Zamazine

infinity-imagined: The orbits of the moons and planets form a...

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:00:41 -0400

infinity-imagined:

The orbits of the moons and planets form a 4-dimensional fractal helix in spacetime.

Romney campaign links embassy attacks to Obama’s failed Middle East policies | The Cable

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:23:22 -0400

Romney campaign links embassy attacks to Obama’s failed Middle East policies | The Cable:

11th anniversary of 9/11 was overshadowed by the events in Libya and Egypt

nationalpost: Richard III mystery solved after 500 years? Bones...

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 15:35:55 -0400

nationalpost:

Richard III mystery solved after 500 years? Bones uncovered at suspected burial site
Archaeologists searching for the grave of King Richard III said Wednesday that they have found bones which are consistent with the 15th century monarch’s physical abnormality and of a man who died in battle.

A team from the University of Leicester said Wednesday the bones were beneath the site of the Grey Friars church in Leicester, central England, where contemporary accounts say Richard was buried following his death in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.

Richard Buckley, co-director of the university’s Archaeological Services, said the bones are a “prime candidate” to be Richard’s. The remains are now being examined and the team hopes that DNA can be recovered to aid identification. (AP Photo/University of Leicester; Reuters)

laphamsquarterly: Chart showing the aggregate number of idiots...

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 14:40:06 -0400

laphamsquarterly:

Chart showing the aggregate number of idiots in the United States, according to the 1870 census. The census also measured the number of insane, deaf, and blind.

Via the excellent maps and charts site A Handsome Atlas

globalvoices: Eloïse Lagrenée has posted on her Facebook page a...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 09:57:03 -0400

globalvoices:

Eloïse Lagrenée has posted on her Facebook page a picture by Yemeni photographer Bushra Almutawakel, illustrating how women could vanish into darkness and invisibility, step by step, under fundamentalist pressure and the full niqab. It has been shared over 1,500 times.

Source

Photo

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 04:00:27 -0400

breakingnews: Arctic sea ice at record low NBC News: Arctic sea...

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:56:34 -0400

breakingnews:

Arctic sea ice at record low

NBC News: Arctic sea ice is at a record low, scientists reported Tuesday. Several recent warmer years have led to a “less polar pole,” according to one of the scientists.

“The area of Arctic waters covered by sea ice was measured at 1.58 million square miles on Sunday, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reported. That’s below the previous record low of 1.61 million square miles set on Sept. 18, 2007, and in line with earlier expectations for the season.”

Photo: This image shows the amount of Arctic ice on Aug. 26. The yellow line represents the average minimum summer ice coverage from 1979 to 2010. (Image via NASA)

fuckyeahmolecularbiology: Played By Humans, Scored By...

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:54:09 -0400

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Played By Humans, Scored By Nature

Meet eteRNA, your new internet addiction. Not only is it a super-fun way to procrastinate on that thing you should be doing, it also helps to advance biology’s understanding of RNA and its synthesis - in a big way. Scientists from Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University have developed eteRNA as a successor to Foldit, a popular internet-based game that proved the pattern-matching skills of amateurs could outperform some of the best protein-folding algorithms designed by scientists. They’re hedging their bets that eteRNA will work similarly - and are even funding the real-life synthesis of the weekly winner’s RNA molecule to see if it really does fold the same way the game predicts it should.

The scientists hope to tap the internet’s ability to harness what is described as “collective intelligence,” the collaborative potential of hundreds or thousands of human minds linked together. Using games to harvest participation from amateurs exploits a resource which the social scientist Clay Shirky recently described as the “cognitive surplus” - the idea that together, as a collection of amateurs, we internet people make a very good algorithm because we react to information presented in a game, get better at it as we go along, and make informed decisions based on what has or hasn’t worked for us in the past.

“We’re the leading edge in asking nonexperts to do really complicated things online,” says Dr. Treuille, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon and one of the original masterminds behind the game. “RNA are beautiful molecules. They are very simple and they self-assemble into complex shapes. From the scientific side, there is an RNA revolution going on. The complexity of life may be due to RNA signaling.”

“This [project] is like putting a molecular chess game in people’s hands at a massive level,” he continues. “I think of this as opening up science. I think we are democratizing science.”

And, so far, the democratisation is working. Although the creators warn that game players may start to see legal and ethical issues in gameplay down the road, for now, the collective intelligence is trumping professionally designed algorithms. Significantly, not only do humans outperform their computer adversaries, but the human strategies developed during the course of the game are significantly more flexible and adaptable than those of the algorithms they’re pitted against.

