Home add your blog Archives Search Contact RSS FEED

This site is an rss/xml news reader containing our favorite feeds. All articles are the copyrighted material of the blogs that wrote them.

Carnival of Space #126

post from OrbitalHub on 03 November 2009 10:09:00 PM. © OrbitalHub

Read The Full Article:
http://orbitalhub.com/?p=590

Digg this

SMOS And PROBA-2 Launch

post from OrbitalHub on 03 November 2009 10:03:00 PM. © OrbitalHub

Read The Full Article:
http://orbitalhub.com/?p=588

Digg this

Effects of Climate Change are Observed World-Wide

post from FUTURISM NOW on 03 November 2009 08:23:34 PM. © FUTURISM NOW

Kilimanjaro's Snows are Melting Away. Mount Kilimanjaro in June 2001 (left) and July 2009 (right). The satellite images show a vastly decreasing amount of snow.

“The snows of Mount Kilimanjaro will be gone within two decades, according to scientists who say that the rapid melting of its glacier cap over the past century provides dramatic physical evidence of global climate change.” Read this story here.

“Climate change is already [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.civilianism.com/futurism/?p=3359

Digg this

Is Deep Brain Stimulation a Cure-all

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 03 November 2009 07:01:00 PM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

Is there anything that can't be fixed by burrowing an electrode array into the deep tissues of the brain? With varying degrees of success, deep brain stimulators have been used to temporarily defog clouds of chronic depression, stamp out migraines before they cycle out of control, and steady the mov

Read The Full Article:
http://cr4.globalspec.com/blogentry/10640/Is-Deep-Brain-Stimulation-a-Cure-all?fr
om_rss=1

Digg this

Andrea Marshall: Queen of manta rays

post from New Scientist - Environment on 03 November 2009 07:00:00 PM. © New Scientist - Environment

The marine ecologist discusses diving, underwater beauty parlours and the discovery of a new species

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/424048/s/708242f/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Carti
cle0Cmg20A4273350B50A0A0Eandrea0Emarshall0Equeen0Eof0Emanta0Erays0Bhtml0DDCMP0FOTC0Erss0Gnsref0Fenvironment/story01.htm

Digg this

Becoming Human

post from Pharyngula on 03 November 2009 06:46:36 PM. © Pharyngula

Tonight! On PBS' Nova! It's a promising new documentary on human evolution, Becoming Human.

I'm going to try to watch it, but unfortunately, my glasses are broken, and I just got back from an eye exam, so my pupils are dilated and the world is a far too bright blur. I'll try to see the glowing blobs moving on my TV screen anyway.

Read the comments on this post...

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/scienceblogs/pharyngula/~3/bjbodMqcIj4/becoming_hu
man.php

Digg this

Call for Submissions: Diversity in Science
Carnival

post from Urban Science Adventures! © on 03 November 2009 06:28:00 PM. © Urban Science Adventures! ©

Write your post or share a link to a previous post for the next edition of the Diversity in Science Carnival. This carnival celebrates the people of science and engineering and this month we celebrate pipeline programs that promote student and faculty diversity at our higher learning institutions.
STEM Diversity and Broad Impacts I: Highlights of successful, ambitious STEM diversity programs such as REUs, mentoring programs and scholarships for college under-graduates, graduate students, post-doctoral associates and early career scientists and engineers.
Submission Deadline: November 15th
Carnival Post date: November 20th
Hosted by: Yours truly at Urban Science Adventures! ©Visit this link to submit to the November DiS Carnival. Articles submitted will be apart of the ongoing discussion in preparation for an upcoming workshop at ScienceOnline2010 - Casting a wider net: Promoting gender and ethnic diversity in STEM ? co-moderated by me (D.N.Lee) and Anne Jefferson.Check it out and join the conversation.Submit an article now.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/UrbanScienceAdventures/~3/n6j-4d0_Vvw/call-for-sub
mission-diversity-in.html

Digg this

Live long and be atheist

The splendid World Happiness Database has released a new analysis of their 2009 data. Basically what they've done is to multiply happiness scores in each nation with the life expectancy. The idea is that what most people want is a life that's both long and happy.

Costa Rica came out top, followed by the usual gaggle of Northern European Countries (and Canada).

Now, there's an 'ecological' problem in this analysis, in that the people with long lives in a nation aren't necessarily the happiest. What's more, happiness might be very unevenly distributed in some countries.

And being grumpy might have its plus side - in the news yesterday was an Australian study which claimed that grumpy people are less prone to errors of judgement!

Be that as it may, whenever these national statistics come out I always like to correlate them against religion, to see how they stack up. So here's the results for this one.

What I've done is plot the percentage of hard-core non-believers in each country against the 'happy-life-years'.

In the top graph, it's the percentage of people who say they are 'confirmed atheists'. In the bottom graph, it's the people who say that religion is 'not at all important' to them.

There is a weak, but statistically significant relationship - especially with the unimportance of religion. What's more, the correlation is about 50% stronger than with happiness alone.

However, digging around in the data shows that the is mostly driven by life expectancy. Average happiness, by itself, is not related to the number of atheists, and only marginally related to the number of non-religious.

Now the interesting thing is that happiness is strongly correlated with life expectancy (as you might expect). So you also would expect a correlation of happiness with atheism - simply because they both correlate with life expectancy.

The fact that this does not happen suggests a negative interaction. What may be happening is that some countries with short life expectancy are particularly religious. That makes them happier than you would expect, and confounds the straightforward link between long life expectancy, happiness and atheism.

To put it another way, turning to religion has the effect of increasing happiness. But good life expectancy is more important, and countries with good life expectancy are the happiest and least religious.
__________________________________________________________________________
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BhaScienceGroup/~3/YL-Qc1zlP5w/live-long-and-be-at
heist.html

Digg this

Maine Islands Host Boreal Birds

This fall I have had the opportunity to visit two different Maine islands to look for Boreal migrant birds – Monhegan Island and Damariscove Island. Interestingly, these two islands were probably the first ones in North America inhabited, at[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.borealbirds.org/blog/?p=195

Digg this

The evolution of human complexity

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 03 November 2009 03:57:22 PM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

A painstaking analysis of thousands of genes and the proteins they encode shows that human beings are biologically complex, at least in part, because of the way humans evolved to cope with redundancies arising from duplicate genes.

Read The Full Article:
http://machineslikeus.com/news/evolution-human-complexity

Digg this