-time global distributed digital ledger of things for everything from tracking food supplies to managing identities Learn more..

adA the Countess of Lovelace 

Our world is filled with new technological advances and groundbreaking discoveries.  Have you ever wondered how these technologies started?  Meet Ada Lovelace, the first software engineer / scientist. That is right boys the first one was a woman.  This year's International Day of Women and Girls in Science has been dedicated to the ‘Women Scientists at the forefront of the fight against Covid-19’. It was created after the United Nations General Assembly decided in 2015 that an annual observance was needed to recognise the critical role women and girls play in science and technology. This year's event on February 11 is the fifth to be held and among the people who inspired it was Ada Lovelace. Over recent years her story and its importance to modern science has continued to grow. Up until about a decade ago she was better known, if known at all, as the only child of the romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, born in December 1815 Learn More...

prof.Youyou Artemisinin & the 191'st Trial

In 1967, a drug discovery project was set up in China, named Project 523, conducted by Prof. Youyou Tu at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing. Her team had screened over 2000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal extracts which were tested on malaria-infected mice. A herbal extract used for over 1,600 years in traditional Chinese therapy for “intermittent fever” the hallmark symptom of malaria, was found effective. The extract from qinghao or huanghuahao (Artemisia annua L.), named qinghaosu, was isolated by low temperature ethyl ether extraction and chemically characterized in 1971. The active antimalarial moieties and the physicochemical properties were determined in vitro and in vivo in both animal models and in human. The drug was distributed to the rest of the world in 1979 Learn more..

percy is landing on Jezero Crater today at 02:55 p.m central time 

​Para nosotros que hablan español, podemos disfrutar de la transmisión en vivo aquí. You can ask questions on any of NASA's social media feeds (@NASA) using the hashtag #CountdowntoMars.

A journey to the bottom of the internet

A fiber-optic cable is made up of incredibly thin strands of glass or plastic known as optical fibers; one cable can have as few as two strands or as many as several hundred. Each strand is less than a tenth as thick as a human hair and can carry something like 25,000 telephone calls, so an entire fiber-optic cable can easily carry several million calls. The current record for a "single-mode" fiber (that's explained below) is 178 terabits (trillion bits) per second—enough for 100 million Zoom sessions. The internet allows us to see videos, photos, and news from anywhere in the world almost instantaneously. But how? Today we learn about the hundreds of underwater fiber optic cables that connect continents, cities, and data centers all over the world and investigate how these cables are made, how they’re installed, and more Learn more..

what is a optical tweezer?

Optical Tweezers use light to manipulate microscopic objects as small as a single atom. The radiation pressure from a focused laser beam is able to trap small particles. In the biological sciences, these instruments have been used to apply forces in the pN-range and to measure displacements in the nm range of objects ranging in size from 10 nm to over 100 mm. A laser beam is focused by a high-quality microscope objective to a spot in the specimen plane. This spot creates an "optical trap" which is able to hold a small particle at its center. The forces felt by this particle consist of the light scattering and gradient forces due to the interaction of the particle with the light. Most frequently, optical tweezers are built by modifying a standard optical microscope. These instruments have evolved from simple tools to manipulate micron-sized objects to sophisticated devices under computer control that can measure displacements and forces with high precision and accuracy Learn more..

working towards  optical integrated circuit

Right now, computers process information via electrons. Data is moved around through nano-sized wires.  Material recently invented allows computers to store and transfer information using light instead of electricity. Photonics is defined as the science of using light to generate energy, detect or transmit information. Another way to define Photonics is as the technology of generating and harnessing light and many other forms of radiant energy whose quantum unit is the photon. But despite years of effort and some progress in related areas such as plasmonics, such computing has remained largely just a promise. All-optical computing still needs some tools to make it into a reality. One key component of this toolbox will likely be all-optical logic gates, and researchers at Aalto University in Finland announced they have been able to fabricate such gates from nanowires in way that’s easier than ever before. The scientists believe that this represents a significant step in the development of on-chip, all-optical logic components that will serve as a key element in future photonic computing systems.  In the research, described in the journal Science Advances, the Finland-based scientists managed to get their logic gate to perform AND, OR, NAND, and NOR binary logic functions—basic building blocks from which all other logic and mathematical functions can be built Learn more..

how to estimate  ::

The so-called “back of the envelope calculations ”, were an essential tool for scientists in the pre-computer era, they provided the means to keep track of exponents when using a slide rule. Calculations requires mathematical skills, logic, critical thinking, life experiences, and the ability to break down complex problems into smaller discrete, soluble parts. At some point in the solution process, the solver is expected to estimate a value which is critical to obtaining an answer.The methodology, involved in making up a (Fermi) Question as well as calculating an answer. The Fermi Questions event in the Science Olympiad tests a team’s ability to estimate a solution to a problem by interpreting basic information, formulating a set of mathematical operations to provide an answer, and using mathematics to provide the answer to the question. Fundamental to the solution of these problems is a skill called critical thinking - essentially a method of attacking such problems in an orderly, logical way  Learn more..

what are Morals according to scientific studies?

According to Cambridge Dictionary the word “moral” is "relating to the standards of good or bad behavior, fairness that each person believes in, rather than to laws". What are morals, according to scientific research? The scientific study of morals has been subject to a tremendous change throughout the past decades, eliciting various theoretical models, paradigms, and methodologies from disciplines as philosophy, social and developmental psychology, cognitive science, or anthropology. Are we born with morals  or is it something we acquire?  Babies at Yale University's Infant Cognition Center respond to "naughty" and "nice" puppets..
Learn More..

What is really going on?

Technically The polar vortex  exists near the poles. It often surfaces in the media when it reaches further south than it is supposed to.  A strong polar vortex helps the circulating jet streams to stay strong and keeps them in shape.   The “polar jet stream” forms the boundary between the cold polar vortex air and the warmer subtropical air. As long as the vortex remains strong, stable and doesn't loose its shape, it doesn't affect or pose a danger to sub-polar regions.  Simply put, a strong polar vortex is a “safe polar vortex”. When the polar vortex is weak or “perturbed”, the flow of air is weaker and meanders north and south (rather than west to east). This allows a redistribution of air masses where cold air from the Arctic spills into the mid-latitudes and warm air from the subtropics is carried into the Arctic. We will be back to regular expected numbers in a week.

first women to jointly win the nobel prize

CRISPR - Simply put is a easy-to-use tool that can edit DNA. Scientists have long hoped CRISPR, a technology that allows scientists to make very precise modifications to DNA could eventually help cure many diseases. And now scientists are taking tangible first steps to make that dream a reality. What we heard earlier (that the  U.S. CRISPR study that had been approved for cancer at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia) has finally started. Kids like us who study digital coding will be by studying the code of life when we are at college next year. Emmanuelle Charpentier, a French microbiologist, and Jennifer A. Doudna, an American biochemist, are the "first women" to "jointly" win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry today and the sixth and seventh women to win the chemistry prize Learn more..

gen-mod mosquitos approved to take flight

One mosquitoe (Aedes aegypti) is known for yellow fever  also spread dengue as well as Zika and Chikungunya. The species is especially hard to control among about 45 kinds of mosquitoes that are common to the Florida Keys. Even the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District with six aircraft for spraying Miami has had zero kills only an estimated 30% to 50% of the local yellow fever mosquito population with its best pesticide treatments. The new application to test GM mosquitoes in Florida, however, got 5,656 comments, plus a petition against the project that drew more than 25,000 signatures. Even though people probably detest mosquitoes, the fact that the Florida Keys project involves genetic modification still stirs passion. An update: a plan to release over 750 genetically modified mosquitoes into the Florida Keys in 2021 received final approval from local authorities, against the objection of many local residents and a coalition of environmental advocacy groups. The plan had already won state and federal approval Learn more..

solving a half-a-century old math problem in a week

It took Dr. Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway..A mathematical knot is really a tangled shape that appears to be made from a "single, unbroken line". Knot theory is a subcategory of topology (the study of object's immutable geometric properties) and it examines how these shapes are possible. This theory of mathematics has real world applications in understanding things like the DNA double-helix and the shape of the universe. In February of last year UT Graduate student Lisa Piccirillo dusted off some long-known but little-utilized mathematical tools to answer a decades-old question about knots. A particular knot named after the legendary mathematician John Conway had long evaded mathematical classification in terms of a higher-dimensional property known as “sliceness.” But by developing a version of the knot that yielded to traditional knot analysis, Piccirillo finally determined that the Conway knot is not “slice.” The Conway Knot is one of the more notorious problems in knot theory, with a line that overlaps in 11 different places. In knot theory, some knots are "slices," which means they could be made by slicing a four-dimensional knotted sphere, and it was unclear whether the Conway Knot belonged in this category Learn more..

use AP credit to skip 1-on-1 classes this fall

Entering college with credit we have already earned through AP can save us time and money for example, we might be able to skip introductory courses. Most U.S. colleges offer credit or advanced placement (or both) for a "qualifying AP score".  Our AP scores could earn us college credit or advanced placement (meaning we could skip certain fundamental courses in college). Use this online tool (College Board's) to find colleges that really do offer credit or advanced placement for our AP scores, Compare Schools or search by AP Course Learn more..

Rutherford Engine is 3D printed and battery powered

What rocket has 9 engines on its first stage, is built by a privately owned aerospace company? which uses the most advanced manufacturing techniques available? and is one of the cheapest rides to space and has a body made entirely out of carbon fiber? If you said Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket you’d be wrong! (its made out of aluminum) Move over Space X. Rocket lab has achieved orbit with their beautiful Electon rocket has the cheapest ride to space with a cost comparison to SpaceX. It has 3d-printed engines, battery powered pumps and composite fuel tanks. Today lets take a deep run down on some of the exciting features about the Electron rocket, then lets compare it to similar rockets (including other small sat rockets, and past small sat rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 1).  Lets throw in a Falcon 9 for comparison and see which rocket takes the cake for the cheapest ride to space with a cost per kilogram comparison Learn More..

Nanos gigantum humeris insidentes ..

" nanos gigantum humeris insidentes " It's Latin metaphor for "We are standing on the shoulders of giants" which means "We are using the understanding gained by major thinkers who have gone before in order to make intellectual progress".  On Feb. 20, 1962, John Glenn blasted off into space and became the first American to orbit Earth. Behind the scenes, thousands of engineers and mathematicians worked tirelessly to make NASA's Friendship 7 mission a success. Historical photos show them as men in crisp white shirts and ties, but we now know there's more to that picture. As mathematicians and engineers, these women made incalculable contributions to the space program. Katherine Johnson, an extraordinary mathematician who calculated the trajectories for Glenn's Friendship 7 mission (Johnson also worked on the Apollo and space shuttle programs) Learn More..

Falcon 9 launch :: moved to 02.04.2021:: 01:19 hours

The next starlink mission launch (Starlink V1.0-L17) which was initially scheduled for Saturday morning from Cape Canaveral Florida - is now pushed to (targeting) 02.04.2021 - Thursday morning - after another forecast update today. Liftoff is scheduled for 01:19 Hours from Launch Pad LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The goal of the mission is to provide worldwide, space-based broadband internet coverage (Payload is a batch of 60 Starlink satellites). Meanwhile, NASA & SpaceX are still targeting no earlier than April 20th for the launch of the second crew rotation to the ISS watch launch live here if interested..

happy groundhog Day!

