_Scientific proof that water once flowed on Mars has been “voted the breakthrough of the year”:http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=594065 according to journal Science._
Runners-up included _Homo floresiensis_, human embryo clones, and declining diversity. Yay, scientists!
New Scientist has a beautiful “interview with Benoit Mandelbrot”:http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinterview.jsp, who discovered the Mandelbrot set and brought fractals to the masses. It’s refreshing to see someone with such history and brilliance at the same time. Mandelbrot is 80 years old, yet he’s still pursuing revolutionary branches of mathematics.
bq. [I am] A mathematical scientist. It’s the official name of my chair at Yale and it was chosen with care. It is deliberately ambiguous. In a different era, I would have called myself a natural philosopher. All my life, I have enjoyed the reputation of being someone who disrupted prevailing ideas. Now that I’m in my 80th year, I can play on my age and provoke people even more.
I have a personal fondness for Mandelbrot because the idea behind fractals — complex forms emerging from a simple function recursively applied and geometrically expressed — provides a compelling reason why it’s possible for us to understand the workings of a complex Universe at all. It doesn’t have to be just randomness out there. We can discern patterns that may turn out to be simple and elegant, even when they are capable of infinite variety.
The Columbia Journalism Review has a thought-provoking “article on media coverage of science”:http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/6/mooney-science.asp, specifically the role of “balance” in determining the journalistic merit of a science article. This has been on my mind lately, since public perception of scientific topics like climate change, medicine, and evolution is so crucial to making sound decisions.
From Yahoo News, via Deana: “In a breathtaking discovery, scientists working on a remote Indonesian island say they have “uncovered the bones of a human dwarf species”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=753&e=1&u=/ap/20041027/ap_on_sc/dwarf_cavewoman marooned for eons while modern man rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.”
I love it when we discover puzzling new evidence. Whatever the explanation turns out to be, the process of learning such extraordinary new things is worth it all by itself.
“This hobbit-sized creature appears to have lived as recently as 18,000 years ago on the island of Flores, a kind of tropical Lost World populated by giant lizards and miniature elephants.”
You just know that writers wait for opportunities like these…
I’m in favor of stem cell research, but it’s interesting to see how various fertility clinics deal with embryos that go unused. This is apparently not something taken lightly.