I ran into this extremely interesting article on Scientific American online called, One World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom by Paul Patton. Scientists, or rather neuroscientists and psychologists, believed that the brain developed over time and as life forms became more complex and sophisticated the brain got more sophisticated also — that’s an […]
The year 2009 is fast approaching. Just a bit longer and the we’ll begin fresh with another year. Of course this New Year’s Eve will be one second longer than the last several as a leap second is added to bring us back into synch with the Earth’s rotation around the sun. It’s the time […]
While I’m sure this comes as no big question to professional mathematicians, I’ve never come to an understanding of the nature of infinity. The question that came up this evening while sitting at a traffic light was: if the set of integer numbers is infinite, and the set of real numbers is infinite, and integers […]
Today, this article in New Scientist caught my eye. It seems that after studying the phenomena scientists believe that lightning during a snow storm, which is a very rare event (called thundersnows), indicates that a blizzard is coming. The more lightning the stronger the blizzard. I’m originally from Maine and I think I’ve only seen/heard […]
Remember my post awhile ago about the connection between Earth and the Sun that occurs every eight minutes, well looks like more can happen during that connection than scientists first thought. NASA today released an interesting article about a recent discovery by the THEMIS project. It seems that during the connection, while THEMIS was actually […]
I was pointed to a website with an example of genetic programming where the result was a pretty darn good approximation of the Mona Lisa. Roger Alsing had done the programming to just have some fun, try out some code — and I presume stretch a bit in a different direction than he usually got […]
As more and more data comes back from our research vehicles on and about Mars, we learn that maybe Mars was once very much like home — Earth. Recently, scientists have learned from the data that Mars periodically has some of its existing atmosphere ripped away by solar winds. Mars’ magnetic field isn’t a bubble […]
A friend sent me a link to this NPR report on “Think You’re Multitasking? Think Again.” I was told at a previous job that it was not humanly possible to multitask, so we were to do one thing at a time. Of course that ignored the fact that we’d be fired if we actually waited […]