We all know that groundhog day is a popular North American tradition observed in the United States & Canada on February 2nd (which supposedly predict the arriva of spring).  Now, lets see how "seeing shadows or not" by a rodent stacks up against history and science. Lets find out the history behind the American tradition and its ties to weather and climate. Groundhog Day presents the perfect opportunity to take a look at global warming also known as Climate Change. Professor Richard Lindzen (MIT atmospheric physicist and one of the world's leading climatologists) summarizes the science behind climate change Learn more..

vera rubin got her own telescope

Vera Rubin, was on the run in the 1970s when she overturned the universe. Humans had presumed that when we gaze out at the universe, what we see is a fair representation of reality. Dr. Rubin, discovered that was not true. The universe and the vast spaces between was awash with dark matter, an invisible something with sufficient gravity to mold the large scale structures of the universe. Esteemed astronomers dismissed her findings at first. But, half a century later, the still futile quest to identify this “dark matter” is a burning question for both particle physics and astronomy. On December 20th 2019 the National Science Foundation announced that the newest observatory joining this cause will be named the Vera C. Rubin Observatory The name replaces the mouthful by which the project was previously known: the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (L.S.S.T) Learn more..

what is game theory?

Game theory developed over many years since the term was first coined to what it is now: "a theory used to understand the strategic behaviour of decision makers who are aware that their decisions affect one another".  Game theory was initially developed by John von Neumann  and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 as a mathematical theory.  Von Neumann and Morgenstern were the first to construct a cooperative theory of n-person games. They assumed that various groups of players might join together to form coalitions, each of which has an associated value defined as the minimum amount that the coalition can ensure by its own efforts. Following on from this, in 1944 Neumann published The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior co-authored with Morgenstern. This is considered to be one of the main foundation texts of game theory. Despite the theory’s origins dating back to Neumann and Morgenstern’s work, the economists John Nash, John Harsanyi, and Reinhard Selten received the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 for further developing game theory in relation to economics. Here are some interesting facts on the field; from its key influencers and terms, to how it applies in everyday life and examples Learn more..

Leveling the playing field

Many of us grew up playing video games, but how often do we think about the people who make them? If your parents were gaming on an Atari in the 1980s, River Raid may sound familiar to you. But chances are you haven’t heard of the game’s designer, Carol Shaw. Carol Shaw, a microprocessor software engineer at Atari and later Activision, was one of the first female video game designer and developer and her career paved the way for other women and girls to study computer-science.  Carol Shaw is believed to be the first professional female video game designer. She first used a computer while at high school in Palo Alto where she excelled at Math and enjoyed playing text-based games. She went on to gain degrees in Computer Science in the 1970s when there were few women in the field. At the time, developers created a whole game including the programming, sound and graphics. She said she joined the company because they paid her to play games! While at Atari, Carol also worked other titles, including 3-D Tic Tac Toe (1978), which took her six months to create, Video Checkers (1980), and Super Breakout (1982) Learn more..

discovery of RNA interference: RNAi

In 1986 few researchers attempted to create an extremely dark purple petunia. They knew which gene controlled purple pigment in the flower, and were aware that petunias are very amenable to DNA transfection. The researchers logically deduced that additional copies of the purple gene should make petunias that were shades darker. However, to the investigator's surprise after they added an extra version of the purple gene to a petunia, the plant did not produce dark purple flowers, instead it had white flowers devoid of pigment ( the very gene they wanted to overexpress got turned off. This effect was later named "cosuppression") After they verified that the gene they had placed into petunias was correct, these scientists along with a horde of molecular biologists spent the next several years trying to figure out what went wrong. During this time, they had little idea they were doing work that would prove to be very significant. It not only won Nobel Prizes for two scientists (in 2006) , but it also led to a discovery that would spark a molecular revolution  Learn more..

NASA Curiosity rover celebrates 3000 days on mars. intrigued? Learn more ..

It’s been 3,000 Martian days (or sols) since Curiosity touched down on Mars on Aug. 6, 2012, and the rover keeps making new discoveries during its gradual climb up Mount Sharp, the 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain it has been exploring since 2014. Geologists were intrigued to see a series of rock “benches” in the most recent panorama from the mission. Credit : mars.nasa.gov

first observations of biological magnetoreception

Few days ago on (Jan 6th 2021) Researchers at The University Of Tokyo - Japan have made the first observations of biological magnetoreception (in live unaltered cells) responding to a magnetic field in real time. This discovery is a crucial step in understanding how animals from birds to butterflies navigate using Earth’s magnetic field (and addresses the question of whether weak electromagnetic fields in our environment might affect human health). The mystery of how animals navigate using Earth's magnetic field is now one step closer to being solved. Scientists recorded live cells responding to a magnetic field in the lab. Statistical analysis of the light intensity in videos data revealed that the cell’s fluorescence dimmed by about 3.5% each time the magnetic field swept over the cells. © Ikeya and Woodward, CC BY, originally published in PNAS DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2018043118. Intrigued? You can learn more about a single protein - Cryptochrome 4 (Cry4) and navigation research in birds here at a old blog post

are counting & memory: just "human" traits?

For human babies their parents use food and toys as a vehicle to get their children to count or recite numbers. As parents feed their children, they will refer to their actions as numbers, as they give their child another spoonful or another piece of food or when they refer to building blocks. All of this is fine, but counting requires more than a simple rote approach whereby children memorize numbers in a chant-like fashion. Turns out we are not the only species who count, birds like Pigeon have now shown that they can learn abstract rules about numbers, an ability that until now had been demonstrated only in primates. wild robins in New Zealand become noticeably bothered when they've been "cheated" out of a set number of promised worms Learn more..

Wi-Fi 6E is almost here :: but what is it?

Wi-Fi 6E is such a huge upgrade. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) voted April of last year to open up a plot of spectrum in the 6GHz band for unlicensed use (the same regulatory go-ahead that lets your router broadcast over the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands). That means there are more open airwaves now (a lot more) that routers can use to broadcast Wi-Fi signals. Once the new spectrum is officially opened for business later this year, that should translate to faster, more reliable connections from the next generation of devices. This is the biggest spectrum addition since the FCC cleared the way for Wi-Fi in 1989, so it’s a huge deal. Wi-Fi 6E will see rapid adoption in 2021 with more than 338 million devices entering the market Learn more..

why lettuce keeps getting contaminated - e. colli

Couple of years back FDA believed that it had traced the source of E.Colli outbreak linked to romaine lettuce (this is the third outbreak in one year). Reasons :: 1. How its grown : Cross contamination in the farm (lettuce needs lots of water - water supports life). 2. How we consume it : Salmonella outbreak linked to cucumbers suggest the obvious (that we don't cook lettuce & cucumber before eating). Washing is not a reliable way to get rid of the bacteria (E. coli 0157:H7) even injecting a single bacteria is enough to produce the illness. Even double or triple washing before packaging doesn't help getting rid of E. Colli. End of the day E. coli 0157:H7 likes lettuce & scientists who work in this area have much work to do.

 word of the day " essential "

{ ADJECTIVE } Absolutely necessary; extremely important. From essential workers to essential businesses and all the essential travel inbetween. "essential" is a defining word that kept society safely functioning in 2020. Phonetic spelling ::  uh-sen-shuhl - How to pronounce the word essential..

Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders

Charles Darwin would be thrilled to read this because, in late October in 1832, he walked onto the deck of the HMS Beagle and realized that the ship had been boarded by thousands of tiny red spiders. The ship was 60 miles offshore, so the spiders probably flew over from the Argentinian mainland. “October 31st   A beautiful day: but the wind has been steadily against us.— In the evening all the ropes were coated & fringed with Gossamer web.— I caught some of the Aeronaut spiders which must have come at least 60 miles. How inexplicable is the cause which induces these small insects, as it now appears in both hemispheres, to undertake their aerial excursions.” he wrote in his diary. Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away, this behavior is called ballooning.  It was believed that ballooning works because the silk catches on the wind, dragging the spider with it. Erica Morley and Daniel Robert have an explanation. The duo, who work at the University of Bristol, has shown that spiders can sense the Earth’s electric field, and use it to launch themselves into the air. Ballooning spiders operate within this planetary electric field. When their silk leaves their bodies, it typically picks up a negative charge. This repels the similar negative charges on the surfaces on which the spiders sit, creating enough force to lift them into the air.  his idea—flight by electrostatic repulsion was first proposed in the early 1800s, around the time of Darwin’s voyage. Peter Gorham, a physicist, resurrected the idea in 2013, and showed that it was mathematically plausible. And now, Morley and Robert have tested it with actual spiders Learn more..

understanding the difference between the myths of pseudoscience and the testable hypotheses of science

This book illustrates clearly the many and varied personal and societal benefits gained from applying the methods of science to every corner of our thinking. The methods are the important part, the findings are just icing on the cake. It covers the dangers of unchecked ideologies and the requirement for both objectivity and wonder. Almost no topic is left unexamined. In an age of ceaseless sensationalism, pseudoscience, and a relentless race for shortcuts, quick answers, and silver bullets, knowing "what to think" seems increasingly challenging. People have come up with tools like The Baloney Detection Kit and create wonderful animations to teach us kids about critical thinking, but the art of thinking critically is a habit that requires careful and consistent cultivation. In his remarkable essay titled “The Burden of Skepticism,” originally published in the Fall 1987 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, Carl Sagan - always the articulate and passionate explainer captured the duality and osmotic balance of critical thinking beautifully.

smallest memory device created

Last month an international team of scientist from the US, the UK & Taiwan has developed the world’s smallest memristor (Memristors are electrical resistors with memory. They are advanced electronic devices that regulate current based on the history of the voltages applied to them. They can store and process data simultaneously, which makes them a lot more efficient than traditional systems). Their results appear in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. This version of the memristor promises capacity of about 25 terabits per square centimeter. That is 100 times higher memory density per layer compared with commercially available flash memory devices.  Couple of years back in 2018 the thinnest memory storage device was created, dubbed ‘atomristor,’ with a single atomic layer of thickness.In the new work, the researchers reduced the size even further, shrinking the cross section area down to just a single square nanometer learn more about memristos here.. (a old blog entry)

today is winter solstice! ( but what is it? )

The winter solstice is the day with the shortest period of daylight and longest night of the year, when the Sun is at its lowest daily maximum elevation in the sky. Technically, the summer solstice occurs when the sun is directly over the Tropic of Cancer, or 23.5° north latitude. In 2020, this occured on June 20th. The summer and winter solstices, the seasons, and the changing length of daylight hours throughout the year are all due to one fact: " Earth spins on a tilted axis ".  " The tilt " possibly caused by a massive object hitting Earth billions of years ago means that for half the year, the North Pole is pointed toward the sun. For the other half of the year, the South Pole gets more light  Learn more..

letters to a young scientist

What it is not: It is not a book about genetic mapping or computer modeling or how they are  changing the ways research is done.  It is an excellent guide to the love of research, the value and need for science study. This is kind of encouragement, empowerment we all need right now at an early age. The father of biodiversity Dr. E.O. Wilson's book consists of twenty letters addressed directly to young people who have chosen to enter a career in Science. The book gives brilliant advice in how to find your passion and do things you like and the creative element of science and its process and how to respect the ecosystems and human’s modest place in the planet.  It takes a lot of dedication and determination, and oftentimes you fail. He does a fantastic job of helping others learn from his experience as a scientist. Enjoying this book is an opportunity to digest and lifetime worth of wisdom in a few short listens Learn more..

how quantum computers can be used iN real world

Right now it takes pharmaceutical companies a decade and billions of dollars to discover a new drug and bring it to market. Quantum computing can dramatically cut costs and time. In 1965, a relatively young Gordon Moore penned his now legendary paper with the scholarly title.. " Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits " That paper, by the future Intel co-founder, is widely celebrated as the original inspiration for Moore's Law, which states roughly that the number of transistors that can be installed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. His breakthrough observation became a sort of guiding principle for the still very young computer industry. During the next 30 years, it was often difficult to tell if chip and computer manufacturers were proving Moore's theory, or following it like some kind of law.Moore's Law transformed computing through decreased costs, but Eroom’s Law ( “Moore” spelled backwards, is the opposite: Much of the costs in bio - drugs etc) have been exponentially increasing in cost. Eroom’s Law in a graph shows the skyrocketing Pharma R&D costs despite Quantum Leaps in technology Learn more..

photonic quantum computer achieves quantum supremacy

Just few days back (Dec 2020) Jiuzhang (a Photonic quantum computer named after Chinese sacred text) achieved quantum supremacy. (Photonic quantum computer include light sources, hundreds of beam splitters, dozens of mirrors and 100 photon detectors). Employing a process called boson sampling, Jiuzhang generates a distribution of numbers that is exceedingly difficult for a classical computer to replicate. Pan Jian-Wei, professor, University of Science and Technology of China, explains how the Jiuzhang quantum computer was used. Quantum supremacy, was met only once before, in 2019 by Google’s quantum computer (Sycamore) which is not based on photonics but is based on superconducting materials.   Sycamore was able to compute something that would have taken a normal computer 10,000 years. In comparison, Jiuzhang has produced results in minutes which would have taken the world’s fastest supercomputer nearly 2.5 billion years to carry out the same calculation Learn more..

what is ISING MODEL?

