From the category archives:

World-scale issues

“The China Study” Considered Harmful

July 11, 2010

An influential study of diet and health has been exploded here. The data and the conclusions don’t just disagree, they aren’t even on speaking terms.

Meanwhile, randomized intervention trials indicate that advice on the perils of saturated fat has been wrong. I suggest some reforms.

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Arctic sea ice yesterday

July 3, 2010

In 2007, the area of Arctic sea ice reached a record low. By comparison, here’s the current story:

   National Snow and Ice Data Center

Looks low by about 4 standard deviations. (Yes, too much geophysics & climate…)

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Needless Megadeaths:
A Suggestion for Science in the Public Interest

June 16, 2010

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Irrational drug design, malaria,
and Alzheimer’s disease

May 24, 2010

Irrational drug design (aka high-throughput screening) parallels other areas of data-driven science: it abandons the methodology of traditional hypothesis-driven science — which demands a focus on specific predictions — and pursues instead the weak and humble hypothesis that looking in a general area will find something. As I discussed here, genomics and synoptic sky [...]

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Liveblogging Globe Forum 2010, Stockholm

April 29, 2010

A bit of liveblogging, at least. I’m in Stockholm for the Globe Forum 2010, resting for a moment after a talk and interviews. The Forum brings together people building businesses focused on sustainability. Work ranges from computational fluid dynamics for better wind energy to a technology that lays down nanoscale films of a tungsten disulphide [...]

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Why fusion won’t provide power
   (at a reasonable cost)

January 20, 2010

The greatest problem with fusion power is rarely mentioned and scarcely on the research agenda: capital cost. When I discussed the problem earlier, in “Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water”, I hadn’t seen this quietly damning report, which I think is worth quoting:

Issues and R&D needs
for commercial fusion energy
An interim report of the
ARIES [...]

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Molecular Manufacturing:
The NRC study and its recommendations

January 7, 2010

Part 6 of a series prompted by the recent 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. This is arguably the most important post of the series, or of this blog to date.
Topics:
— The most credible study of molecular manufacturing to date
— The study’s recommendations for Federal research support
— The [...]

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Khan Academy:
On a mission to educate the world (for free)

December 28, 2009

I got a pointer to a free, online educational resource today.
It deserves more attention.
The eyeballs of a few million students might be a good start. Students in elementary school, grad school, rural Africa… places like that.
It consists of 1000+ brief lectures on YouTube.
It centers on math, but goes beyond.
Here are a few samples that [...]

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Molecular Manufacturing: Where’s the progress?

December 19, 2009

Part 2 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

John Stewart Mill Debugging defects in human thought

As cognitive psychologists know, we human beings suffer from multiple, systematic cognitive biases, aberrations of intellectual vision that [...]

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How many minds produce knowledge
(and how they don’t)

December 11, 2009

A review of Infotopia
I’ve been discussing problems with public information and ways to improve it with Michael Nielsen, and on this topic, he recommended Infotopia: how many minds produce knowledge by Cass Sunstein. Having just finished reading it, I recommend it too.
With a solid grounding in experiments and studies of group behavior (and enlightened common [...]

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Great Science, Great Scientists, and Icons

November 27, 2009

Working as a young, self-funded, independent investigator, Charles Darwin formulated the theory of evolution by variation and natural selection.
Modern science funds independent investigators differently:

It has become increasingly difficult for young U.S. researchers to win funding for their ideas.
(See also: “More about less opportunity for young scientists”)
Unfortunately, our iconic images of great scientists distort perceptions of [...]

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Cybersecurity: Let’s try something that can work

November 25, 2009

William Wulf and Anita Jones have written a brief, tantalizing, and important article in Science: “Reflections on Cybersecurity”. They point the way out of a tangle of security problems (not all, of course) that costs billions of dollars in losses billions in countermeasures, and billions more in opportunity costs — some known and some [...]

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