Researchers thought that flies chose their altitude based on optic flow, a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has ridden an airplane.
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You Are Now Free to Move About the Insect - ScienceNOW - 1 views
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The team's observations, published online today in Current Biology, suggest that flies base their cruising altitude on horizontal edges and landmarks—such as table surfaces or tree tops—and not on how fast the ground is moving beneath them. The edge-tracking strategy may enable flies to keep tabs on possible landing spots.
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This may be the general principle" for all flying insects, he says.
How to Pour Champagne Like a Scientist - 1 views
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ah these french... they don't know what to do of their time ! Imagine the research proposal: we need 100 Champagne bottle...!
An evil atmosphere is forming around geoengineering - 0 views
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A number of right-wing think tanks actively denying climate change are also promoting geoengineering, an irony that seems to escape them.
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Wood believes that climate engineering is inevitable. In a statement that could serve as Earth's epitaph, he declared: "We've engineered every other environment we live in, why not the planet?"
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It's estimated that if whoever controls the scheme decided to stop, the greenhouse gases that would have built up could cause warming to rebound at a rate 10 to 20 times that of the recent past - a phenomenon referred to, apparently without irony, as the "termination problem".
Claimed Proof That P != NP - 4 views
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Yet another one? Wish him good luck... I doubt anyone will waste time peer-reviewing his article. Here's quite a nice overview of the efforts on the problem: http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm -
thanks Marek - very nice link indeed ... did not know about it
Slashdot Science Story | 5 Trillion Digits of Pi - a New World Record - 1 views
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Another Pi digits calculation record.
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wow - apparently the project started as a high-school project! http://www.numberworld.org/y-cruncher/
Slashdot Science Story | Calculating Environmental Damage From Space Tourism Rockets - 3 views
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Cynthia - please have a look ... can we check the OoM?
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http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101022/full/news.2010.558.html hmm should be the ACT in Nature, no? ;)
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Yeeesss :) So the "non-commercial" rockets do not emit soot? And how many "non-commercial" launches per year are there in comparison to the commercial ones? Finally commercial space-flight seems more realisable than ever, and "non-commercial" guys will do everything to prevent situation in which they have to compete on an open market... Coming years should be very interesting...
Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense - 6 views
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Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
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fantastic!
Can Google Predict the Stock Market? - ScienceNOW - 2 views
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in related news: Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market "An analysis of almost 10 million tweets from 2008 shows how they can be used to predict stock market movements up to 6 days in advance" http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/25900/ http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.3003
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Likewise, I can predict the statistical properties of white noise :-)
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the problem is that usually the google search queries and the twitter updates happen after a crisis for example. I dont really think that people all over the world suddenly realised that Lehman would collapse and started googling it like crazy before it collapsed. More likely they did it afterwards.
Cutting Soot Counteracts Warming in California - 1 views
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models suggest that cut may also have cut into the warming of the state's climate in an unexpectedly big way, preventing temperatures from climbing even higher.
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"This indeed has major implications for mitigating climate change on a global scale," says Ramanathan. "We have the chance to see a quick global response."
Slashdot Science Story | Turns Out You Actually Can Be Bored To Death - 4 views
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whoa, so take care at those long presentations and meetings!
Slashdot Science Story | New Interactive Black Hole Simulation Published - 3 views
The Olympics run on Windows (XP) | Beyond Binary - CNET News - 3 views
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The good news for Microsoft is that all the PCs powering the Olympics are running Windows. The bad news: it's the older Windows XP operating system.
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Now I start to understand why the Swiss win so many medals. That's most probably a bug!!!
Slashdot Science Story | Chilean Earthquake Shortened Earth's Day - 1 views
Slashdot Technology Story | Using Classical Music As a Form of Social Control - 1 views
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A clockwork orange all over again.
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Some other ingenious suggestions: death metal in rest homes motivates people to care for their parents, deafening techno in the doctor's waiting room decreases the rate of unjustified medical visits, Eros Ramazotti in UK stadiums keeps the hooligans away etc.
Better Nanotubes May Be on the Way -- Fox 2009 (1210): 3 -- ScienceNOW - 1 views
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Success at building large amounts of inexpensive nanotubes opens the door for lighter, faster car frames; affordable space vehicles; and ultralightweight armor. Or on a smaller level, BNNTs could be used with pinpoint precision to attack cancer cells by sticking to tumors, absorbing neutrons from a targeted beam, and generating localized alpha radiation to kill the cancer. "This is the start of a revolution in materials," says Dennis Bushnell, a NASA engineer who has watched the work closely in the hopes of using BNNTs for space vehicles.
Common ecology quantifies human insurgency : Article : Nature - 0 views
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nice paper: like especially: To our knowledge, our model provides the first unified explanation of high-frequency, intra-conflict data across human insurgencies. Other explanations of human insurgency are possible, though any competing theory would also need to replicate the results of Figs 1, 2, 3. Our model's specific mechanisms challenge traditional ideas of insurgency based on rigid hierarchies and networks, whereas its striking similarity to multi-agent financial market models24, 25, 26 hints at a possible link between collective human dynamics in violent and non-violent settings1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19. Top of page
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There was also this paper ... Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence (http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2009/1216/1?rss=1)
Power Law Explains Insurgent Violence - 1 views
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To try to explain the mechanism behind these patterns, the team borrowed a simple computer model from economics. The model treated all insurgencies like a marketplace--groups of people constantly deciding whether to act. Rather than coordinating, the groups simply watch the news. The size of the carnage reported at any given time determines the probability that a group of a given size will strike next. Like clockwork, the attacks over the course of the conflict--from the smallest to the most deadly--have the same distribution.
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