Woo! Go science!

(Via Slashdot)

(Via www.readwriteweb.com)

• Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people. (New York Times)

• Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its ’serious privacy gaps.’ These include the retaining of personal information after an account has been deactivated, and the sending of personal information (other than contact info) to third parties. (www.canada.com)

• Gene therapy improves vision for the blind, by creating a new fovea, the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors. (www.technologyreview.com)

• The temperature of the sun’s outer atmosphere soars to several million degrees Kelvin (K); which is much hotter than at the sun’s surface. Scientists have been baffled by this until now. (www.spacefellowship.com)

• Seth Godin has written another unreal post, this time about the future of education. (www.sethgodin.typepad.com)

CreatureCast Episode 1 from Casey Dunn on Vimeo.

• A man is sentenced to 6 months in jail for what ?! (www.nbcnewyork.com)

• Is it now a crime to be poor? (www.nlchp.org)

• Blackwater (if you don’t know what it is, please look it up) founder is accused of murder, along with being quoted as saying he “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” and that Prince’s companies “encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life.” (www.thenation.com)

In science:

• A Swiss experiment shows that robots can form human-like societies, complete with traitors and martyrs. (www.dailygalaxy.com)

• www.telegraph.co.uk reports on a study: Dogs are as intelligent as two year old children. (via Slashdot, and here is a great comment)

• Multiple sclerosis successfully reversed in animals (www.physorg.com)

The video shows birds in a lab carefully inspecting test tubes with worms on the surface of water they cannot reach. Once rocks are introduced, they drop them in the water, to raise the level enough to eat the worm. What I found striking was the last video, where the birds could tell the difference between water and sawdust, and how they didn’t even bother dropping rocks on the sawdust.

near the end of the article, the authors also made a great point (emphasis added):

Although the study demonstrates the flexible nature of tool use in rooks, they are not believed to use tools in the wild.

“Wild tool use appears to be dependent on motivation,” Bird said. “Rooks do not use tools in the wild because they do not need to, not because they can’t. They have access to other food that can be acquired without using tools.”

As Bird noted, that fits nicely with Aesop’s maxim, demonstrated by the crow: “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

As per usual in these types of posts, I sign off with someone else’s thoughts, in this case, Einstein:

Our task must be to free ourselves…by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

I want to form an opinion on the use of radar to prevent bats from colliding into windmills (it does so by literally microwaving their heads). Then there’s Canada’s nuclear reactors, that help create the medical isotopes desperately needed in a new global shortage. Harper wants us to stop making them. At least those who live near the reactor won’t be needing the isotopes as much (a large proportion of people who live near them get cancer).

I also want to know more about issues when it comes to intellectual property, aside from the obvious music/game/movie industry piracy issues. For example, I want to form an opinion on doctors fighting patents on methods of metabolite level observation.

I want to explore the moon, learn more about the new stage in human evolution, and I wish to learn more about autism.

I’m also really interested in biomimicry, and the development of countermeasures for modern weapons. But alas, I have to get back to work—as much as I would liked to be bathed in a soothing green light.