Exactly 100 years ago in 1920  (in a world recovering from a global flu pandemic) a German physicist named "Wilhelm Lenz" set out to understand why heating a magnet past a certain temperature causes it to suddenly lose its attractive power  (as Pierre Curie had discovered 25 years earlier). Lenz imagined a magnet as a lattice of little arrows, each pointing either up or down, representing atoms (atoms are intrinsically magnetic, with north and south poles, and thus can be thought of as having orientations). Arrows influence their neighbors, attempting to magnetically flip them to match their own orientation. The mathematical key to cracking “phase transitions” debuted exactly 100 years ago, and it has transformed the natural sciences. The "Ising model" as it’s known (was assigned as a problem to his student Ising. Ising then concluded that the model is uninteresting in one dimension and didn't bother to investigate other cases) was initially proposed as a cartoon picture of magnets. It’s now so commonly used as a simple model of physical systems that physicists liken it to the fruit fly, biology’s model organism. It has also penetrated far-flung disciplines well beyond physics, serving as a model of earthquakes, proteins, brains and even racial segregation ok now if you have few minutes learn more...

how do animals survive their own poison?

Thousands of animal species use toxic chemicals to defend themselves from predators. Snakes have blood clotting compounds in their fangs, the bombardier beetle has corrosive liquid in its abdomen and jellyfish have venomous, harpoon-like structures in their tentacles. But how do these animals survive their own poison? What are the strategies that animals/nature/evolution uses to protect animals from themselves. Scientists have wondered how golden poison dart frogs resist succumbing to the high doses of toxin they store in their skin. Certain species of Phyllobates frogs are loaded with enough batrachotoxin—up to 2 mg in adults—to kill more than 20,000 mice, yet their voltage-gated sodium channel membrane protein is immune to its paralytic effects. Sho-Ya Wang and Ging Kuo Wang of the University at Albany now discovered that a single amino acid swap can render sodium channels almost completely resistant to batrachotoxin Learn more..

what is  working memory - can we improve it?

We all  have trouble with working memory sometimes (remembering information and doing things with it over a short amount of time). Working memory is said to be the most important aspect of our cognitive ability that we can train.  Let's start by looking at the traditional view laid out by Baddeley and  Hitch (1971) . So, they looked at memory as a whole by separating it into three different categories: long-term memory, short-term memory and working memory. Long term memory is storing your biographical information, old friends from pre-k. Short-term is storing the name of a character of a book you are reading or what you had for dinner yesterday. Working memory (traditionally) was thought to be like the RAM (Random-Access-Memory) in a computer which is the shortest term memory. It was thought to be the memory you use to hold numbers (carry over) when you are performing multiplication and addition its the memory you use to repeat a phone number to remember it when you want to go and grab a pen and to write it down Learn more..

what is empathy?

Empathy is the ability to recognize, understand, and share the thoughts and feelings of another person, animal, or fictional character. Developing empathy is crucial for establishing relationships and behaving compassionately. It involves experiencing another person’s point of view, rather than just one’s own, and enables prosocial, or helping behaviors that come from within, rather than being forced Learn more..

what is remote sensing?

Remote sensing is the process of detecting and monitoring the physical characteristics of an area by measuring its reflected and emitted radiation at a distance (typically from satellite or aircraft). Special cameras collect remotely sensed images, which help researchers "sense" things about the Earth. Some examples are: Cameras on satellites and airplanes take images of large areas on the Earth's surface, allowing us to see much more than we can standing on the ground. Sonar systems on ships can be used to create images of the ocean floor without needing to travel to the bottom of the ocean. Cameras on satellites can be used to make images of temperature changes in the oceans Learn more..

 heads-up! :: See all seven planets this week

Just a "heads-up" -  this week, there will be some not so familiar sights in the sky - Seven planets will be visible at various points in the day. Venus and Mercury are bright enough to see in the mornings, While Mars, Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn will be easier to see at night. With a telescope you will be able to see Saturn's rings too  More here..

NASA and SpaceX Crew-1 Flight Day 2 Highlights ::

:: The Crew ::
Dr. Shannon Walker,
CDR. Victor Glover,
Dr. Soichi Noguchi, Col. Michael Hopkins

 Intrigued?
 Try docking the Space X Crew Dragon with ISS using Space X's Simulator here..

how to think critically?

Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally, understanding the logical connection between ideas. In essence, critical thinking requires you to use your ability to reason. It is about being an active learner rather than a passive recipient of information. Critical thinkers rigorously question ideas and assumptions rather than accepting them at face value. They will always seek to determine whether the ideas, arguments and findings represent the entire picture and are open to finding that they do not. Critical thinkers will identify, analyze and solve problems systematically rather than by intuition or instinct Learn more..

what is Contact tracing ?

Contact tracing was used during the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak, as well as in the SARS outbreak in 2003. The technique is a “cornerstone” of preventative medicine. But, can technology really get us back to some resemblance of a normal life? Big tech giants like Apple & Google seem to think so. High tech version of a Low tech fighting tool called Contact tracing is being developed right now and will be on our phones in the next two weeks. It is a simple concept that is vital in stopping the spread of infectious diseases. When done correctly, contact tracing saves lives by helping us diagnose patients earlier improving the likelihood they'll be cured and reducing the chance they'll spread the virus to others. The purpose of contact tracing is to break chains of transmission. It is a very well-used public health intervention which has been used for decades to track a variety of infections Learn more..

William Hamilton's Quaternions

William Rowan Hamilton was born in Dublin in 1805. He became interested in mathematics when he lost a competition against an American child, Zerah Colburn, who was incredibly quick at computing numbers. While Hamilton was interested in many subjects, this polymath pursued his interest in math and chose to study classics and science in Trinity College Dublin, where he later became a professor of astronomy. Hamilton was fascinated by the link between geometry and complex numbers. Complex numbers are numbers that are made up of a real number (numbers we’re used to dealing with in everyday life to count or measure, like a temperature of -4 degrees) and an imaginary number (which can be written as a real number multiplied by an “imaginary” part, symbolized by “i”) Learn more..

what is an algorithm? examples of sorting algos

Algorithm is just a list of instructions, most often used in solving problems or performing tasks. Sorting is the most heavily studied concept in Computer Science. Idea is to arrange the items of a list in a specific order. Though every major programming language has built-in sorting libraries, it comes in handy if you know how they work. Sorting is ordering a list of objects. In computer science, a sorting algorithm is an algorithm that puts elements of a list in a certain order. We can distinguish two types of sorting. If the number of objects is small enough to fits into the main memory, sorting is called internal sorting. If the number of objects is so large that some of them reside on external storage during the sort, it is called external sorting. The following are internal sorting algorithms: Bucket sort, Bubble sort, Insertion sort, Selection sort, Heapsort, Mergesort  Learn more..

different ways to look at brain

Lets first try to understand how traditional EEGs, fMRIs, and PETs work? In 2015 a new method of microscopy was invented called expansion microscopy, put simply, it is a method of improving the final image resolution during regular light microscopy, by physically enlarging the organism itself. Earlier this year (Jan 2019) researchers have developed a new way to image the brain with unprecedented resolution and speed. Using this approach, they can locate individual neurons, trace connections between them, and visualize organelles inside neurons, over large volumes of brain tissue this microscopy technique is now known as lattice light-sheet microscopy
Learn more..

what is a ventilator really?

A medical ventilator is a machine that helps the lungs work. It doesn’t treat any kind of condition or illness. Rather, it may be used during treatment of one. Other names for a ventilator are: respirator, breathing machine and mechanical ventilation. When breathing on your own is very difficult. A ventilator can help you breathe if you have lung disease or another condition that makes breathing difficult or impossible. They can’t treat or fix a health problem. But, they can do the breathing work for you while you’re being treated or recovering from an illness or health condition.  Acronym A.R.D.S stands for Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, it is a condition that causes fluid to build up in the lungs as a result oxygen can’t get to your organs. Fluid leaks from small blood vessels and collects in tiny air sacs ( alveoli ) in your lungs so they can’t fill with enough air learn more..

the second brain

Known as the ENS (enteric nervous system) the second brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end. The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system.  Apparently the second brain informs our state of mind in other more obscure ways, as well. A big part of our emotions are probably influenced by the nerves in our gut. Our everyday emotional well-being may rely on messages from the brain below to the brain above. For example, electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve a useful treatment for depression may mimic these signals. Scientists are learning that the serotonin made by the enteric nervous system might also play a role in more surprising diseases. A recent study suggest that  the enteric nervous system is “A little brain in the gut” Learn more..

Connectomics and tasting light

There are totally only five tastes making up the human palette: sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and savory or umami ( Technically, umami refers to glutamate  C5H8NO4- { anion of glutamic acid a aminoacid neurotransmitter} which occurs naturally in many foods such as meat, fish, vegetables and various dairy products ). Everything else about our experience of food is supposed to come from the texture, aroma, and aesthetics. A study from MIT has found a unique and potentially groundbreaking mechanism of photosensitivity in the lab-favorite roundworm c. elegans, as the simple organisms have been shown to detect light by tasting it. What does light taste like? Well, like bleach apparently. C. elegans tastes the light indirectly, by detecting the hydrogen peroxide and other reactive substances that often results when fragile molecules are damaged by light. This has implications not just for vision, but for our understanding of taste, overall Learn more..

the internal magnetic compass of birds

The Earth's magnetic field is a result of the movement or convection of liquid iron in the outer core. As the liquid metal in the outer core moves, it generates electric currents, which lead to a magnetic field. Biologists have identified a single protein - Cryptochrome 4 (Cry4) without which birds probably would not be able to orient themselves using the Earth’s magnetic field. Two separate studies, with the one published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface studying zebra finches and the other published in the Current Biology journal investigating European robins, look to have confirmed that theory Learn more..

how does immunity to virus & bacteria work?

