Humanity is now the proud owner of some 13,000 photos of Mars taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Monitoring Seasonal Albedo Patterns on South Polar Residual Cap (ESP_014405_0945) Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona The photos were taken by the most powerful camera of any on NASA’s spacecraft - the aptly (if dryly) named High Resolution Imaging […]
Science and Society
Season's greetings
Well, it’s that time of year again. Christmas. New Year’s. The extremely aptly-named silly season. So we thought we’d take the opportunity to say thank you to all our Sciblings. Since its humble beginnings in September/October of this year, we’ve seen over 600 new posts written (to total over 1,100). Our stats have climbed steadily […]
World leaders, 20 years on and sorry
This is really quite interesting.(Click on link to go to website: once there, click on picture for slideshow)Greenpeace is running an ad campaign in Copenhagen airport, featuring world leaders who are 20 years older (‘though many look much more) and ap…
The best of Royal Society publishing - 350 years' worth!
So, this is seriously, seriously cool. 350 years’ worth of the Royal Society of London’s best published papers.(click on the picture to visit the site)To expand, (teehee), it’s actually an interactive, explorable timeline. And it’s been launched to c…
The teapot effect, end of
So apparently, there’s something called the teapot effect. Or, rather, there was.No, it’s not what you might first imagine it is. At least, it’s not what I first imaged it was. Instead, it’s apparently the name used for the phenomenon whereby the sp…
Moving disembodied voice aids attention
In driving, that is.(Also, an oops here: I wrote this last week, and forgot to publish it) Two of the prettiest headsets out the there: the Jawbone and the Ripple (click on pics to be taken to websites)Eyal Ophir and his colleagues in Stanford Universi…
The Open Laboratory - the best science blogging around
Now this is a fantastic project. Even better, it’s been going since 2006!Called Open Lab (or The Open Laboratory, in book form), it’s a collection of the best science blogging on the net. Each year, some 50-53 posts are selected from the hundreds sen…
NZ's increasing academic shortage
I was most interested to read this article in the ODT today.It talks about the University of Otago’s plans to futureproof (what a catchphrase) itself against what, apparently, is a steadily increasing shortage of tertiary academics in New Zealand as we…
Nature's data-sharing issue
Nature has published their special data-sharing issue, which can be found here. An extremely timely issue, I might add, give how topical the subject is (see here and here).There’s a lot of interesting stuff in here, including articles about what seems…
Peer Review Survey 2009 - the system's worth keeping, but could use some work
Sense about Science, a UK not-for profit organisation dedicated to improving the understanding of science issues, has released the prelim findings of its Peer Review Survey (full details out in November). The results were released early this morning, …