We’ve been trying to build flapping-wing robots for hundreds of years. And now, ornithopters are finally being developed, and may be used mostly for military purposes, says Hank Green of the SciShow.
Piezoelectrics make those little bugs possible, and also enhances the ability of robot arms to feel, in other news from The International Journal of Robotics.
Learning to talk about chemistry can be like learning a foreign language, but Hank Green is here to help with some straightforward and simple rules to help you learn to speak Chemistrian like a native.
Science can help create understanding where there is none, but is it possible to study and understand terrorists if we’re too busy doing everything we can to stop it? Terrorism is notoriously difficult to study because governments constantly subpoena scientists’ lists of contacts, making source anonymity impossible. Hank Green comments.
Let the liberals be Luddites. Let Democrats be the Chicken Little, sky-is-falling party. Joshua Jacobs, co-founder of the Conservative Future Project, is reaching out to Republicans, urging them to embrace an open-ended future filled with driverless cars, stem-cell research and private space exploration.
If that sounds like a tall order for a party whose leading presidential candidates in 2012 waffled on whether they believed in evolution, you’re right. But Jacobs argues forcefully that the GOP is no less anti-science than the Democrats and actually has a long history of pushing scientific and technological innovation.
Nick Gillespie sat down with Jacobs in Reason’s D.C. studio to talk about how conservatives might stop standing athwart history yelling stop and march boldly into the future.
Scientists from the national research agency in France have found that infants as young as five months old may show signs of conscious thought. The neuroscientists attached electrodes to the infants’ heads to measure changes in electrical brain activity called event related potentials, or ERP. Critics are skeptical and claim the scientists are misinterpreting the results.
Why do we get goosebumps in the first place? Do they serve any purpose? H/T AsapSCIENCE
Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Hawking are just some of the young scientists who have profoundly shaped science. Why is youth a key element in a revolutionary scientist? H/T 2veritasium
Scientists have come up with a way to make whole brains transparent, so they can be labelled with molecular markers and imaged using a light microscope. The technique, called CLARITY, enables its creators to produce the detailed 3D visualizations you see in this video. It works in mouse brains and human brains. Here, the team uses it to look into the brain of a 7-year-old boy who had autism.
Have you heard of Alexander von Humboldt? Not likely. The geologist turned South American explorer was a bit of an 18th century super scientist, traveling over 24,000 miles to understand the relationship between nature and habitat. George Mehler details Humboldt’s major accomplishments and why we should care about them today. H/T TEDEducation
In this edition of Bite Sci-zed, Alex Dainis raises several pivotal questions regarding genetic privacy, few of which have easy answers.
