PodSpec » Science

Rewriting Macroeconomics Curriculum

cs — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:12:28 +0000

IN MORE than 30 years of teaching introductory macroeconomics, says Alan Blinder of Princeton University, he has never seen interest as high as it was last year. At Harvard, says David Laibson, students in his undergraduate macroeconomics course are “chomping at the bit”.

At elite American universities, where endowments have shrivelled and hiring is down, increased [...]

Coming up empty

cs — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 20:37:06 +0000

THE renewable-fuel standard released in February by America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paints an ambitious picture of biofuels’ future. It wants the amount of the stuff used as transport fuel to climb from 13 billion gallons (49 billion litres) in 2010 to 36 billion gallons in 2022, requiring by far the largest part of that [...]

Single Molecule Transistor

cs — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:59:05 +0000

MANHASSET, NY — Researchers from Yale University and the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea have successfully created a transistor made from a single molecule. The researchers showed that a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts could behave just like a silicon transistor.

They were able to manipulate the molecule’s different energy [...]

Rubber from Dandelions

cs — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 03:58:51 +0000

The tyres of the future may be made from dandelions. OTHER than being an ingredient of the more recherché sorts of salad, herbal tea or wine, dandelions are pretty useless plants. Or, at least, they were. But one species, a Russian variety called Taraxacum kok-saghyz (TKS), may yet make the big time. It produces molecules [...]

Native Flu Fighting Proteins

cs — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 23:07:42 +0000

A team led by Harvard researchers has discovered a family of naturally occurring proteins in human cells that protect against influenza and other illnesses—a finding that may lead to methods to speed up vaccine production and to new flu prevention drugs for humans.

Shedding greater light on the human body’s first-line defense against the flu virus, [...]

Wireless Electricity

cs — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:27:24 +0000

Marin Soljacic couldn’t sleep. The problem was his wife’s Nokia cell phone. The tyrannical device beeped on the bedside table when it needed to be plugged in. It could not be disabled.

Instead of taking a hammer to the phone, Soljacic marveled at the fact that this device, and billions of others like it, was sitting [...]

News vs Newspaper

cs — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 19:09:53 +0000

How a new communications technology disrupted America’s newspaper industry — in 1845. CHANGE is in the air. A new communications technology threatens a dramatic upheaval in America’s newspaper industry, overturning the status quo and disrupting the business model that has served the industry for years. This “great revolution”, warns one editor, will mean that some [...]

Foundations of Economic Analysis

cs — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:41:29 +0000

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.

His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Mr. Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centers of graduate education in [...]

Birds and Aviation Fuel Efficiency

cs — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 06:10:28 +0000

Copying Birds may save aircraft fuel.

Source: The Economist. Photo: Corbis

BOTH Boeing and Airbus have trumpeted the efficiency of their newest aircraft, the 787 and A350 respectively. Their clever designs and lightweight composites certainly make a difference. But a group of researchers at Stanford University, led by Ilan Kroo, has suggested that airlines could take a [...]

Giant Crack in Africa

cs — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:22:33 +0000

A 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean eventually, researchers now confirm. The crack, 20 feet wide in spots, opened in 2005 and some geologists believed then that it would spawn a new ocean. But that view was controversial, and the rift had not been well studied.

A new study [...]

Diatoms

cs — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:54:16 +0000

PORTLAND, Ore. — Diatoms–single-celled phytoplankton (algae)–are one of the most plentiful life forms on Earth, accounting for 20 percent of the carbon dioxide removed from the environment each year. The mechanism they use–encasing themselves in patterned silicon dioxide shells as they fall to the bottom of oceans and lakes worldwide–removes as much carbon dioxide from [...]

Molecular Machines

cs — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:46:28 +0000

A tiny chemical “brain” which could one day act as a remote control for swarms of nano-machines has been invented. The molecular device – just two billionths of a metre across – was able to control eight of the microscopic machines simultaneously in a test. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists [...]

Road Coloring Problem

cs — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 23:38:08 +0000

After 38 years, Israeli solves math code. A mathematical puzzle that baffled the top minds in the esoteric field of symbolic dynamics for nearly four decades has been cracked — by a 63-year-old immigrant who once had to work as a security guard. Avraham Trahtman, a mathematician who also toiled as a laborer after moving [...]

