National Geographic has a slideshow of the proposed national parks, one of which, Maine Woods National Park, would be the “Yellowstone of the East” if granted Federal protection and be larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite combined. Mt. St. Helens is another site under consideration.
British Chiropractors Association has dropped its libel action against science writer Simon Singh, after he won the right to appeal. The suit has cost Singh over $200k in legal fees, so really is feels like the BCA won.
Using a modified version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where automated agents could learn strategies experientially or by observing other agents, researchers found that despite the high-cost of observing others, sacrificing rewards by merely observing for a round, agents that used social learning came out ahead.
A study of monkeys placed on a reduced calorie diet found they didn’t lose weight because they reduced their activity levels, while monkeys trained on a treadmill combined with lower caloric intake did lose weight.
Octopus steals camera, shoots its own footage:
Life Magazine has posted exclusive photos of the day Albert Einstein died.
What He Left Behind
Credit: Ralph Morse/TIME & LIFE Pictures
The Wisconsin Assembly has voted lactococcus lactis the official state microbe, which is the bacterium used to make cheese.
Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait covers the good and bad in Obama’s vision for NASA, which he characterizes overall as “pragmatic”.
“Oceanic-Snot Diver”, “Sneeze Modeler”, and “Feces Piper” are just a few of Pop Sci’s worst jobs in science, an article enhanced with some great illustrations to boot.
Live Footage Iceland Volcano 2010 April:
Tyrannobdella rex the “Tyrant King Leech” is a species discovered feeding on the mucous membranes of Peruvian swimmers, and has recently been found to be related to other mucous-membrane-eating leeches, but I mention it here because nose-leeches are freakin’ creepy.
Tyrannobdella rex
Credit: PLoS ONE
President Obama has unveiled his vision for NASA, which has come under attack by former astronauts and some lawmakers for lacking concrete vision and scaling back America’s manned spaceflight goals.
New data from India’s Chandrayaan-1 lunar probe has discovered that the Moon has a miniature magnetosphere covering a small pocket of its surface, which opens the possibility of finding them on smaller objects, like asteroids.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) does not endorse spanking children for any reason, favoring putting children in “time out” to reflect on their misbehavior, and now a study of 2,500 children finds those spanked at age 3 are more aggressive at age 5.
Lightning on Saturn:
Physicists have discovered the “zero-twist point” for ropes where the triple strands of a rope are rotated to their maximum, resulting in a rope that is 68 percent shorter than the length of an individual strand. While this finding won’t add anything to the art of rope-making, it does mean that extraterrestrials with rope-technology would use the same craftmanship.
zero-twist configuration
Credit: Jakob Bohr and Kasper Olsen/Technical University of Denmark
Russia is establishing its first science city since the collapse of the USSR, using Western economic-incentive strategies to incentivize innovation and research in hopes of diversifying its economy from its current oil-centrism.
The medieval warm period is often cited by Climate Change skeptics as proof global temperatures have always fluctuated dramatically over time periods measured in centuries (ie. “That’s why the Vikings called it ‘Greenland.’”,) but a deeper analysis of both Northern and Southern Europe’s climate at the time finds the warming period was a local, not global event.
The Animal Review blog has released a book, grading animals on their adaptations and survival fitness. They give the Octopus an “A” for its incredible intelligence and amazingly adaptable bodies, while the Panda gets an “F” for eating nothing but bamboo, which it can barely digest, and lacking an interest in mating.
Michael Specter’s TED Talk on how Irrational Thinking Could Kill Us:
