Earlier this week, Facebook unveiled its new search engine, called Graph Search. Facebook promises that it will help you find people who share your interests. “Want to start a book club or find a gym buddy? Connect with friends who like the same activities—and meet new people, too.” Having moved around for most of my […]
Month: January 2013
To the layman, the website for BabyPlus might seem plausible. The company sells devices that supposedly make babies smarter by playing sounds to them while still in the womb. The site claims that by strapping a speaker playing loud rhythmic sounds to her belly, an expectant mother ensures her child will be more relaxed, nurse […]
I love snow, but we don’t get much of it here. On the rare day that the highest peaks catch a few flakes, people pile into cars and drive up into our local mountains just to see a small patch of white. Part of the allure is the wonderful way in which snow is described […]
As you know, we are now one month into the International Year of Statistics. What, you didn’t know that? Yeah, statisticians aren’t really all that great at promotion. Which is too bad, since they work on interesting problems in just about every field of science and engineering. The first time I went to the Joint […]
January 21 – 25 This week, Eric showed us why no one does death quite like Mexico; Abstruse Goose does the math to tell us where in the universe our televised electromagnetic leaks have gotten to; Cassie examined the complex relationships between scientific breakthroughs, miracle drugs, and the government programs that allow them to save […]
Phoenix is scorching in the summer, and Pat Elliott had been standing for hours. So she wasn’t alarmed one August day in 2009 to find her feet swollen. “It must be the weather,” Elliott thought. But they also ached. The pain was horrendous. So she called her doctor, and he told her to come in. […]
150 million years ago in what is now the North American West, mighty diplodocus thundered across the terrain, stripping leaves from branches with its peg-like teeth and lashing away pests and predators with the 80-some vertebrae of its whip-like tail. They were magnificent creatures, as long as three school buses each. And for nearly a […]
Young Indian feminists have begun calling her “Damini.” We don’t know her real name, but most of us have read about the terrible way she died. Damini was the 23-year-old woman attacked and gang-raped in New Delhi on December 16 while returning home at night on a bus with a male friend. She died 13 […]