Nanodots

cs — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 20:54:16 +0000

Nanodots could yield denser memories, ceramic engine

PORTLAND, Ore. — Researchers at North Carolina State University said they were able to read and write bits at room temperature using magnetic nanodots that delivered 1 terabit of memory per centimeter2.The ferromagnetic film on which the nanodots were based could lead to ultra-dense memory chips that store bits [...]

Man vs God

cs — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:37:04 +0000

Wall Street Journal | September 12, 2009

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence. Richard Dawkins argues that evolution leaves God with nothing to do!

Karen Armstrong says we need God to grasp the wonder of our existence

Richard Dawkins has been right all along, of course—at least in one important respect. Evolution [...]

FinFETs

cs — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:35:13 +0000

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. — Gaze into the electron microscope display in Frances Ross’s laboratory here and it is possible to persuade yourself that Dr. Ross, a 21st-century materials scientist, is actually a farmer in some Lilliputian silicon world.

Dr. Ross, an I.B.M. researcher, is growing [...]

Doomsday Seed Vault

cs — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:06:37 +0000

UN chief Ban Ki-moon visited Wednesday a vault carved into the Arctic permafrost, filled with samples of the world’s most important seeds in case food crops are wiped out by a catastrophe.

“The world faces many daunting challenges today, one of the greatest of which is how to feed a growing population in the context of [...]

Biomimicry

cs — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:03:08 +0000

An adhesive made by worms inspires a new treatment for broken bones.

Torn flesh is easy to put back together with stitches, but when bone breaks, repairs are nowhere near as simple. Fractures that run in a straight line can often be placed back in their proper alignment and set in a cast for a period [...]

Telescope turning 400

cs — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 15:47:31 +0000

Celebrating 400th anniversary of Galileo’s Telescope.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14213985

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_Galilei

Bhuvan challenging Google Earth

cs — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:20:56 +0000

Google Earth’s got some competition now — from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which today unveiled its beta version of Bhuvan (meaning earth in Sanskrit).

A web-based tool like Google Earth, Bhuvan promises to give better 3-D satellite imagery of India than is currently being offered by the US-based software giant plus a host [...]

Mapping the world

cs — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:22:23 +0000

Between GPS devices on your car’s dashboard and digital maps of almost any locale in the world on your smartphone or laptop, it’s hard to get lost these days.

We may take these 21st-century services for granted. But someone still [...]

Flying Frogs

cs — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 16:46:04 +0000

A flying frog, the world’s smallest deer and the first new monkey to be found in over a century are among 350 new species discovered in the eastern Himalayas in the past decade, the WWF said Monday.

But the environmental group said the vital habitats of the mountain range were facing growing pressures from unsustainable development [...]

1 million mph

cs — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 22:30:50 +0000

Stars in a distant galaxy move at stunning speeds — greater than 1 million mph, astronomers have revealed.

These hyperactive stars move at about twice the speed of our sun through the Milky Way, because their host galaxy is very massive, yet strangely compact. The scene, which has theorists baffled, is 11 billion light-years away. It [...]

Diamond in the Sky

cs — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:34:25 +0000

Solar Eclipse July 22, 2009 | New Delhi, India

Wrath of Robigus

admin — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:00:02 +0000

According to Roman legend, there once was a cruel boy who tortured a fox by tying straw to its tail and then setting the straw ablaze. The god Robigus was so outraged that he punished humanity with wheat rust, a fungal nightmare that leaves crops looking as though they had been burned.

For centuries afterward, the [...]

Cracking Bernoulli Puzzle

admin — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 01:56:33 +0000

STOCKHOLM (AFP) – A 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant living in Sweden has cracked a maths puzzle that has stumped experts for more than 300 years, Swedish media reported on Thursday.

In just four months, Mohamed Altoumaimi has found a formula to explain and simplify the so-called Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of calculations named after the 17th century [...]

Nereus

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:54:40 +0000

The dive to 10,902m (6.8 miles) took place on 31 May, at the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, located in the western Pacific Ocean.

This makes Nereus the deepest-diving vehicle currently in service and the first vehicle to explore the Marianas Trench since 1998.

The unmanned vehicle is remotely operated by pilots aboard a surface ship [...]

iPhone Teardown

admin — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 23:11:23 +0000

Whenever a new gadget hits the streets, it’s a race to see who will be the first to reduce to its constituent pieces. With the launch of the iPhone 3G S we’ve got a pair of different companies doing their darndest to disassemble the latest iteration of Apple’s iconic device. Frankly, I’d be happy to [...]