Column
- Math
When intuition and math probably look wrong
A twist on the Two Children Problem shows how information can steer what looks probable.
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Explaining the equation behind the oil spill disaster
Catastrophes come in all shapes and sizes, but some basic causative principles underlie most of them. Robert Bea, an engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, has studied system failures from space shuttle explosions to levee breaks during Hurricane Katrina — but as a former oil rig worker he is most familiar with drilling disasters. […]
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In synthetic life, the can is as important as the Coke
A paper published online May 20 in Science touted the creation of the world’s first synthetic cell by researchers from the J. Craig Venter Institute who assembled a bacterial genome from scratch and used it to reprogram an existing organism (Page 5). The accomplishment is a major advance in the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, […]
- Math
‘Discounting’ the future cost of climate change
Economists develop new methods to quantify the trade-off between spending now and spending later.
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Obama adviser weighs ‘the rightful place of science’
Obama adviser weighs ‘the rightful place of science’ by Eric S. Lander ERIC S. LANDER “Science drives the innovation that provides productivity and growth for the future economy, and it also adds to our quality of life in many ways.” Len Rubenstein In an address to scientists attending the 2010 meeting of the American Association […]
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Confronting a third crisis in U.S. science education
Is science education broken in the United States? And if so, how should the country fix it? A working group of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has been investigating these long-standing questions and is expected to issue a report on its policy recommendations this month. Science News Contributing Editor Alexandra […]
- Physics
Laser pioneer reflects on making Einstein’s idea real
Science News reporter Ron Cowen's Q&A with Nobel laureate and laser-technology pioneer Charles Townes.
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Jumping to conclusions can make for good decisions
Gary Klein, a psychologist and chief scientist at Applied Research Associates in Fairborn, Ohio, has for the past 25 years studied how people make real-life, critical decisions under extreme time pressure. In his 2009 book Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making (MIT Press), Klein discusses 10 surprising ways effective thinkers […]
- Math
Million-dollar math prize awarded, but not necessarily accepted
The reclusive mathematician who proved the Poincaré conjecture may or may not claim his prize.
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How the Internet will change the world — even more
Recently, 895 Web experts and users were asked by the Pew Research Center and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University in North Carolina to assess predictions about technology and its effects on society in the year 2020. Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in Washington, D.C., discussed the […]
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Contemplating future plans for particle colliders
Caltech physicist Barry Barish is the director of the global design effort for the International Linear Collider, which is currently in the planning stages. If built, the ILC would smash together electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, at nearly the speed of light. The ILC would complement the Large Hadron Collider, a European proton collider […]
- Math
The mutual inspiration of art and mathematics
Economics, origami and other fields trigger new and original creations.
