Monthly Archive for April, 2011

Sandra Hanson to Speak at Science in Society Confernece in Washington D.C.

Published on April 30, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Sandra Hanson is a Professor of Sociology and Research Fellow at Institute for Policy Research and Catholic Studies, The Catholic University of America. Dr. Hanson’s research examines the gender structure of educational and occupational systems in a comparative context. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation. Dr. Hanson has authored numerous research articles appearing in journals including, Public Opinion Quarterly, Sociology of Education, Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, and European Sociological Review.  Her book Swimming Against the Tide: African American Girls in Science Education (Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 2009) examines the experiences of African American girls in the science education system. Dr. Hanson’s earlier book, Lost Talent: Women in the Sciences (Temple University Press: 1996), was a culmination of her research on the loss of talented young women in the science pipeline.

For more information please visit the Science in Society Conference Web-Site.

Time-Lapse Milky Way Video Captures Nature From A Unique Perspective

Published on April 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Huffington Post

This time-lapse video of the Milky Way will blow your mind.

Terje Sorgjerd is on a roll. After capturing some amazing footage of the Aurora Borealis recently (though not the famous footage out of the plane window) he’s back with this incredible video that looks like something out of Planet Earth. His time-lapse shots of the Milky Way show a stunning sky, backlit with an incredible aura.

It really makes you feel small, and in awe of the universe.

The time-lapse footage was captured between April 4th and 11th, 2011, from atop El Teide, Spain’s highest mountain. At one point a sandstorm blows across, which rendered Sorgjerd unable to see the sky, but left his camera with some stunning images.

To Watch the Video…

NASA Reveals the Greatest Show off Earth

Published on April 18, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Alicia Chang, The Age

NASA has released a trove of data from its sky-mapping mission, allowing scientists and anyone with access to the Internet to peruse millions of galaxies, stars, asteroids and other hard-to-see objects.

Many of the targets in the celestial catalog released online this week have been previously observed, but there are significant new discoveries. The mission’s finds include more than 33,000 new asteroids floating between Mars and Jupiter and 20 comets.

NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which carried an infrared telescope, in December 2009 to scan the cosmos in finer detail than previous missions. The spacecraft, known as WISE, mapped the sky one and a half times during its 14-month mission, snapping more than 2.5 million images from its polar orbit.

To Read More…

China ‘to Overtake US on Science’ in Two Years

Published on April 17, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From David Shukman, BBC News

That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the UK’s national science academy.

The country that invented the compass, gunpowder, paper and printing is set for a globally important comeback.

An analysis of published research – one of the key measures of scientific effort – reveals an “especially striking” rise by Chinese science.

“There are many millions of graduates but they are mandated to publish so the numbers are high”

Dr Cong Cao Nottingham University

The study, Knowledge, Networks and Nations, charts the challenge to the traditional dominance of the United States, Europe and Japan.

The figures are based on the papers published in recognised international journals listed by the Scopus service of the publishers Elsevier.

In 1996, the first year of the analysis, the US published 292,513 papers – more than 10 times China’s 25,474.

By 2008, the US total had increased very slightly to 316,317 while China’s had surged more than seven-fold to 184,080.

Previous estimates for the rate of expansion of Chinese science had suggested that China might overtake the US sometime after 2020.

But this study shows that China, after displacing the UK as the world’s second leading producer of research, could go on to overtake America in as little as two years’ time.

“Projections vary, but a simple linear interpretation of Elsevier’s publishing data suggests that this could take place as early as 2013,” it says.

To Read More…

From Single Cells, a Vast Kingdom Arose

Published on April 15, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Carl Zimmer, The New York Times

Lurking in the blood of tropical snails is a single-celled creature called Capsaspora owczarzaki. This tentacled, amoebalike species is so obscure that no one even noticed it until 2002. And yet, in just a few years it has moved from anonymity to the scientific spotlight. It turns out to be one of the closest relatives to animals. As improbable as it might seem, our ancestors a billion years ago probably were a lot like Capsaspora.

The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution.

Animals devoured the microbial mats that had dominated the oceans for more than two billion years and created their own habitats, like coral reefs.

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types.

To Read More…

Surveys confirm enormous value of science museums, ‘free choice’ learning

Published on April 9, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

hickerphoto.com

From Oregon State University’s EurekaAlert service:

CORVALLIS, Ore. – One of the first studies of its type has confirmed that a science museum can strongly influence the public’s knowledge and attitudes about science and technology, and to a surprising degree can cut across racial, ethnic, educational and economic barriers.

The study focused on the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and offers profound support for the value of such institutions. It also reinforces the emerging concept of “free choice” learning, which holds that people get most of their knowledge about science from someplace other than school or formal education.

The comprehensive, multi-year analysis was one of the first of its kind ever done, researchers said, based on extensive surveys of thousands of adults in the past decade by scientists from Oregon State University. The findings were recently published in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.

“The holy grail of science museums is not to provide someone all the knowledge they need, but to inspire them, to become a launching point,” said John Falk, an OSU professor of science education and national leader in the free-choice learning movement. “Many people have believed that such institutions could do this, but this study provides some of the first definitive evidence that it works.

‘Free choice’ learning proposes that out-of-school experience is more effective than in-school experience, learningwise. In other words, the world is the real school. What are the implications of taking that seriously and making local, regional, and national planning and design choices accordingly?

For more…

The Ashtray: The Ultimatum (Part 1)

Published on April 6, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

Errol Morris, The New York Times

It was April, 1972. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. The home in the 1950s of Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel. Thomas Kuhn, the author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and the father of the paradigm shift, threw an ashtray at my head.

It had all begun six months earlier.

“Under no circumstances are you to go to those lectures. Do you hear me?” Kuhn, the head of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Princeton where I was a graduate student, had issued an ultimatum. It concerned the philosopher Saul Kripke’s lectures — later to be called “Naming and Necessity” — which he had originally given at Princeton in 1970 and planned to give again in the Fall, 1972.

But what was Kuhn’s problem with Kripke?

Kuhn was becoming more and more famous. He would become not just a major figure in the history and philosophy of science, but an icon – and his terms “paradigm” and “paradigm shift” became ubiquitous in the culture-at-large. An astrophysicist and rock-climbing friend from Princeton, Dick Saum, later sent me a picture of a bumper sticker that said, “Shifts happen.” [1]

To Read More…

Scientists’ Nightstand: Massimo Pigliucci

Published on April 4, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Greg Ross, American Scientist

Massimo Pigliucci is professor of philosophy at the City University of New York. His most recent book is Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

I began my academic career as an evolutionary biologist, first at the University of Tennessee, then at Stony Brook University. However, when my midlife crisis hit I decided to switch to philosophy, went back to graduate school, got a proper degree in the field, and started publishing in philosophy of science. As a result, now I am the Chair of Philosophy at Lehman College in New York and a faculty member at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.

What books are you currently reading (or have you just finished reading) for your work or for pleasure? Why did you choose them, and what do you think of them?

Let me check my Kindle list . . . I am about to finish Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Illustrated Novels (Chancellor Press, 2001), because I always wanted to do that. I have been endlessly fascinated with the hyperrational detective, and I often quote from him (yes, I know he is fictional) in my classes on the nature of science. I am also reading Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (HarperCollins, 2010), a delightful book about how and why we are so often wrong about things, and what is the best attitude about it. Recent readings include Noam Chomsky’s Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (Metropolitan, 2006); Lee Smolin’s The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Houghton Mifflin, 2006); and Sunnyside, a novel by Glen David Gold (Knopf, 2009).

To Read More…