sputnik
milhayser | December 11, 2013On EvolutionBlog, Jason Rosenhouse confronts the challenge of basic math education: “we need to find a balance between hammering the basic skills, while also making it clear that there is so much more to mathematics than arithmetic.” Rosenhouse rejects the approach of New Math, “teaching grade-schoolers about set theory and the axiomatic method,” instituted briefly in the U.S. after the Soviets launched a giant ball bearing named Sputnik into orbit. Rosenhouse goes on to question whether teachers should emphasize experimental mathematics, wherein the brute force of computation is used to…
kcollins | November 29, 2011By Joe Schwarcz PhD, Author, USASEF Expo Performer, AT&T Sponsored Nifty Fifty Program SpeakerThe "beep..beep..beep" sounded innocent enough, but it shook America to its very core. Why? Because it was coming from outer space! No, the military personnel monitoring radio signals did not pick up a transmission from aliens. This beep was coming from a transmitter placed inside a twenty-three inch diameter ball made of aluminum, titanium and magnesium. A ball that was orbiting the earth, passing over Washington DC every hour, emitting an irritating signal that sent a clear message: We are…
gregladen | October 8, 2009It does not matter what you believe about god, creationism, science, evolution, whatever. If you were raised in a society in which there is an evil enemy that you are convinced intends to arrive some day on your country's shores, take over your government, impose a new social order, marry your sister, and so on, then when this evil foreign government sends the first warning shot in this war and it is an unprecedented and amazing feat of science, then suddenly you love science.
You pay taxes to fund science. Your idolize science. You start demanding that science comes to the rescue. One…
grrlscientist | August 6, 2008tags: virology, mimivirus, sputnik, virophage, microbiology, molecular biology
Now here's an astonishing discovery that's hot off the presses: a virus that infects other viruses! This amazing finding is being published tomorrow in the top-tier peer-reviewed journal, Nature.
I don't know about you, but when I was in school, I was taught that viruses could only infect other living cells, and further, I was taught that viruses are not living cells. So, logically, one could conclude that viruses cannot infect other viruses. But a new discovery by a group of scientists in France reveals otherwise…