We are constantly under assault by pathogenic infectious microorganisms like corona virus. Synthetic antiviral drugs that are available (other than naturally available "supporting agents" like elderberry & Turmeric/Curcumin at every American Mom's spice cabinet) according to CDC are baloxavir marboxil (Xofluza), oseltamivir (Tamiflu), and zanamivir (Relenza) for both flu prevention and treatment. Thankfully, more than 1 billion years of evolution have equipped most multi-cellular life with a host of methods to intercept and destroy invading pathogens: by two distinct protective schemes: innate and adaptive immunity. Of the two methods, the adaptive immunological response is the most well-known and extensively studied.  Adaptive or acquired immunity, present in most vertebrate animals. Historically, innate immunity has not enjoyed the same deep level of interest and study as the adaptive immunological response Learn more..

what is crystallography?

Martin Julian Buerger's invented the X-ray precession camera for studies in crystallography. The mineral fluor-buergerite is named for him. Among the most important of Buerger’s innovations is the "precession method of X-ray diffraction analysis" (the determination of the spatial arrangement of atoms in crystals by observing the pattern in which they scatter a beam of X rays) One of the two most commonly used methods of recording diffraction intensities.  Lets try to understand the anatomy of Rosalind Elsie Franklin's photo 51. When James Watson saw Rosalind Franklin's now-famous image of DNA,  he experienced a eureka moment. " The instant I saw the picture my jaw fell open and my pulse began to race " he later recalled.  Unlike Watson, the non expert has no such flash of insight upon seeing Franklin's X-ray diffraction image, for it bears little resemblance to the double helix we all know know so well.  Fortunately, with a little explanation Photo 51 begins to look less like a Rorschach test open to infinite interpretation and more like what it relly is: a window into the magic of life Learn more..

Turns out, there is a way to un-boil eggs, but why?

It’s so obvious that it’s practically proverbial: you can’t unboil an egg. But actually, it turns out that you can -- sort of. Eleanor Nelsen explains the process by which mechanical energy can undo what thermal energy has done. The ability to quickly restore molecular proteins could slash biotechnology costs and dramatically reduce the costs for cancer treatments. Rather than spending days and weeks putting certain misshapen proteins back together, people in laboratories may be able to stick solutions into 2-by-2 foot machines and be done with it just minutes later, so they can get back to the work of developing cancer treatments  Learn more..

what is The meaning of Life..

The meaning of life, or the answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?", pertains to the significance of living or existence in general. Many other related questions include: "Why are we here?", "What is life all about?", or "What is the purpose of existence?". Although, to be sure, creature comforts can be highly motivating from time to time, a life filled with nothing but the hedonistic search for feel-good experiences can leave people feeling empty. During a Q&A session Astrophysicist, Cosmologist Neil deGrasse Tyson answers six (and three-quarters) year old Jack's question, "what's the meaning of life?" Learn more..

prevent brain eating amoeba infection: use nose-clips

Yesterday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a disaster declaration for Lake-Jackson county where a deadly brain-eating amoeba was found in City of Lake Jackson tap water supply. Naegleria is an amoeba (single-celled living organism) commonly found in warm freshwater (for example, lakes, rivers, and hot springs) and soil. Only one species (type) of Naegleria infects people: Naegleria fowleri., Naegleria infections may also occur when contaminated water from other sources (such as inadequately chlorinated swimming pool water or heated and contaminated tap water) enters the nose (nose connects to the brain). Boil tap water before drinking it, using it for washing fruits and vegetables or using it for brushing  Learn more..

the Knapsack problem

You’re packing your backpack for a field trip, you have choices of tantalizing, healthy and tasty food. You only have a single backpack. Your goal should be to get ready with the most grub without overloading your bag until it breaks or becomes too heavy to carry. How do you choose among the objects to maximize your grub? You could list all  of the food available and their weights to work out the answer by hand. But the more objects there are, the more taxing this calculation becomes for a person or a computer. This dilemma is the " knapsack problem ", it belongs to a class of mathematical problems famous for pushing the limits of computing.  It is more than a thought experiment. Lot of problems we face in life, be it business, finance, including logistics, container ship loading, aircraft loading are all said to be knapsack problems, from a practical perspective, the knapsack problem is ubiquitous in everyday life. It belongs to a class of “NP” problems (which stands for “nondeterministic polynomial time). The name references how these problems force a computer to go through many steps to arrive at a solution, and the number increases dramatically based on the size of the inputs Learn more..

The phylogenetic significance of the tuatara

"Phylogenies" is the framework within which we can best arrange our knowledge of all aspects of biology.  It has taken biologists a long time to give a detailed explanation of the simple idea that it is the "study of biodiversity" that makes biology different from other sciences (the nature and scale of the interrelationships among organisms is something that has never been conceived of within physics and chemistry). The tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) is the only living member of the reptilian order Rhynchocephalia (Sphenodontia), once widespread across Gondwana is an iconic species that is endemic to New Zealand. A key link to the now-extinct stem reptiles (from which dinosaurs, modern reptiles, birds and mammals evolved), the tuatara provides key insights into the ancestral amniotes Learn more..

potential anti-viral drug ( not a vaccine )

Long before.. Paul Ehrlich ( who is regarded as one of the fathers of modern immunology - as he proposed the side-chain theory ) arguably some of the earliest work in the field that has now become known as immunology was performed in the period around 1714-1717 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu pioneered a smallpox inoculation, a course of action unparalleled in medical advance up to that point. 'Variolation' as it was known, used live smallpox virus in the liquid taken from a smallpox blister in a mild case of the disease and carried in a nutshell (she had observed what today we would call an inoculation in Turkey by a set of old women).  It was much later (in 1798) the first smallpox vaccination was more notably demonstrated by Edward Jenner. Which brings us to 2020.. a 4-year-old llama named Winter who may hold the key to fighting the new coronavirus to patients who are already exposed to the virus  Learn more..

ways scientists hope to provide immunity

There are different ways in which scientists hope to provide immunity to COVID-19.. Researchers are trialling different technologies, some of which haven’t been used in a licensed vaccine before. At least six groups have already begun injecting formulations into volunteers in safety trials. Others have started testing in animals.  All vaccines aim to expose the body to an antigen that won’t cause disease, but will provoke an immune response that can block or kill the virus if a person becomes infected. There are at least eight types being tried against the corona-virus, and they rely on different viruses or viral parts Learn more..

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what is mastery learning?

Mastery learning ensures students obtain mastery in a given topic before moving on to the next unit. It assumes any student can reach high levels of achievement given sufficient instruction, time and perseverance. Teaching for mastery encourages lifelong learning. When students are given time to learn and succeed, they’re more likely to value perseverance, have confidence in their skills and understand their own learning needs Learn more..

Perseverance Mars Rover Live Update !

Was there once life on Mars? Our Perseverance rover aims to find out! On Thursday, July 30, watch our new robotic astrobiologist launch on a seven-month journey to the Red Planet. Launching on board will be the most sophisticated set of tools ever sent to Mars, with the hope Perseverance will uncover the planet’s secrets. Tune in to our live launch broadcast starting at 7 a.m. EDT. Teams are targeting 7:50 a.m. EDT for liftoff of Perseverance atop United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Don’t forget to set a reminder to join us in the #CountdownToMars – you won’t want to miss this historic mission take flight!

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first time  humans have been on a SpaceX vehicle

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Would you like to learn more about how the "geometry of return trajectory and reentry" into the Earth’s atmosphere works? or how Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson brilliant women working at NASA (in Mid 1950s) served as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit Learn more..

Flying NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to space aboard its Crew Dragon spacecraft using a Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX’s collaboration with NASA launch represents more than just a televised distraction for us kids in our country that is still largely stuck at home. It signals a renewal of American optimism and a reminder of what the country is capable of achieving when it works together Perhaps most significantly, it is the first time in 17 years that anyone has launched a new type of spaceship to carry humans to Earth orbit. Go here to watch continued coveratge..

Intrigued? would you like to know more about the " OTHER " privately owned aerospace company down under? Learn more.. 

is "BCG vaccine" the solution? or is it a example of classic " corelation-causation " fallacy?

Wishful thinking is not only the band-name of a Australian "buzz" punk/pop band it is also a confirmation bias which does not let us perceive circumstances objectively. As humans we tend to seek and interpret information that confirms our existing belief or ideas. We know (from AP Stats) that a common misconception in statistics is to think that correlation can imply causation. "correlation" is a statistical technique which tells us how strongly the pair of variables are linearly related and change together. It does not tell us "the why & how" behind the relationship but it just says the relationship exists.  A article states that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination (Bacillus Calmette-Guerin vaccine) such as Italy, the Netherlands and  good ol' U.S. of A have been more severely affected by the ongoing pandemic.. according to a study made widely available. Case in point: Tuberculosis (TB) is caused by a type of "bacteria" (not a virus) called Mycobacterium tuberculosis and the BCG vaccine contains live bacteria that has been weakened (attenuated) so that they stimulate the immune system but do not cause disease in healthy people (it is less effective in preventing the form of TB that affects the lungs). COVID-19 is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) a "virus". That said, on the flip side maybe B.C.G vaccine boosts the immune system so that it defends better against a whole range of different viruses and bacteria in a lot more generalized way. We just have to wait for the results of the clinical trial that just got started down under on healthcare workers in Australian hospitals.

What is Convalescent Plasma trans-fusion?

The adjective " convalescent " means " recovering from sickness or debility ". Uncontrolled study entry in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that 5 critically ill corona-virus patients on ventilators in Shenzen, China, rapidly improved after treatment with plasma. Within a few days, they started getting better. Eventually, three of them were discharged and two were still hospitalized in stable condition. The idea of a treatment derived from recovering patients is not new. Doctors used serum -plasma with the clotting factors removed as far back as the 1890s. In fact, serum was the only treatment option for certain infectious diseases until antibiotics were introduced in the 1940s. In 1934, doctors used convalescent serum and successfully halted an outbreak of measles at a Pennsylvania school. Apparently right now Docs at any institution who are treating hospitalized patients with COVID-19 can register their patients' information at uscovidplasma.org. The national program is supported by the American Red Cross and the larger blood-banking community, which will work with physicians to collect and distribute the donor plasma Learn more..

Heads-up dear peeps: the second part of " the gene " is airing today !

The Gene, is a two-part PBS documentary airing April 7th (today) and the 14th (next Tuesday), The documentary explores the benefits and risks that come with deciphering life’s code.
                      

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mutation

Understanding the dynamics of mutations and the distribution of fitness effects is critical for most evolutionary models. Mutations have been investigated for more than a century but remain difficult to observe directly in single cells, which limits the characterization of their dynamics and fitness effects. By combining micro-fluidics, time-lapse imaging, and a fluorescent tag of the mismatch repair system in E coli, a team has visualized the emergence of mutations in single cells, revealing Poissonian dynamics Learn more..

What is reproducibility/ replication crisis?

Replication (re-running studies to confirm results) and reproducibility (the ability to repeat an analyses on data) have come under fire over the past few years. The foundation of science itself is built upon statistical analysis and yet there has been more and more evidence that suggests possibly even the majority of studies cannot be replicated. This "replication crisis" is likely being caused by a number of factors which we'll discuss as well as some of the proposed solutions to ensure that the results we're drawing from scientific studies are reliable Learn more..

illusion of control & placebo effect

We are surrounded by buttons that are mechanically sound and can be pushed, but provide no functionality.  First: the crosswalk button : When cities switched over to automation using intelligent algorithms to time traffic signals (which meant many crosswalk buttons became shams for at least part of the day). But, these buttons may still serve a purpose: they have a "psychological effect" on pedestrians. Turns out taking some action leads people to feel a sense of control over a situation, and that feels good, rather than just being a passive bystander. Doing something typically feels better than doing nothing, which explains why people press the elevator call button when it's already lit. Which teaches us the real power of doubt to override rational thinking Learn more..

 kleptoplasty

The root word klepto- comes from the Greek word for thief. Costasiella kuroshimae, from the Costasiellidae family is otherwise known as the Sea Sheep. Organisms capable of kleptoplasty typically eat algae or aquatic plants and “steal” the undigested chloroplasts. These chloroplasts can continue to function and provide energy for their new host via photosynthesis. At only 1cm long these tiny slugs are arguably just as cute, and definitely just as cool as sea bunnies. Not only are these slugs absolutely adorable, they come with their own battery packs. Much like land sheep, kuroshimae love munching on greens. However, instead of grass they chew on algae Learn more..

COVID‑19 information & resources

Google debuted an educational website on the coronavirus outbreak in the United States, which focuses on providing accurate information on education, prevention, and local resources.  The site is designed to highlight information from "authoritative" sources at the front of the pandemic response, like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization, to gather information on data visualization, safety and prevention, relief efforts, and resources for affected individuals and businesses.

clinical trials & studies time after time suggest that copper kills virus and bacteria

The element Copper with atomic number 29 is a soft, malleable & ductile metal with very high thermal and electrical conductivity. It gets its name & Symbol "Cu" from the Latin word "Cuprum", meaning "from the island of Cyprus". In the Ancient Roman world (whose common language was Latin) most copper was mined in Cyprus. Copper used to be the symbol for the Roman goddess Venus, to whom the island of Cyprus was sacred. Copper is usually obtained from the ores cuprite (CuO2), tenorite (CuO), malachite (CuO3*Cu(OH)2), chalcocite (Cu2S), covellite (CuS), and bornite (Cu6FeS4). In 1852 physician Victor Burq visited a copper smelter in Paris's 3rd arrondissement. the 200 employees who worked there had all been spared from cholera outbreaks that hit the city in 1832, 1849, and 1852. When Burq learned that 400 to 500 copper workers on the same street had also mysteriously dodged cholera, he concluded that something about their professions & copper had made them immune to the highly infectious disease. He launched a detailed investigation into other people who worked with copper, in Paris and cities around the world. After visiting 400 different businesses and factories in Paris, all of which used copper, and collecting reports from England, Sweden, and Russia on more than 200,000 people, he concluded to the French Academies of Science and Medicine in 1867 that “copper or its alloys, brass and bronze, applied literally and pregnantly to the skin in the cholera epidemic are effective means of prevention which should not be neglected" Learn more..

diversity of thought

In any day you may have up to 70,000 thoughts go in and out of your mind. Of these, most are about our social environment or ourselves. About 80% of the thoughts are negative, and the odds are that not a single one of them is a completely original idea. This isn’t something bad about us, it’s just how we’ve evolved. The problem is that we’re so involved in our own 70,000 thoughts every day that it doesn’t give us the time to look into the ideas of another individual.Haley Randall of James River High School in Virginia uses the invention of sliced bread as a jumping off point to illuminate the benefit of learning from and building on one another person's ideas Learn more..

what is up with " flatten the curve  " meme

Flatten the Curve meme has become the defining graphic of the COVID-19 pandemic, during a time when people around the world are searching for answers, (Where the term “ flatten the curve” first came from is not really known). The idea is very simple though, taking steps like washing your hands or staying home if you’re sick can slow down new cases of illness (so that the finite resources of our healthcare system can handle a more steady flow of sick patients rather than a sudden overflow). With roots that trace as far back as a 2007 paper published by the CDC ( Page 18 - Figure 1: Goals of Community Mitigation ) the core scheme of Flatten the Curve is an idea that’s been repeatedly remixed by health experts to reach its final, clearest form, proposed by New Zealand microbiologist Dr. Siouxsie Wiles and drawn by illustrator Toby Morris. It’s a cartoon gif that appears to be a silly webcomic but instead, it toggles between two potential futures for our healthcare system. In the first, a man dismissively says “whatever, it’s just like a cold or flu,” and above him, we see a large spike in the number of coronavirus cases, peaking well above a dotted line conveying healthcare capacity. Then it toggles to another perspective, a woman washing her hands saying, “don’t panic but be careful,” and we see the number of cases smoothed to a long, low hill that doesn’t overwhelm our hospital system Learn more..

national Pie Day is actually Jan. 23 today is for 3.14

So, is there some mystical theory explaining how noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking died on the same day Albert Einstein was born, which also happens to be 3.14? (March 14th) Nope. It's just all one giant coincidence. March 14 is Pi Day for 3.14, an important concept that touches almost all aspects of math and science. Let’s dish up some fun with all things pi. In math, pi is what’s known as an irrational number (a number that does not terminate when written as a decimal number and cannot be exactly represented by a fraction). The Guinness World Record for a calculation of pi was set in 2019 by Emma Haruka Iwao using Google cloud software. She calculated pi to 31,415,926,535,897 digits. As the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) explains, modern arithmetic techniques, which were probably discovered in India before the fifth century, took centuries to spread throughout Europe (Indo-Arabic system, as it is now known). Indian mathematicians Madhava and Aryabhata made very significant contributions in finding the exact value of π (pi) Learn more..

the serial killer inside of  us a.k.a T-cells

T-killer cell is a T lymphocyte (a type of white blood cell) that kills cancer cells, cells that are infected (particularly with viruses), or cells that are damaged in other ways.Cytotoxic T cells are very precise and efficient killers. They are able to destroy infected or cancerous cells, without destroying healthy cells surrounding them. For years, the foundations of cancer treatment were surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Over the last two decades, targeted therapies that target cancer cells by homing in on specific molecular changes seen primarily in those cells have also cemented themselves as standard treatments for many cancers. But over the past several years, immunotherapy therapies that enlist and strengthen the power of a patient’s immune system to attack tumors (Photo Source: Sloan Kettering Cancer Center)  Learn More..

medical research

Engineers are problem solvers, and our own health is full of problems to be engineered. Lets us find out what is drug discovery and what does drug delivery mean?  why is it important?  We’ll explore everything from classical and reverse pharmacology to the new field of synthetic biology. We’ll also look at how important good disease detection is and why we really need more targeted drug delivery systems. Let us find out what the drug approval process look like and what does the term 'personalized medicine' really mean Lean more ..

Happy Women's Day!

"Pies, ¿para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar?" ( Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly?) says Frida Kahlo, an awesome Mexican artist. International Women's Day means different things to different people, but the global focus on equality and celebration is clear.  Throughout ancient and modern history, women have collaborated and lead purposeful action to redress inequality in the hope of a better future for their communities, children and themselves. Whether through bold well-documented action or through humble resistance that never made it into the history books, women have united for equality and achievement forever. And along the way, one particularly powerful collaboration lead to the formation of a globally united moment for women across countries to come together in hope and action. That moment is "International Women's Day". Started in the early 1900's, the almighty and tenacious Suffragettes forged purposeful action for equality Learn more..

taking a stand for drug safety

Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey became an American hero for her role in the thalidomide case, celebrated not only for her vigilance, which spared the United States  from widespread birth deformities, but also for giving rise to modern laws regulating pharmaceuticals. In 1960, Dr. Kelsey was hired by the FDA in Washington, D.C. At that time, she was one of only seven full-time and four young part-time physicians reviewing drugs for the FDA. One of her first assignments there was to review an application for the drug thalidomide as a tranquilizer and painkiller for pregnant women for morning sickness. Even though it had already been approved in Canada and more than 20 European and African countries, she withheld approval for the drug and requested further studies. Despite pressure from thalidomide’s manufacturer, Kelsey persisted in requesting additional information to explain an English study that documented a nervous system side effect Learn more..

what happens when brain cells and dna are damaged?

Imagine the brain could reboot, updating its damaged cells with new, improved units. That may sound like science fiction, but it’s a potential reality scientists are investigating right now. Ralitsa Petrova details the science behind neurogenesis and explains how we might harness it to reverse diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Did you know that the DNA in just one of our cells gets damaged tens of thousands of times per day. As DNA provides the blueprint for the proteins your cells need to function, this damage can cause serious issues—including cancer. Fortunately, your cells have ways of fixing most of these problems, most of the time Learn more..

study suggests only 5% of adults wash hand properly!

People around the world are clamoring to buy face masks amidst fears that the coronavirus will continue spreading, but washing your hands is actually the best way to prevent the spread of disease.  COVID-19 is spread through respiratory droplets, which typically travel about three to six feet and settle on surfaces, where they can live for a few hours up to several days, according to the World Health Organization. Follow these five steps every time Follow these five steps every time.
    1.    Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap.
    2.    Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap.
           Lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails.
    3.    Scrub for 20 seconds.  (Hum the “Happy Birthday” song from beginning to end twice)
    4.    Rinse your hands well under clean, running water.
    5.    Dry your hands using a clean towel or air dry them
    https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/when-how-handwashing.html

henneguya salminicola - has no mitochondrial DNA

Mitochondrial respiration is an ancient characteristic of eukaryotes (organisms consisting of a cell or cells in which the genetic material is DNA in the form of chromosomes contained within a distinct nucleus. Eukaryotes include all living organisms other than the eubacteria and archaebacteria) but now researchers at  Tel Aviv University recently discoved (using deep sequencing approaches) a "multicellular animal " with no mitochondrial DNA inturn making it the only known animal to exist without the need to breathe oxygen! If you spent your entire life infecting the dense muscle tissues of fish and underwater worms, like H. salminicola does, you probably wouldn't have much opportunity to turn oxygen into energy, either. However, all other multicellular animals on Earth whose DNA scientists have had a chance to sequence have some respiratory genes. Researchers at TAU’s School of Zoology mapped the creatures’ genome to try and understand how it survives in such conditions, only to discover its cells lack mitochondria. According to a new study published few days ago (Feb. 24) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, H. salminicola's genome does not (Organisms like fungi, amoebas or ciliate lineages in anaerobic environments have lost the ability to breathe over time) The new study demonstrates that the same can happen to an animal — possibly because the parasite happens to live in an anaerobic environment. Image: Spores of the parasite Henneguya Salminicola swim under a microscope. Those alien "eyes" are actually stinger cells, one of the few features this organism hasn't evolved away. (Image: © Stephen Douglas Atkinson)

why is 2020 a leap year? and 2019 a common year!

