Posts with the tag science

German Teenager Smarter Than NASA

Kayla — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:55:11 EDT

NASA got schooled yesterday by a 13-year-old boy from Germany. Nico Marquardt calculated that there is a one in 450 chance the astroid Apophis could collide with Earth. NASA had calculated the chance to be one in 45,000.

NASA had previously estimated the chances at only 1 in 45,000 but told its sister organisation, the European Space Agency (ESA), that the young whizzkid had got it right.
The schoolboy took into consideration the risk of Apophis running into one or more of the 40,000 satellites orbiting Earth during its path close to the planet on April 13 2029.

And to think, I was merely struggling with the quadratic equation when I was a wee lass of 13.

Science Jobs Shortfall

Kay Steiger — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:59:40 EST

Remember last January when Bush made his state of the economy speech, saying, "You can't compete in the 21st century unless we're educating young engineers and physicists and chemists -- unless our kids have the skills necessary to fill the jobs of the 21st century." Well, it turns out a recent report from the Urban Institute shows that every year the number of of science and engineering graduates (with a 4-year degree) outnumbers S&E job openings in the United States by a ratio three to one.

Instead, Science Progress today promotes the idea of cross-discipline studying when it comes to science. After all, it would be nice to have politicians and staffers who understood the science behind stem cell research or biofuels. It'd be nice if science journalists understood the subjects they were writing about. The list of cross-nondisciplinary jobs goes on. The bottom line is that if we produce an army of scientists and engineers, we'd better have jobs for all of them.

Hating On The Special Olympics

Jesse Singal — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:15:49 EDT

There’s a juicy article in today’s Times about the testimony of former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona, who appeared before a Congressional panel on Tuesday. He told the panel “that top Bush administration officials repeatedly tried to weaken or suppress important public health reports because of political considerations.” In other words, he echoed the sentiments of former members of every Bush-era government agency that has anything to do with science.

Come out AND have babies

singhm — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 13:29:00 EDT

Scientists say female-female conception IS possible.

How long til the right catches wind of this and bans any possible testing to prove it true?

Science by Anecdote

pdelatorre — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 17:40:11 EDT

The Washington Post ran a story yesterday that compares some human and animal behavior. That much of human behavior is strongly rooted in our evolutionary heritage seems like a pretty easy conclusion, considering one of the anecdotes mentioned:

When Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal read a news story that said Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, had hurled a chair across the room on hearing an employee was going to work for rival Google, the scientist immediately made a connection with his own research: "When I see such behavior, I think of a chimpanzee."

The Female Orgasm

Dana Goldstein — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:55:26 EST

There's a lot to pick apart in this Chicago Tribune report from an academic conference on women's sexuality. But what's missing from the article, though hopefully not from discussion among these experts themselves, is an accounting for social conditioning. To what extent are women just not taught to value their own sexual pleasure equally to that of men? Or to feel ashamed of their bodies and sexuality in a way that inhibits them in bed? Check this out:

Since the 1960s, researchers have operated under a variation of the simple model proposed by William Masters and Virginia Johnson that says the human sexual response starts with desire, progresses through excitement or arousal and ends with orgasm. But experts argued that notion might reflect the experience of men more than women, many of whom don't see orgasm as a goal.

In recent years the field has moved toward a more complicated model based on the observation that many women go into a sexual encounter without being in the mood--perhaps they're seeking intimacy or hoping to please their partner--and may not really want sex until after they become aroused.

But it wasn't until very recently that anyone thought to test those theories by asking women. Sand, who was awarded a prize for his innovative research, found that 57 percent of women felt a straightforward model best described their sexual experience. The 29 percent who endorsed the more complicated model were more likely to have sexual problems.

This is pretty fascinating. The women who saw their sexual response as similar to men's---desire, arousal, orgasm---had better sex than the women who felt they were just going along with their partner and didn't see their own orgasm as a goal. That makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. It's hard to enjoy something you're only doing to please somebody else. Feminism and sex-positivity, when they teach girls that they deserve pleasure and that it's nothing to be ashamed of, really do make a person better in bed.