Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how’s your father. Hairy blighter, dicky-birdied, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper’s and caught his can in the Bertie.
Oh, wait. Bacon in the Asteroid Belt is meant to be taken literally. Answering the timeless question of how much energy it would take to put pork products in orbit. Hmmm. Bacon. Sausage. Sausage. There’s a nice, woody word. (Not at all tinny, like asparagus or celery)
Complexity and connectivity, and the problems they can cause. And the notion that “too big to fail” might mean “too big to be allowed to exist.”
Much like the power grid, the financial system is a series of complex, interlocking contingencies. And in such a system, the biggest risk of all – that the system as a whole might fail – is not related in any simple way to the risk profiles of its individual parts. Like a downed tree, the failure of one part of the system can trigger an unpredictable cascade that can propagate throughout the entire system.
[…]
[W]e tend to overlook a fact that should be obvious – that once everything is connected, problems can spread as easily as solutions, sometimes more so. Thanks to globally connected transportation systems, epidemics of disease like SARS, avian influenza, and swine flu can spread farther and faster than ever before. Thanks to the Internet, e-mail viruses, nasty rumors, and embarrassing truths can spread to colleagues, loved ones, or even around the world before remedial action can be taken to stop them. And thanks to globally connected financial markets, a drop in real-estate prices in California can hurt the retirement benefits of civil servants in the UK.
ApolloPlus40 – Tweeting the Apollo 11 Mission
Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened — 40 years on. Followers can read about technical milestones, political challenges, and related events in the space race starting today, just over a month before the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing.
(Gliese 581 being a system, with a planet, about 20 light-years away, which would account for the 40-year delay)
This has it all. A scientist, working on his own, discovering something new (and useful) using proper scientific methodology … and he’s in high school. WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags
First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.
After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.
Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.
That wasn’t good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.
Oh, and yes, he won the top prize at the science fair.
18 Beautiful Rainbows from Around the World
And one more from Niskayuna, which comes with a physics explanation
But for the people walking, this looks like a model railroad setup.
Tilt-Shift Trains Switzerland
Beauty, eh? What, you don’t remember Bob and Doug McKenzie? Beer roulette?
OK, how about a nice little story of “why I do physics” (short answer: because physics (especially atomic physics) is frikkin’ cool, and we like learning) from a member of Joseph Thywissen’s cold atoms group at U. Toronto. Physics is beauty
Physics is worth knowing because it is beautiful. It is the hidden secret of the scientist. We may claim to be researching some topic or other because it is “useful to society” or it will revolutionize some technology but, more often than not, we are simply fascinated by some small detail about how the world works and we can’t stop thinking about it until we understand it better. We are constantly astounded by the way a few basic principles work together to explain so many different things, and sit in wonder and awe at the beauty of the world. Like an artist, I want to share this beauty with others. I want them to know what it is to see through my eyes.
Via ZapperZ
Giant’s Shoulders #12 is up at thoughts from gut bacteria.
The world’s oldest barbecue has been uncovered by archaeologists
The world’s oldest barbecue has been uncovered by archaeologists – and on the menu were gigantic mammoth ribs.