Monday: July 11, 2011
The science behind why we tend to screw up when the pressure is on.Article goes into some detail regarding just what our brain does under certain times when stress levels may be heightened. Continue reading over the full article over at New Scientist if you want more information about stuff like cognitive horsepower and spatial problem solving. You know, for science.
Thursday: August 11, 2011
Nintendo shareholders would really like to see Mario on the iPhone, sooner than later.It's an interesting time these days for video game consoles. That is of course, if you happen to be a company called Nintendo. Nintendo's latest handheld has been officially declared as a flop (even by Nintendo itself) and the price has been reduced not long after release. The caliber of games you can find on the iPhone and iPad do rival what you can find on a Nintendo handheld - and at a much cheaper cost ($40 compared to often times $1-2). It should be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Monday: August 1, 2011
Turns out that coin tosses don't really provide fifty-fifty odds.As usual, it's humanity that messes things up. When flipped by a machine, coins come up heads a solid fifty percent of the time, and tails the other fifty percent. Put the fate of the coin in grubby human hands and the odds tip slightly in favor of the side that faces up just before the coin is flipped. The side that was face up at the beginning of the flip has a fifty-one percent chance of landing face-up at the end. Humans are not as precise as machines, and so the coin rotates around several axes instead of one.
Thursday: July 7, 2011
Storm over Saturn makes for some pretty pictures.Behold pictures of Saturn's largest and most intense storm to date (larger photos on source site). Aren't they pretty? These images come from NASA's Cassini Spacecraft. The folks over at New Scientist state that the various colors represent different altitudes of clouds, not Saturn's overall mood and/or demeanor. As a sidenote: I made a similar picture the other day by accidentally mixing oil and water on the pavement.
Tuesday: May 18, 2010
Brand new computer algorithm actually capable of detecting sarcasm....the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. The team then identified certain sarcastic patterns that emerged in the reviews and created a classification algorithm that puts each statement into a sarcastic class.
Everything you never knew about ball lightning hallucinations.For hundreds of years eyewitnesses have reported brief encounters with the golf ball- to tennis ball-size orbs of electricity. But scientists have been unable to agree on how and why ball lightning forms, since the phenomenon is rare and very short-lived.
Wednesday: May 12, 2010
Scientists have discovered that Jupiter somehow managed to lose a stripe.The band was present at the end of 2009, right before Jupiter moved too close to the sun in the sky to be observed from Earth. When the planet emerged from the sun's glare again in early April, its south equatorial belt was nowhere to be seen.
Rogue star mystery finally deciphered thanks to Hubble Space Telescope.The massive, hot star seemed out of place when astronomers first spotted it in 2006, and now thanks to Hubble, we know why. The misfit, 30 Dor #016, appears to have been ejected from a cluster of even heftier stars, pinging off of them and off into space at tremendous speed.
Tuesday: May 11, 2010
A photo gallery from inside the Pavilions of Expo currently underway in Shanghai, China.Go on in and have a gander at some photography of the event courtesy of Popular Science. You'll see some interesting things such as the world's largest IMAX screen followed by the world's largest baby (relax, it's only a model).
Scientists discover that colossal squid is actually just a lazy pink blob.The researchers found that the colossal squid would have had a slower metabolism and so moved slower than expected, waiting for prey rather than running it down. 'Everyone thought it was an aggressive predator, but the data suggests otherwise,' Rosa told LiveScience.
Monday: May 10, 2010
Scientist verifies that the human brain contains a master switch.Shin believes his discovery may be useful in understanding brain malfunctions such as autism, epilepsy and others. While researching brain function, Shin has previously shown that taking statin drugs to lower cholesterol may actually inhibit some brain function.