On this leap day let us learn the reason for adding leap days to the calendar.. It is to " align the calendar year with the actual year". which is defined by the time it takes Earth to circle the sun. It is equal to 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds, or 365.24219 days. However, the Gregorian calendar has only 365 days in a year, so if we didn't add a leap day on February 29 nearly every four years, we would lose almost six hours off our calendar every year. After only 100 years, our calendar would be off by around 24 days Learn more..

lets go virus hunting

The highly virulent Ebola virus has seen a few major outbreaks since it first appeared in 1976, with the worst epidemic occurring in 2014. How does the virus spread, and what exactly does it do to the body? Ebola virus, formally called Zaire ebolavirus, is a rare virus that infects humans and nonhuman animals such as pigs and other primates. It is one among several viruses within the genus Ebolavirus, only four of which are known to infect humans: Ebola, Sudan, Taï Forest, and Bundibugyo. Five Ebola subtypes have been identified: Zaire ebolavirus (ZEBOV), which was first identified in 1976 and is the most virulent; Sudan ebolavirus, (SEBOV); Ivory Coast ebolavirus (ICEBOV); Ebola-Reston (REBOV), and Bundibugyo ebolavirus (BEBOV). Reston was isolated from cynomolgus monkeys from the Philippines in 1989 and is less pathogenic in non-human primates. It was thought to be the only subtype that does not cause infection in humans until 2009, when it was strongly speculated to have been transferred from pigs to humans. Bundibugyo was discovered in 2008, and has been found to be most closely related to the ICEBOV strain Learn more..

nsa discloses  windows 10 cryptographic bug

Microsoft released a patch for Windows 10 and Server 2016 yesterday, after the National Security Agency found and disclosed a serious vulnerability. It's a rare but not unprecedented tip-off, one that underscores the flaw's severity. The bug is in Windows' mechanism for confirming the legitimacy of software or establishing secure web connections. If the verification check itself isn't trustworthy, attackers can exploit that fact to remotely distribute malware or intercept sensitive data. The flaw is specifically in Microsoft's CryptoAPI service, which helps developers cryptographically "sign" software and data or generate digital certificates used in authentication all to prove trustworthiness and validity when Windows checks for it on users' devices. An attacker could potentially exploit the bug to undermine crucial protections, and ultimately take control of victim devices. The NSA's decision to share the vulnerability brings to mind the NSA hacking tool known as "Eternal Blue" which exploited a Windows bug patched in early 2017. That flaw was present in all versions of Windows available at the time, and the NSA had known about the bug and exploited it for digital espionage for more than five years.

Toxic Blister beetle blamed for deaths of 14 horses

It is hard to imagine the reason behind the recent news (deaths of more than a dozen horses) to be small beetle(s). Let us try to understand the science behind it: It might be hard to imagine that an essential part of the horse’s diet could contain potentially deadly hidden toxins. But it’s a hard truth that horse owners must be aware of: Alfalfa hay can harbor blister beetles (Epicauta spp), which can contain a harmful toxic substance called cantharidin (C10H12O4 IUPAC: 4,7-Epoxyisobenzofuran-1) A member of the Meloidae family, blister beetles live throughout the United States and Canada. Their average body length is about 0.3 to 1.3 inches. A blister beetle’s diet is mainly composed of pollen, blossoms, and leaves of flowering plants, making alfalfa the perfect meal for them. Most alfalfa infestation occurs during late summer and early fall, when the adult blister beetle population also peaks Learn more..

FDA LIFTS romaine e.coli warning !

Caesar salad lovers rejoice! crispy romaine lettuce leaves are OK to eat now. Today The CDC said that consumers no longer have to avoid romaine lettuce grown in Salinas, California, though it continues to investigate the cause of three E. coli outbreaks that sickened nearly 200 people. Lettuce implicated in all the three outbreaks was traced back to 10 fields run by a single grower in the lower Salinas Valley. Water, soil and compost samples taken at the fields so far have come back negative for all three outbreak strains, and the investigation by the FDA, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California health and agriculture authorities continues. The question is Why E. coli keeps getting into our lettuce? and how CDC tracks? (Public health investigators used the PulseNet system to identify illnesses that may be part of this outbreak. PulseNet is the national sub-typing network of public health and food regulatory agency laboratories coordinated by CDC. DNA fingerprinting is performed on E. coli bacteria (isolated from ill people) Learn more..

can we 3d print organs?

There are currently hundreds of thousands of people on transplant lists, waiting for critical organs like kidneys, hearts and livers that could save their lives. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough donor organs available to fill that demand. What if, instead of waiting, we could create new, customized organs from scratch? Let's explores bio-printing, a new branch of regenerative medicine Learn more..

what are lichens really?

A hand lens or a microscope and a bit of lichen makes for a pleasing afternoon. In winter, after a rain they are like glowing jewels plastered on trees and rocks. The view that a lichen is a symbiotic partnership between a fungus and an alga alone has changed. In the 1860s, scientists thought that they were plants. But in 1868, a Swiss botanist named Simon Schwendener revealed that they’re composite organisms, consisting of fungi that live in partnership with microscopic algae. In the 150 years since Schwendener, biologists have tried in vain to grow lichens in laboratories. Whenever they artificially united the fungus and the alga, the two partners would never fully recreate their natural structures. It was as if something was missing and Spribille might have discovered it.  He has shown that largest and most species-rich group of lichens are not alliances between two organisms, as every scientist since Schwendener has claimed. Instead, they’re alliances between three. All this time, a second type of fungus has been hiding in plain view Learn more..

feed a cold starve a fever? .. is it true?

The belief is that eating food may help the body generate warmth during a “cold” and that avoiding food may help it cool down when overheated.  But what does modern medical science say? Let us take colds first, when our body fights an illness it needs energy, so eating “healthy food” is helpful. Eating can also help the body generate heat. Although, wearing an extra layer can keep us warm too.  The reasons to eat for fever are more interesting. Fever is part of the immune system’s attempt to beat the bugs. It  raises body temperature which increase metabolism and results in more calories burned Lear more..

new species of ant!

Texas rodeo ant new species #1 ( still to be formally named ) she’s a mouth-clamping Solenopsis ant, was reported on November 17 in St. Louis at Entomology 2019. The shape of her head and notched mouthparts allow a snug grip around the waist of the particular ant species she was riding. He was just stretching his legs at the Brackenridge Field Laboratory, an urban field station, reachable by Austin city bus. It was hardly unknown wilderness rustling with mysteries. Entomologists had worked over the ground for years. But, now Alex Wild is the one who discovered new rodeo ants in ( of course ) Texas. Rodeo ant queens avoid having to reproduce their own worker ants. Instead, they drop their eggs into the nests of other ants while riding on the back of that colony’s queen. Alex Wild is curator of entomology and a lecturer in the Department of Integrative Biology at UT. He says rodeo ants are “social parasites.”

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Why learn a foreign Language?

Many of us have often wondered what benefits learning another language has? Other than the obvious reason being able to communicate in said language. Learning a new language rewires your brain, and helps your mind stay sharp longer. Recent studies show that speaking being bilingual improves cognitive skills unrelated to language. Scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. You can become a more independent person. Ever find yourself in downtown Miami, Florida without an English speaker in sight? Learning to speak Spanish will help take care of that problem. Spanish is spelled phonetically and many of the words are similar to English. And because so many people in the U.S. speak Spanish fluently, you don’t have to go very far to find someone with whom you can practice or some place where you can fully immerse yourself in the language Learn more..

NEW UPDATES from parker probe !

The Parker Solar Probe discovered high-speed plasma currents flowing from the sun seemly propelled by sharply kinked ripples in the solar magnetic field. (From Last year's blog entry ):  Lets look at a group of women from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab who are key to the success of NASA's Parker Solar Probe, a groundbreaking mission to explore our Sun, launched last night.  Lets meet APL's Nicola Fox, project scientist; Betsy Congdon, lead thermal protection system engineer; Yanping Guo, mission design and navigation manager; and Annette Dolbow, integration and test lead engineer just a few of the women working to ready the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft for its historic journey to our star  Learn more..

the Fall of Icarus  (stop worrying  about what others think)

In Greek mythology, Icarus who succeeded in flying, with wings made by his father, using feathers and beeswax. Unfortunately, Icarus ignored his father’s warnings, and he flew too close to the sun, melting the wax, and he fell into the sea and drowned. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is a large painting from the 1560s that hangs in Belgium’s largest museum, the Musée des Beaux Arts – and is held to be a meticulous copy of an original (now lost) work by the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder. ( following recent technical examinations, it is now regarded as an excellent early copy by an unknown artist of Bruegel’s lost original ). It shows a superficially bucolic scene: ships are taking sail, a shepherd is tending to his flock, distant cities look prosperous and ordered Learn more..

DNA data storage is really music to our ears

Hundreds of years from now, today’s DVDs, web servers, and flash drives will all be long dead. But one copy of a music video for alternative rock band OK Go’s song "This Too Shall Pass" could still be playing. The Rube Goldberg-inspired video is part of a 202-megabyte cache of data that University of Washington say they’ve written to DNA storage — the largest known DNA storage trove created. The world will generate 160 zettabytes of data in 2025. That’s more bytes than there are stars in the observable universe. Conventional storage media like flash-drives and hard-drives do not have the longevity, data density, or cost efficiency to meet the global demand. In order to write data to DNA, researchers translate the binary code of a file into the nucleotide molecules that form DNA’s building blocks, assigning different base pairs to represent ones and zeroes. The idea has been in the proof of concept stage for years, and so far, the information stored has been modest Learn more..

perceptions

What shapes our perceptions (and misperceptions) about science? In an eye-opening talk, meteorologist Dr. Shepherd explains how confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect and cognitive dissonance impact what we think we know -- and shares ideas for how we can replace them with something much more powerful: knowledge Learn more..

Transit of Mercury Live!

Slooh has a live stream of the event starting around 7:30 AM ET.  Slooh will train its highly specialized Solar Telescope, based at its flagship observatory at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, on the tiny planet Mercury as it crosses the face of the Sun. Join Slooh host, Paul Cox and Slooh's experts Bob Berman, Dr Mike Shaw, and special guests who will tell us everything there is to know about Mercury, the Sun, and planetary transits. The team will be discussing the phenomena as viewers snap their own images from the live streams. They will also discuss the importance of planetary transits in history and why major expeditions to view them were organized at great expense during the 1700s. We can interact with the team using Slooh's chat facility when watching at slooh.com. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory will also be tracking the event, and will be uploading images of the event as it happens. Here is NASA's events list - you can find one near you here..   Watch trtansit of Mercury Live Learn more..

what is EEE?

Eastern equine encephalitis (encephalitis means inflammation of the brain) is transmitted to humans by the bite of an infected mosquito. The EEE virus typically circulates back and forth between Culiseta melanura mosquitoes and birds, because Culiseta melanura mosquitoes don't tend to feed on humans. But you can get the virus if other mosquito species (e.g., Aedes, Coquillettidia, and Culex) were to bite infected birds and then bite us. The disease is actually misnamed: term equine implies that the major source is horses, and they are not. Horses are dead-end hosts like we are. It is a disease between birds and mosquitoes.  EEE is one of five common types of viral encephalitis carried by mosquitoes (other forms of encephalitis that tend to appear are St. Louis, La Crosse, western equine and West Nile). Among them Eastern equine encephalitis is the deadliest. Togaviruses attach to the surface of a cell using the glycoprotein spikes that cover the virion surface, and are absorbed into the cell. What about prevention you ask? Mosquitoes are so hard to avoid, be more mindful of it. Avoiding mosquito bites is the best way to stop the spread of EEE. Using EPA-registered insect repellents that contain one of the following active ingredients: DEET, picaridin, oil of lemon eucalyptus, para-menthanediol, or 2-undecanone, following the label instructions. avoiding activities that take place outdoors between dusk and dawn, wearing long pants, long-sleeve shirts and socks and eliminating standing water where mosquitoes breed help Learn more..

Fantastic Voyage style!

In Fantastic Voyage (the 1966 movie novelized by Isaac Asimov) scientists shrank a submarine (with people inside) to the size of a microbe, enabling the humans in it to travel into the brain of a scientist with a life-threatening blood clot. That notion of performing medical procedures in microscopic scale is now slowly sneaking out of the realm of science fiction.. Scientists are combining living microbes (very small to begin with, no need for shrinking) with an additional cargo-carrying apparatus.
These “hybrid biological microrobots” could deliver disease-fighting drugs, attack tumors or perform other helpful functions Learn more..

what does a memory really look like?