So what are you waiting for? This isn’t procrastination, it’s being a part of a collective intelligence that’s smart enough to take down science’s finest algorithms. Click here (you know you want to) to get synthesising!

world-shaker: Farewell, Neil Armstrong super high quality...

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 08:58:06 -0400

world-shaker:

Farewell, Neil Armstrong

super high quality version available here

libertasacademica: Figure 12A from ‘The Expanding Mi-2/NuRD...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 01:55:59 -0400

libertasacademica:

Figure 12A from ‘The Expanding Mi-2/NuRD Complexes: A Schematic Glance’ Published in Proteomics Insights

theeconomist: Tomorrow’s cover today: the world economy is in...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 08:52:43 -0400

theeconomist:

Tomorrow’s cover today: the world economy is in grave danger. A lot depends on one woman.

futurejournalismproject: Forty Percent of Social Media Accounts...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 08:21:20 -0400

futurejournalismproject:

Forty Percent of Social Media Accounts Are Spam

Every so often I’ll get an uptick in followers on my Twitter account. This makes me happy.

It also makes me curious about who might be interested in my 140 character missives.

And more often than not I discover it’s a bunch of pornbots linking out to fleshy sites.

Tumblr has this problem too. They’ve cleaned it up a lot but we still get a fair amount of likes from accounts that redirect to walls of naked bodies doing naked body things.

I’m not alone though. After years of clogging email inboxes, spam is infiltrating the social Web. According to Mark Risher, CEO of an anti-spam software company called Impermium, in an interview with Businessweek, up to 40% of social media accounts are spam.

Via Businessweek:

About 8 percent of messages sent via social pages are spam, approximately twice the volume of six months ago, [Risher] says. Spammers use the sharing features on social sites to spread their messages. Click on a spammer’s link on Facebook (FB), and it may ask you to “like” or “share” a page, or to allow an app to gain access to your profile.

Facebook and Twitter have hired programmers and security specialists to deflect the flotsam. “Tens of millions of dollars are spent on our site-integrity systems, including hundreds of full-time employees,” says Facebook spokesman Frederic Wolens.

In January, Facebook sued advertising network Adscend Media, accusing it of sending unsolicited messages to Facebook users. A typical lure cited in the suit: “You will be SHOCKED when you see this video. Simply “Like” this page to see the video.” By clicking on a link, some users may unwittingly “like” the spam, a practice security experts call “likejacking.” At least 280,214 users were tricked into interacting with spam. About 80 percent of Adscend’s monthly revenue of $1.2 million comes from Facebook scams, according to the suit.

Businessweek: ‘Likejacking’: Spammers Hit Social Media.

Photo

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 08:04:48 -0400

kateoplis: Enessere, Hercules Wind Generator “The choice we...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 07:59:45 -0400

kateoplis:

Enessere, Hercules Wind Generator

“The choice we face is not between saving our environment and saving our economy. The choice we face is between prosperity and decline.“
— Barack Obama

breakingnews: UFO seen in Middle East skies linked to Russian...

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 07:58:27 -0400

breakingnews:

UFO seen in Middle East skies linked to Russian missile test

The Jerusalem Post: “Russia announced on Thursday night that it had carried out a successful test of an inter-continental ballistic missile, seemingly explaining a mysterious moving light seen in the skies over Israel, Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Jordan.”

Photo: YouTube screenshot

Photo

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 08:34:17 -0400

Photo

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:58:33 -0400

sunfoundation: Planet Earth Has Less Water Than We Think! As a...

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:50:45 -0400

sunfoundation:

Planet Earth Has Less Water Than We Think!

As a child, you are told a lot of things about this great planet of ours. We are the third of nine planets in the Solar System (now eight and one dwarf planet), Mount Everest is the tallest mountain on the planet, and the Earth’s surface is 70% water. With a figure like that, it’s easy to assume that water is pretty much an infinite resource. However, according to the U. S. Geological Survey, if you were to take all of the water on the planet (including fresh water, sea water, ground water, water vapor and water inside our bodies), it would only make a sphere 860 miles in diameter. 860 miles!? You can drive that in a day – it’s about the distance from Salt Lake City to Topeka, Kansas.

fuckyeahmolecularbiology: Human striated muscle fibres. Image...

Tue, 08 May 2012 10:01:52 -0400

fuckyeahmolecularbiology:

Human striated muscle fibres.

Image Source: Science Photo Library.

betterbooktitles: Shakespeare on Better Book Titles.

Mon, 07 May 2012 10:01:36 -0400

Hamlet

Macbeth

Romeo and Juliet

King Lear

Othello

As You Like It

betterbooktitles:

Shakespeare on Better Book Titles.