A great transcription of Richard Hamming's 1986 talk on what it takes to do great work. All I can say is: wow. I'm doing lots of thinking on this now, having read this. Speaks very deeply to my mind of things involved in the work I do. Brilliant paper.

[I highly recommend this paper as well...its very cool. (of course..I am a researcher, so it speaks to me....and it may very well speak to you too) - Nanochick:)]

You and Your Research

"Microbes that thrive on nuclear waste, that can scrub greenhouse gases from the air and turn toxic soil pure again are the targets of new federal research funds"

Tom: do you remember when I was telling you that idea (about a year ago) I had about the box that goes on the exhaust pipe of everyone's car that contains microbes or nano-bots that convert the pollution into something clean? This is so going to be it:)

Yahoo! News - New Research to Find Environment-Cleansing Bugs

RICHARD F. MOLLICA, M.D.
Boston, July 14, 2002
The writer is director, Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, Massachusetts General Hospital.

Um...someone should tell this guy that lots of innovative things can be turned into something that can be used against us. Punishing scientists for being creative isn't going to stop terrorists. If terrorists wanted to create a virus, I am sure that they already could figure out how to do it without the inspiration of the news article.

Scientists and Terrorists

" It could be the new superhero of metals. More than twice as strong as titanium and steel, it doesn’t rust and it can be cast like plastic and honed to an edge as sharp as glass. And like any superhero, it has a weakness: don’t heat it too much, or it loses its strength. "

New metal alloy is super strong

", a team of chemists is unveiling a nanotechnology that allows individual DNA molecules to be painted onto a surface like watercolors onto a sheet of paper. This discovery, in turn, offers an attractive means of assembling nanoscale structures and miniaturizing present generation gene chips by factors of 100,000 or more.

The Code of Life as a Paint Set

Lam says that teleporting single atoms and molecules could be perfected within the next ten years"

Ahhh....its going to be so cool when we can just teleport wherever we need to go!
Does anyone know any good books on quantum teleportation?
e-mail me if ya do

New Scientist-Quantum teleportation technique improved

[Gould] was one of the few scientific intellectuals to whom the overworked phrase "Renaissance man" could be applied without blushing. As essayist, historian, and author, his influence on the wider cultural scene was exceptional. ... A few months before his death his last, massive work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, appeared, summarizing his thoughts on evolution (the mere thought of reading its 1400 pages is intimidating). It is almost as if the reappearance of cancer was held in check by force of will until this book, his magnum opus, was completed.

Subscription required for access to full text.

Evolution: Retrospective -- Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) | _Science_

Researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the Carnegie Institution announced Thursday that they've found the first planetary system that closely resembles our own."

Found: Solar System Like Our Own

The year's first solar eclipse, a partial blackout, was visible Tuesday across the Pacific Ocean.

Here's a short RealVideo clip of the eclipse, from Associated Press.

The Recent Annular Solar Eclipse [RealVideo]

"...Dr. Willard said the draft human genome sequence, though "extraordinarily useful," was a long way from complete. Referring to leaders of the rival efforts to sequence the human genome, he said: "As much as Francis Collins and Craig Venter and others like to call the sequence complete, it is still sketchy in places and likely to remain so for some time. To call it complete, as will happen next April to match the 50th anniversary of the Watson-Crick paper, is a bit of a sham."

Jeremy sent me this link...its interesting because I hadn't heard alot about how accurate they thought they were, but it doesn't really suprise me that they are finding large errors. If they had wanted accuracy, they shouldn't have made it a race, but then again, research science is a very competitive field.

Human Genome Sequence Has Errors, Scientists Say