In the Harry Potter movies, they are silver streams that can be teased from the head with the tip of a wand. In the Pixar movie " Inside Out ", they are small glowing Orbs, stored in vast racks of shelving in our minds, in the movie memories are shown as translucent globes encapsulating events. Each globe takes on a different hue depending on the primary emotion of the event. A golden-hued joyful memory starts to turn blue when held by Sadness, showing the transformation of a previously happy memory to one that becomes bittersweet with the acknowledgment of loss. It’s well established in the movie that the emotional character of events is sometimes altered as we recall them. The events of Riley’s day are automatically encoded into a single globe. Each memory globe is stored on a shelf in a vast long-term storage library. That might be a handy visual metaphor for memory, it’s not actually how memory works. So, what does a memory really look like? and how are they stored? Researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine developed a mouse model in which molecules crucial to making memories (beta-actin mRNA) were given fluorescent "tags" so they could be tracked
Learn more..

the wacky history of cell theory

Cell theory is a scientific theory which describes the properties of cells. These cells are the basic unit of structure in all organisms and also the basic unit of reproduction. With continual improvements made to microscopes over time, magnification technology advanced enough to discover cells in the 17th century. Scientific discovery isn't as simple as one good experiment. Learn More..

Today in history: August 21st 1858:

The leading candidate, Stephen A Douglas was the sitting senator. So, he got to lead off in four of the seven debates. The leading candidate did a 60 minute introduction. Then there was a 90 minute response!, followed by a 30 minute rebuttal! That was how the seven (original LD) Lincoln Douglas debates were structured.  During the debates Abe Lincoln addressed Stephen Douglas as "Judge Douglas" as he served as a judge on the Illinois state supreme court from 1841 to 1843.  When Abe Lincoln received the Republican nomination to run against Douglas, said in his acceptance speech the famous .. “A house divided against itself cannot stand ” and that “ this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Douglas attacked Lincoln as a radical, threatening the continued stability of the Union. Lincoln then challenged Douglas to a series of debates, and the two eventually agreed to hold joint encounters in seven Illinois congressional districts. The debates, each three hours long, were convened in Ottawa (August 21), Freeport (August 27), Jonesboro (September 15), Charleston (September 18), Galesburg (October 7), Quincy (October 13), and Alton (October 15) Learn more..

problem with headlines

There’s often a disconnect between news headlines and the scientific research they cover. While headlines are designed to catch attention, many studies produce meaningful results when they focus on a narrow, specific question. Unfortunately, looking into studies is a lot easier said than done. IF you try reading studies to see how they came to their results and most are published in scientific journals that require us to pay money to see the whole contents. Most allow us to see the abstract, but not the actual contents of how the study was conducted. So how can you figure out what’s a genuine health concern and what’s less conclusive? Which leads us to the next question.. " how to choose our News?" in the first place Learn more..

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EHT & black hole: how, what and why?

Albert Einstein first predicted black holes in 1916 with his general theory of relativity. The term "black hole" was coined in 1967 by American astronomer John Wheeler, and the first one was discovered in 1971 (in the form of the X-ray source) Cygnus X-1. The international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration revealed humanity's first glimpse of a black hole. It's been a big day for science. And an even bigger day for women scientists. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) post-doctoral student Katie Bouman (who isn’t an astronomer) amazingly played a vital role in taking the first-ever photograph of a black hole. Katie Bouman, a computer scientist along with Andrew Chael and Mareki Honma took the lead on creating the algorithm that made it possible to take the photo Learn more..

what are solar flares & C.M.Es?

The Sun constantly burps out supercharged particles. When these burps hit the Earth’s atmosphere, interactions with our magnetic field create the southern and northern lights. In 1859 a solar flare (like yesterday morning) from the Sun, hit the Earth with such power, the northern lights that normally dance in the sky over Alaska could be seen as far south as Mexico. The event took down telegraph systems across Europe and North America. Solar flares are giant explosions on the sun that send energy, light and high speed particles into space. These flares are often associated with solar magnetic storms known as coronal mass ejections (C.M.E).  The number of solar flares increases approximately every 11 years, and the sun is currently moving towards another solar maximum. The biggest flares are known as "X-class flares" based on a classification system that divides solar flares according to their strength. The smallest ones are A-class (near background levels), followed by B, C, M and X. Similar to the Richter scale for earthquakes, each letter represents a 10-fold increase in energy output. So an X is ten times an M and 100 times a C. Within each letter class there is a finer scale from 1 to 9 Learn more..

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siri is so passé .. say hello  to mica !

Remember when Siri the first voice assistant appeared? it was on the iPhone 4S! Seems so long ago right? Welcome to the world of "virtual" assistant. The tech world's latest virtual assistant looks so realistic, you might mistake her for an actual human. Apple has Siri, and Amazon has Alexa. But the lifelikeness of both are dwarfed by Mica: a prototype that Magic Leap, a highly regarded augmented-reality startup, unveiled at its conference. Mica isn't just a voice assistant. She's something you can actually see if you wear the company's augmented-reality glasses, called Magic Leap One. Mica looks and acts like a human — she makes eye contact and offers a warm smile, along with other human-like expressions Learn  more..

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hotelling's law of spatial competition

Harold Hotelling’s Law states that there’s a natural tendency for competitors to be pulled toward a common middle ground. Found a good clear explanation of the Hotelling model of spatial location in game theory. Has very good animation and discusses different scenarios to help understand how game theory and Nash equilibrium works Learn more..

the paradox of value & tragedy of the commons

Imagine you’re on a game show and you can choose between two prizes: a diamond … or a bottle of water. It’s an easy choice – the diamonds are more valuable. But if given the same choice when you were dehydrated in the desert, after wandering for days, would you choose differently? Why? Aren’t diamonds still more valuable?
Learn more..

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to scale: the solar system

Here at the pale-blue-dot : Wylie Overstreet convinced four friends to travel to a dry lake bed in Nevada and help him build a full, three dimensional scale model of the solar system complete with planetary orbits (way to see what our place in the cosmos to scale)  Learn More..

The tree of life just got another major branch

Canadian researchers have discovered a new kind of organism that's so different from other living things that it doesn't fit into the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, or any other kingdom used to classify known organisms Two species of the microscopic organisms, called hemimastigotes, were found in dirt collected on a whim during a hike in Nova Scotia by Dalhousie University graduate student Yana Eglit. A genetic analysis shows they're more different from other organisms than animals and fungi (which are in different kingdoms) are from each other, representing a completely new part of the tree of life Learn more..

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science cannot be politicized :

It's been an unprecedented year in politics leading up to Tuesday's midterm elections, with a historic number of women and minorities running for office. Scientists have typically steered clear of the political fray, but this year, more than 450 candidates with backgrounds in science, technology, engineering and math are also seeking state and federal offices Learn more..

print it in space

What happens when something breaks aboard the International Space Station? In the past, spare parts had to be sent on resupply missions, which were expensive and time-consuming. Former NASA intern Jason Dunn saw a better option and founded Made in Space. When most of us think of the new space race we think of the shipbuilders the renegade billionaires who poured their fortunes into opening up space we don't think of couple of 30 year olds who built the world's most advanced 3D printer, which prints in micro-gravity  Learn more..

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what is Phage Display?

Phage display is a laboratory platform that allows scientists to study protein interactions on a large-scale and select proteins with the highest affinity for specific targets. Phage display is one of the most powerful and widely used laboratory technique for the study of protein-protein, protein-peptide and protein-DNA interactions. This technology is mainly based on displaying the interest protein (peptides, antibodies, scaffolds or others) on the surface of employing phage and then be used to interrogate the constructed libraries containing millions or even billions of displayed phages Learn more..

What is directed evolution?

The notion of enzymes as biocatalysts was originally presented in 1833 with the discovery of the conversion of starch into sugars catalyzed by diastase. However, it was not until the 20th century that scientists realized their full potential in the context of medicine and technology. Major landmarks were the development of methods for enzyme isolation and purification, the realization that enzymes are proteins with biochemical activity and their characterization using x-ray diffraction technique. Directed evolution has made it possible to cut out the use of many toxic catalysts, providing enzymes for all manner of fields including the development of bio-fuels and the production of pharmaceuticals. Now you can adapt your enzyme to work in an industrial environment, instead of in a cell where it is normally used to working Learn more..

what are biomAterials?

Biomaterials are those materials - be it natural or synthetic, alive or lifeless, and usually made of multiple components — that interact with biological systems. Biomaterials are often used in medical applications to augment or replace a natural function. As a science, biomaterials is about fifty years old. The study of biomaterials is called biomaterials science or biomaterials engineering. aditionally, care should be exercised in defining a biomaterial as biocompatible, since it is application-specific Learn more..

gendered marketing: harm american & european girls

One of the world's largest engineering institutions is warning against gender sterotyping of toys concerned it could be discouraging girls from pursuing a career in engineeing, science and tech. Research by the Institute for Engineering and Tech (IET) found that toys with a Sciene, Engineering and Tech focus were three times as likely to be targered at boys than girls. Toys influence what a child does in later years, University of Washington study suggests  Learn more.. .

M.I.T's Alter Ego:

Wearables can now read your mind. When you think a sentence in your head, your brain sends signals to your mouth and jaw. MIT Media Lab's headset (AlterEgo) reads those signals with 92 percent accuracy.  AlterEgo is developed by MIT Media Lab. You strap it to your face. You talk to it. It talks to you. But no words are said. You say things in your head, like "what street am I on," and it reads the signals your brain sends to your mouth and jaw, and answers the question for you. The institution explained in its announcement that AlterEgo communicates with you through bone-conduction headphones, which circumvent the ear canal by transmitting sound vibrations through your face bones Learn more..

how does P.C.R work? ( Mini or classic )

PCR is acronim for a simple but very useful procedure in molecular biology called the polymerase chain reaction. A PCR machine (or a thermocycler) has test tubes (the DNA mixture of interest are put into these test tubes) and the machine changes the temperature to suit each step of the process. It is a technique used to amplify a segment of DNA of interest or produce lots and lots of copies. In other words, PCR enables you to produce millions of copies of a specific DNA sequence from an initially small sample – sometimes even a single copy. It is a crucial process for a range of genetic technologies and, in fact, has enabled the development of a suite of new technologies Learn more..

how does  induction motor (and electric car) work?

Unlike toys and flashlights, most homes, offices, factories, and other buildings aren't powered by little batteries: they're not supplied with DC current, but with alternating current (AC), which reverses its direction about 50 times per second (with a frequency of 50 Hz) Learn more..

remembering Bob Dorough

For many learning civics and math and grammar began early as they sat cross-legged on the floor in front of a big cathode ray tube on Saturday mornings between Scooby-Doo, Josie and the Pussycats and Super Friends, learned lessons from his fun, educational songs probably didn't know what a great jazz pianist, singer and songwriter he was. Learn more..

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smart profiling and psychometric manipulation

The phrase “you’re the product” first appeared in a 1986 speech by President Reagan about the drug war. Perhaps the most disturbing elements of data collection and use are the gray areas, where the morality of how data is being used is questionable and only seem legal because law enforcement is yet to catch up. By now I'm sure you have heard of the University of Cambridge researcher's app called "This is your digital life" which collected information on millions of Americans through Facebook for Cambridge Analytica, the maker of the application Dr Aleksandr Kogan says he did not know his work for Cambridge Analytica in 2014 violated any policies. Let us back track to see what Facebook and Cambridge Analytica's data scandal is all about, what Data Scientist Christopher Wylie exposes? what really is " Psychographic profiling " which is behind false advertising Learn more..

