do you think he knows
What I find really astonishing isn’t that a giant land snail managed to earn a doctorate, but that he managed to land a national TV spot despite displaying this kind of egregious, disrespectful behaviour towards his co-host.
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New research led by Kazuo Fujita of Kyoto University has found that your dog is the best wing man/woman. The researchers tested three groups of 18 dogs by putting them in rooms with their owners as well as two strangers. The owners were tasked with opening a box, and solicited help from the two other people in the room (sometimes they would help and sometimes they would refuse). After watching their owners either be rebuffed or aided, the dogs were offered food by the strangers — and were much more likely to ignore the stranger who had been unkind to their owner.
In a study, dogs refused food from people who had slighted their owners
this is the kind of groundbreaking scientific research I want to see
Ladies and gentlemen, this is science in a nutshell
Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge
Welcome to the Pirate Bay of science.
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles - almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published - freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.
For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court - a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.
“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,” Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”
Well, consider this. One paper access costs 30-40$ and monthly salary of many Russian scientists is 200-300$. Even a student master thesis requires tens of papers, PhD and above - hundreds. Everywhere scientists and engineers are creating these free databases of images, sounds, DNA sequenses, how-to-make manuals, spreading and sharing the knowledge, and yet the journals set these unrealistic prices, when they don’t even produce the content.
A single sperm has 37.5MB of DNA information in it. That means that a normal ejaculation represents a data transfer of 1,587.5TB.
Now that’s a lot of information to swallow
Now someone needs to calculate the average data transfer speed.
It all happens in about 10 seconds, so about 158.75 TB/sec, but there is a buffering issue and the software to initiate the transfer takes a while to download.
Thank you, davromega. You are the hero we need.
thank you, nature, for pre-slicing oranges for us. You didnt have to and you did anyway and that was cool of you
And thank you science and agriculture for engineering seedless clementines that nearly peel themselves.
The task of photographing Pluto was a feat of time travel in its own right. Men and women nine years ago had to look forward in time at Pluto’s orbit and pinpoint just how much mass, fuel, thrust, which trajectory, etc. the satellite would need in order to make the journey in time and meet Pluto in the right spot 9+ years later.
And they got there within 72 seconds of the predicted time.
Sci-fi often starts rambling at the dinner table and gets these really weird, convoluted ideas about something and Science really wants to reach out and squeeze its hand and explain where its logic is flawed, but Science does so love to listen to Sci-fi talk. Even if much of it is complete nonsense, it often articulates it so beautifully and then, occasionally, it will say something absolutely brilliant and Science will be struck speechless, standing up abruptly and wandering off to spend the rest of the night thinking. Sometimes, in the morning, Sci-fi will wake to Science pacing across the bedroom floor, breathlessly excited to show off what it has created - an astonishing approximation/translation of what Sci-fi had been rambling about the night before.
Often, Science will work really hard and fruitlessly at something for no real reason other than because Sci-fi thought it was cool - and Science loves making Sci-fi happy. In return, Science will sit down in the evening and discover that Sci-fi was paying attention to it and has done it homage in its latest paperback - something that delights and flatters Science so much that they have steamy sex all night long and produce thousands of inspired scientists and writers as offspring.
That “new scientific breakthrough discovery” you just read about on that news site/blog/Facebook page? It’s almost certainly wrong. This article from Vox is a seriously important thing that, if you care about science, you really need to read, like right now.
My take: The tendency of the media to report on what is *NEW* in science is indicative of what I think is the largest perspective gap between scientists and nonscientists.
The general public (<- apologies, I hate how homogenous that word is, because there is no single “general public”, but I have to use it here) seems to crave novelty and has a tendency to view every scientific finding as forwardprogress and individually meaningful, but science is a an ongoing process of self-correction and repetition. It doesn’t have an “end” and any single study is almost certainly wrong, or at the very least doesn’t tell the full story.
This is why I have tried to steer clear of reporting on “breaking” science news in my own efforts here on OKTBS. Science communicators and journalists, we need to make a commitment to covering science as a process and not as a series of breakthroughs. When science IS reported that way, we run the risk of losing people’s trust when science later must later correct or contradict itself, which is something that will absolutely happen, because that’s what science does. We must also make people comfortable with the idea uncertainty and science-as-a-process is a good thing!
I’ll shut up now. Go read this.