Stunning!

The Orb:

What were the skies like when you were young?

They went on forever
and they,
when I,
we lived in Arizona
And the skies always had little fluffy clouds
And they moved down,
they were long and clear
And there were lots of stars at night

Julie Bosman:

What would New York or Shanghai look like with a full sky of brilliant stars? Thierry Cohen, a French photographer, thinks he can show us by blending city scenes -- shot and altered to eliminate lights and other distractions -- and the night skies from less populated locations that fall on the same latitudes. The result is what city dwellers might see in the absence of light pollution. So Paris gets the stars of northern Montana, New York those of the Nevada desert. As Cohen, whose work will be exhibited at the Danziger Gallery in New York in March, sees it, the loss of the starry skies, accelerated by worldwide population growth in cities, has created an urbanite who "forgets and no longer understands nature." He adds, "To show him stars is to help him dream again."

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Starry, Starry, Starry Night

Ooo...can't wait to check these video lectures out! Thanks Noteworthy!

Navigate the mind-expanding universe of Gödel, Escher, Bach with MIT OpenCourseWare:

What do one mathematician, one artist, and one musician all have in common? Are you interested in zen Buddhism, math, fractals, logic, paradoxes, infinities, art, language, computer science, physics, music, intelligence, consciousness and unified theories? Get ready to chase me down a rabbit hole into Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach. Lectures will be a place for crazy ideas to bounce around as we try to pace our way through this enlightening tome. You will be responsible for most of the reading as lectures will consist primarily of motivating the material and encouraging discussion. I advise everyone seriously interested to buy the book, grab on and get ready for a mind-expanding voyage into higher dimensions of recursive thinking.

Check out the video lectures.

From the archive, on Hofstadter:

What do we mean when we say "I"?

Freeman Dyson:

After Gödel, mathematics was no longer a single structure tied together with a unique concept of truth, but an archipelago of structures with diverse sets of axioms and diverse notions of truth. Gödel showed that mathematics is inexhaustible. No matter which set of axioms is chosen as the foundation, birds can always find questions that those axioms cannot answer.

Dr. Nanochick on the Geek Test:

I feel truly geeky because I can think of something that should have gotten me geek points that wasn't on the list -- owning the "Real Genius" DVD and reading "Gödel, Escher, Bach."

Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20’s in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read – and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Sources at Google have disclosed that the humble domain, http://research.google.com, will soon provide a home for terabytes of open-source scientific datasets. The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all. The project, known as Palimpsest and first previewed to the scientific community at the Science Foo camp at the Googleplex last August, missed its original launch date this week, but will debut soon.

Building on the company's acquisition of the data visualization technology, Trendalyzer, from the oft-lauded, TED presenting Gapminder team, Google will also be offering algorithms for the examination and probing of the information. The new site will have YouTube-style annotating and commenting features.

Google to Host Terabytes of Open-Source Science Data | Wired Science from Wired.com

South Korean scientists have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene, a procedure which could help develop treatments for human genetic diseases, officials said Wednesday. In a side-effect, the cloned cats glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet beams.

"The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as humans," it added. The technology can also help clone endangered animals like tigers, leopards, and wildcats, Kong said.

Biological hacking = no more boring pets.

South Korean scientists clone cats that glow in the dark.

The depth at which ice can be found below the surface of Mars varies greatly, new temperature maps made by NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft reveal. The 'bumpy' ice appears to be involved in an active martian water cycle.

'Bumpy' ice on Mars points to active water cycle - space - 02 May 2007 - New Scientist Space

It took some mighty fine nets, but scientists who spent two years trawling the world's oceans for bacteria and viruses have completed the most thorough census ever of marine microbial life, revealing an astonishingly diverse and bizarre microscopic menagerie.

This is awesome. I have been waiting for the conclusion of this story since I read years ago that Craig Venter had started a new project in which he was sailing around the world in a boat collecting sea life. The paper is free to the public, so if you are at all interested, you should go and check it out. Just google PLoS Biology (which is the journal that the paper is in).

Seas Yield Surprising Catch of Unknown Genes - washingtonpost.com

Tom got into Science before I did....curse:)

Tom Cross, who is a software security researcher and co-developer of the MemeStream social networking website, also disagrees that “if we want to improve America's scientific competitiveness, we need to increase the supply of technical workers, which will reduce their cost.” Gathering Storm, he believes, has “misdefined the problem, [which] is on the demand side and not the supply side.”

“Technological competitiveness is not about how much technology you are doing but what kind,” he states. “You don't want to lead the world in having development sweatshops where people grind out code for hours at low wages. ... You want to lead the world in creating new innovations.”

Science Magazine quoted my MemeStream. :)

ScienceCareers.org | What's Wrong With American Science? : Benderly: 9 December 2005

] The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to
] participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular
] biology lab on eBay.

It was only a matter of time...now I can quit grad school and go work in a garage;)

Wired 13.05: VIEW

Nanotechnology and the cell nucleus....my two loves combine.

Nano-Probes Stay Inside a Cell's Nucleus for Days