This video of the yesterday’s Space Shuttle Discovery launch is courtesy of Clotille:
I gave her a bunch of hell for taking the Nerdmobile to Geektown, but I bet it was actually pretty fun.
Buzz Aldrin is, by all accounts, a great guy. West Point graduate, religious man, fighter pilot, astronaut. But don’t piss him off:
Yeah, this is old, but I just learned of it yesterday, thank’s to the Chron’s Eric Berger.
In the whole debate over evolution vs. creation, a third possibility has been widely overlooked: the notion that they’re not mutually exclusive. It’s always seemed perfectly plausible to me that God may have set evolution in motion, knowing where it would end up. Or maybe He gave evolution little divine nudges over millions of years.
I’ve just never bought into the idea that either evolution or “poof”-style creation tells the whole story. Rome isn’t buying it either:
The Vatican has issued a stout defence of Charles Darwin, voicing strong criticism of Christian fundamentalists who reject his theory of evolution and interpret the biblical account of creation literally.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said the Genesis description of how God created the universe and Darwin’s theory of evolution were “perfectly compatible” if the Bible were read correctly.
“The fundamentalists want to give a scientific meaning to words that had no scientific aim,” he said at a Vatican press conference. He said the real message in Genesis was that “the universe didn’t make itself and had a creator”.
This idea was part of theology, Cardinal Poupard emphasised, while the precise details of how creation and the development of the species came about belonged to a different realm - science. Cardinal Poupard said that it was important for Catholic believers to know how science saw things so as to “understand things better”.
Catholic readers might want to take a look at Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical dealing with the relationship between faith and reason.
It gets 100 gajillion miles per gallon.
Scientists at our own Rice University have constructed a ‘nanocar,’ barely the width of a DNA strand:
The nanocar consists of a chassis and axles made of well-defined organic groups with pivoting suspension and freely rotating axles. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. The entire car measures just 3-4 nanometers across, making it slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair, by comparison, is about 80,000 nanometers in diameter.
The experiment hit a snag, however, when the car broke down on 59, and was towed by a microscopic Safe Clear wrecker.
The Chron’s SciGuy reports on a 4,000-year-old batch of Chinese food. No, it wasn’t discovered in the back of my fridge:
The discovery of a pot of thin yellow noodles preserved for 4,000 years in Yellow river silt may have tipped the bowl in China’s favor. It suggests that people were eating noodles at least 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, and many centuries before such dishes were documented in Europe.”These are undoubtedly the oldest noodles ever found,” says Houyuan Lu at China’s Institute of Geology and Geophysics in Beijing.
Researchers are still digging, hoping to find a millenia-old packet of duck sauce.
Nobel laureate Jack Kilby, whose invention of the integrated circuit ushered in the electronics age and made possible the microprocessor, has died after a battle with cancer. He was 81.Kilby died Monday, according to Texas Instruments Inc., where he worked for many years.
Before the integrated circuit, electronic devices relied on bulky and fragile circuitry, including glass vacuum tubes. In the late 1950s, there was considerable interest — especially in the military — in making devices smaller.
Kilby’s fingernail-size integrated circuit, a forerunner of the microchip used in today’s computers, replaced the bulky and unreliable switches and tubes.
Just think of the impact that the integrated circuit has had on our daily lives. I was awakened this morning by an electronic clock radio, shaved with an chip-equipped electric razor, had a cup of coffee from a microprocessor-controlled coffee pot, set my electronic thermostat, got in my chip-laden car, and drove to work, where I used a fax machine, computer, PDA and cell phone, all made possible and cost-effective because of integrated circuits.
In case you’re not yet convinced of Kilby’s enormous contribution to society, just think where you’d have to get your news if it wasn’t for the integrated circuit.
You are currently browsing the Mattsapundit weblog archives for the 'Science' category.
