From the category archives:

Brevia

Darwin portraits on sale, ₤10 — exactly

December 26, 2011

The ₤10 note honors one of Britain’s historic scientists:

There’s a different view of science here.

For more posts with a Darwin theme, see:

Great Science, Great Scientists, and Icons

For Darwin Day: On the Origin of Genetic Information

For Darwin’s sake, reject “Darwin-ism”

And for a view on learning science, see:

How to Learn About Everything

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Video of my talk
at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum

December 23, 2011

A video of my talk at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum is now on YouTube. I gave this talk on advanced nanotechnology prospects to an audience drawn from local technical universities during my recent Moscow visit.

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A rich visual display
of quantitative money information

November 25, 2011

Here’s a huge, data-rich visualization of the money dimension of McDonald’s meals, billionaires, the Moon landing, income quintiles, and the like. It’s well done, spans 12 orders of magnitude, and kept my attention for entirely too long.

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A Busy Day in Moscow

October 26, 2011

I am no longer in possession of a Russian secret regarding the lineup of speakers during the opening plenary session of Rusnanotech 2011 this morning.
Rusnanotech is organized by Russia’s state-sponsored nanotechnology investment corporation, Rusnano. My plenary talk followed a speech by Anatoly Chubais, the Chairman of Rusnano and former First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia. [...]

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Science and engineering at NIH

May 10, 2011

In response to (yet another) proposal to reorganize and redirect the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Russ Altman writes in Nature that
…it is crucial to separate the engine of discovery from the engine of application. Discovery is stochastic and opportunistic; application is the stuff of engineers. That is why attempts to over-engineer discovery fail and [...]

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Polyoxometalate papers

May 3, 2011

Background: polyoxometalate nanostructures are cool (more here).
Lee Cronin sent me a pdf of the polyoxometalate paper I discussed in my previous post, and he notes that readers can download it here, with other papers on his group’s website here.
The Israel Journal of Chemistry has a new special issue, “Frontiers in Metal Oxide Cluster Science”, [...]

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Fukushima — best video, possible recriticallity [*?]

March 27, 2011

Here’s current video showing the steam, smoke, and wreckage at Units 1, 2, 3 & 4, seen with good optics from a helicopter at a safe standoff distance. It gives tantalizing glimpses of what’s going on, but what would be visible around the corners inside?
The mobilization of technology here is pitiful. An off-the-shelf Parrot.AR drone [...]

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Across the blood-brain barrier with exosomes

March 22, 2011

New work with exosomes promises wide-ranging advances in medicine, courtesy of an emerging biomolecular nanotechnology.
As pharmaceutical chemists know, the blood-brain barrier blocks delivery of many molecules that do wonderful things if injected directly into the brain, but injecting the brain isn’t quite as convenient as injecting a vein.
Exosomes are lipid vesicles manufactured by cells for [...]

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Tsunami disasters
and the cost of making things

March 11, 2011

When I wake up to news of a coast smashed by a tsunami, I see yet another sign of our relative material poverty, a sign that our civilization hasn’t yet mastered the art of making things.
Japan, by modern standards, is rich, yet costs deterred the construction of deployable barriers able to resist fast-rising sea*. If [...]

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Nano drug carrier (!!!)

December 8, 2010

This news just in:
A ‘buckyball’ — a spherical molecule made up of 60 carbon atoms — has been turned into a vial just big enough to hold a single water molecule….
The authors say that uses for the vial could include acting as a carrier for drugs in the body.
(News item)
As The Onion might ask, What [...]

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Why We Get Fat

December 8, 2010

Gary Taubes has started a blog, and his first post nicely summarizes his case against the idea that overeating causes obesity: A tiny caloric imbalance of ~1% (only while actively gaining weight, of course) isn’t a cause of obesity, it’s a consequence of the onset of obesity, which is itself best understood as a consequence [...]

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A meta-meta-analysis from the CDC

November 30, 2010

As a meta-oriented post, Metamodern is pleased to report a meta-meta-analysis.
In this month’s issue of the CDC-sponsored journal Preventing Chronic Disease, we find, published as a “Systematic Review”:
Quality of Systematic Reviews of Observational Nontherapeutic Studies
…Of the 145 systematic reviews we found, fewer than half met each quality criterion; 49% reported study flow, 27% assessed [...]

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