Maxwell's Demon summoned.

Ganked from dracodraconis...
Fibromyalgia may be a brain disorder.

peristaltor wrote a good summary post about mass extinctions (90+%) and their relation to global warming; scary stuff! He is summarizing things drawn from several sources, which I will have to look into separately.

I followed the link to one of his sources, an interview with the Chief Scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center, from which the subject line ( Read more... )

An article about women leaving tech fields in their thirties and forties, related to recent discussions. The article's main point is good and seems pretty sound to me, but there's a line that's tossed in about "the hostile macho cultures - the hard hat culture of engineering, the geek culture of technology or the lab culture of science" which ( Read more... )

Bob McDonald of CBC's Quirks and Quarks is not impressed with the Harper government's treatment of former National Science Advisor Dr. Arthur Carty, and isn't afraid to say so.

Who can blame him? Also, good on him and the CBC for not soft-playing this.

M. King Hubbert on energy, growth, and sustainability, in 1974.

I believe that the fundamental assumption of unbounded economic growth will break down within my natural lifetime; I just got sent this, and it's someone with pretty good credentials saying something disturbingly similar a year after I was born.

Integrity.

Nothing to add, really.

Undergraduate research shows leaderless honeybee organizing

Interesting in its own right, and also by analogy to societal models.

This suggests to me an analogy between neurons and honeybees, and more generally of cellular automata with emergent properties. Are honeybees (and other hive insect colonies, perhaps) "intelligent" en masse?

"The sea squirt has a very simple brain which is used only to find a suitable spot to root itself for life. Once it's settled into a spot, it no longer needs the brain, so it eats it. This has been compared by at least one Researcher to a professor receiving tenure at a university."

BBC has more weird animal stuff.

Great tits challenge evolutionary theory
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