Jeeves, a programming language with privacy baked in.

When programmers create a feature for an app or a website, even something as simple as a calendar, they should code in protections so the personal information that the feature needs to access such as your location doesn’t slip out onto the Internet. Needless to say, they sometimes fail, leaving our data to be exploited by hackers. There is a new programming language ( created by Jean Yang Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University) with privacy baked in called Jeeves. With Jeeves, developers don’t necessarily have to scrub personal information from their features, because Yang’s code essentially does it automatically. Learn more..

La Luna

Just like how there are various conflicting accounts in classical Greek mythology regarding Artemis's (Godess of the Moon) birth. Scientists couple of days back have a new theory about where the Moon came from, and it’s unlike anything you’ve heard before. According to a new paper it was inside Earth's synestia that the Moon formed rather than a collision with Mars sized body called Thia 4.5 billion years ago that threw material into Earth's orbit Learn more..

Resolved: US ought to provide a universal basic

income.

That was the LD debate topic for the National qualifiers. Pilot programs are in the works at Oakland, Ontario and Finland. It was Thomas More, an English counselor to King Henry VIII who first advocated in his 1516 novel Utopia that a basic income be used to redistribute wealth during the transition from public land ownership to private land ownership.  The idea rose to relative prominence in the United States, and the Nixon administration even commissioned experiments on UBI in a number of states between 1968 and 1971. Nixon ended up unsuccessfully pushing for a UBI Learn more..

did you experience the (near) future?

Technology companies brought 5G technology platforms to life with industry leaders for the world's largest 5G showcase, setting the stage for the global deployment of 5G. At PyeongChang 2018, Intel, KT and ecosystem collaborators delivered a 5G showcase in Gangneung Olympic Park, in Gwanghwamoon, Seoul, and at other Olympic venues across South Korea. Today’s mobile users want faster data speeds and more reliable service Learn more..

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net neutrality explained by kids (react to), hank &

hank!

"Net neutrality" prevents Internet providers like Verizon and Comcast from dictating the kinds of content you're able to access online. Instead, Internet providers have to treat all traffic sources equally. Net neutrality is enforced by the Federal Communications Commission, or FCC Learn More..

heal with a cell not a pill:

Current medical treatment boils down to six words: Have disease, take pill, kill something. But physician Siddhartha Mukherjee points to a future of medicine that will transform the way we heal.  Turns out he had severe osteoarthritis the ''wear-and-tear'' type, in one of his knees Learn more..

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One Touch

Researchers at the Center for Regenerative Medicine and Cell-Based Therapies at The Ohio State University have developed a portable, thumbnail-sized silicon chip that can, in a fraction of a second, reprogram skin cells so that they transform into just about any other cell type in the body. Learn more..

the declaration of sentiments

At the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y., a woman’s rights convention–the first ever held in the United States–convenes with almost 200 women in attendance. The convention was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Learn more..

metalic hydrogen

Researchers say they've managed to create a potentially revolutionary material that has only been imagined in theory for the past several decades: solid metallic hydrogen Learn More..

are you taking A.P U.S History: 8/9 grade

What can you do against Gilded Age greed? Use the Sherman Antitrust Act against them. Doesn't hurt to have Teddy Roosevelt on your side. The Sherman Antitrust Act, the first federal antitrust law, authorized federal action against any "combination in the form of trusts or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade." Learn More..

how playing sports benefit our brain: growth mindset

The victory of the underdog. The last minute penalty shot that wins the tournament. The training montage. Many people love to glorify victory on the field, cheer for teams, and play sports. But should we be obsessed with sports? Are sports as good for us as we make them out to be? Learn More..

how they Put the false in falsetto:

Lets look at the origins of autotune software. Andy Hildebrand, the inventor of autotune, once said "My thinking was, ok, I'll put that setting in the software. But I didn't think anyone in their right mind would ever use it." Thus was born the "Cher effect", and one of the biggest hits of the 1990s , the Cher effect also known as the autotune a pitch-correcting software designed to smooth out any off-key notes in a singer's vocal track Learn More..

DEVIL's MILK

Scientists have discovered that Tasmanian devil's milk contains an arsenal of antimicrobial peptides (six naturally occurring antimicrobial peptides in the cathelicidins family)  that can kill some of the most deadly bacterial and fungal infections known to science - including golden staph (Staphylococcus aureus), Candida krusei and airborne fungus called Cryptococus gattii. Tasmanian devil joeys are born without primary immune tissues and they don't develop proper antibody-mediated immunity until around 90 days old Learn More..

If Else statement in java:

An if statement can be followed by an optional else statement, which executes when the Boolean expression is false. If the boolean expression evaluates to true, then the if block of code will be executed, otherwise else block of code will be executed. When using if, else if, else statements there are a few points to keep in mind. An if can have zero or one else's and it must come after any else if’s.. Learn more

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what is synthetic biology

Synthetic biology is the convergence of advances in chemistry, biology, computer science, and engineering that enables us to go from idea to product faster, cheaper, and with greater precision than ever before. Community of experts across many disciplines is coming together to create these new foundations for many industries, including medicine, energy and the environment Learn more..

Dirty Dancing

I hear the Dung Beetle was all the rage in ancient Egypt. They were even worshiped as one of their Gods. Did the ancient Egyptians knew something about the dung beetle, that we are still figuring out? .. the fact that dung-beetles can navigate using polarized light of the milky way. Learn more..

germ theory

For several centuries, people thought diseases were caused by wandering clouds of poisonous vapor, work of several scientists who discredited a widely accepted theory in a way that was beneficial to human health. Learn more..

Cyanobacteria

Cyanobacteria, formerly called "blue-green algae" are relatively simple, primitive life forms closely related to bacteria.   Typically much larger than bacteria, they photosynthesize like algae. Depending upon the species, cyanobacteria can occur as single cells, filaments of cells, or colonies Learn more...

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women explorers

During the Victorian Age, women were unlikely to become great explorers, but a few intelligent, gritty and brave women made major contributions to the study of previously little-understood territory.  Marianne North, Mary Kingsley and Alexandra David-Néel who wouldn't take no for an answer Learn More

kids publish scientific study

Eight and Ten year old British Elementary school kids may be the youngest scientists ever to have their work published in a journal. 25, 8- to 10-year-old children from Blackawton Primary School report that buff-tailed bumblebees can learn  Learn More

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√-1 2^3 ∑ π and it was delicious!

The first few times around you probably made few retro game consoles or upgraded to Chromium as you wanted a better browser than Midori for the TV.  Here is a news flash, Raspberry Pi 3 is out (since yesterday) with builtin bluetooth and wifi connectivity making it IoT application usage right out of the box, there’s truly not much this tiny machine can’t do! There’s also a brand new GPU—a huge step for open source, affordable hardware as now performance can match that of a modern smartphone Learn More..

game based learning: physics & math

Parents who are passion pushers try to make something out of nothing every time their kids show the slightest interest in an activity (by mislabeling it passion) that does not involve a game console. Most of us are lucky to have parents who nurture exploration and not put an end to it. Game based learning is one such fun activity to explore Learn More..

how brain receive & deliver impulses

As grad students at the University of Michigan, Tim and Greg (now a Neuroscientist) often interacted with schoolchildren during neuroscience outreach events. We often wanted to show real "spiking" activity to students, but this was impossible due to the high cost of equipment. By using off-the-shelf electronics, we designed kits that could provide insight into the inner workings of the nervous system  Learn More..

history of the 'study of the brain'

Brain surgeons, long burdened with the onerous reputation of being among the smartest people in the world, are expressing relief that this educational video is shattering that stereotype once and for all.  Western ancient medical practitioners had conflicting views of the significance of the brain Learn More..

the science of skin color

When ultraviolet sunlight hits our skin, it affects each of us differently. Depending on skin color, it’ll take only minutes of exposure to turn one person beetroot-pink, while another requires hours to experience the slightest change. What’s to account for that difference, and how did our skin come to take on so many different hues to begin with? Learn More..

mind controling parasites:

Parasitology is the study of parasites, their hosts, and the relationship between them. As a biological discipline, the scope of parasitology is not determined by the organism or environment in question, but by their way of life. Learn More..

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gravitational waves were detected today

Since Albert Einstein first predicted their existence a century ago (in his general theory of relativity) physicists have been on the hunt for gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of spacetime. Have Gravitational Waves finally been detected? Yes! Physicists explain what they are and why they'll cause a big ripple in our understanding of the Universe Learn More..

History vs. Napoleon Bonaparte
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​Napoleon Bonaparte was a revolutionary figure who helped influence the French revolution. A highly controversial character, Bonaparte is labeled with many titles. Some of which contain the talk of a hero who saved France from a dictatorship or a villain who made himself the dictator. But when it comes to history every person can be controversial, as old values diminish. Its time to put Napoleon Bonaparte on trial, on History versus Napoleon Bonaparte. Learn more..

pod design competition - @ Texas A&M

Hyperloop pod design competition at Texas A&M University was the place to be last Saturday.  Dozens of winners in propulsion, design, levitation, and braking were  announced at the end of the two-day competition, which also featured technology demo like Arx Pax's hover engine  Learn More..

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difference between a scientific law and theory

Chat with a friend about an established scientific theory, and she might reply, “Well, that’s just a theory.” But a conversation about an established scientific law rarely ends with “Well, that’s just a law.” Why is that? What is the difference between a theory and a law... and is one “better”? Learn More..

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girls who build: m.y.o (Make your own) with/at M.i.T

The Make Your Own Wearables Workshop introduces girls to computer science and electrical and mechanical engineering through wearable technology.  This one-day workshop, developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory, consists of hands-on projects in manufacturing and wearable electronics. Prerequisites: None, Upcoming Workshop Offerings: December 2015, Spring 2016  Learn More..

cosmic triangle

Jupiter, Venus and Mars create a cosmic triangle in morning sky this week Bundle up and get outside early about an hour before dawn this week to see a potentially incredible grouping of bright planets in the eastern sky  Learn more..

physics behind the Fosbury flop

When Dick Fosbury couldn't compete against the skilled high jumpers at his college, he tried jumping in a different way, backwards! know more about the physics behind the success of the now dominant Fosbury Flop Learn more..

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seasons: Tilt not distance - M.I.T

Many people believe that Earth is closer to the sun in the summer and that is why it is hotter. And, likewise, they think Earth is farthest from the sun in the winter. In reality it's the "tilt"  Learn more

celebrating women in tech and science

Sure, you've heard of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, but what about Martha Coston, Mary Anderson, and Sarah Mather? In honor of International Women's Day, the campaign highlights the main problem surrounding the gender gap in technology education. We know about famous male creators, but our knowledge of the women who have spearheaded the development of things such as the computer algorithm and satellite propulsion ( Ada Lovelace and Yvonne Brill, for the record ) remains limited, to say the least Learn More..

6th grade world history

Unlike his mentor Socrates, Plato was both a writer and a teacher. His writings are in the form of dialogues, with Socrates as the principal speaker. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato described symbolically the predicament in which mankind finds itself and proposes a way of salvation. The Allegory of the Cave can be found in Book VII of Plato's best-known work, The Republic, a lengthy dialogue on the nature of justice Learn More..

Why Should you read macbeth..

There’s a play so powerful that an old superstition says its name should never be uttered in a theater. A play that begins with witchcraft and ends with a bloody, severed head. A play filled with riddles, prophecies, nightmare visions, and lots of brutal murder. But is it really all that good? Brendan Pelsue explains why you should read (or revisit) "Macbeth."  Learn more..

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