Google Maps Visits Antarctica's Snowy
Landscape

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 18 July 2012 01:48:20 PM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From Crave: gorgeous gadgets and other crushworthy stuff. - CNET: Google announced that with the introduction of its new Google Maps feature people don't need to gear up, survive the elements, and make the long journey to explore this corner of the world. They can simply fire up their co

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Inactivity 'As Deadly As Smoking'

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 18 July 2012 01:46:47 PM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From BBC News - Science & Environment: A lack of exercise, contributing to diseases such as diabetes and cancer, is now causing as many deaths as smoking across the world, a study suggests. Read the whole article

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Afghanistan Minerals Fully Mapped

post from CR4 - Recent Blog Entries on 18 July 2012 01:46:00 PM. © CR4 - Recent Blog Entries

From BBC News - Science & Environment: The US Geological Survey releases a first-of-its-kind country-wide map of the mineral resources in Afghanistan. Read the whole article

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Who is Enrico Fermi

post from Physics Buzz on 18 July 2012 01:16:45 PM. © Physics Buzz

Today's new podcast is titled "Who is Enrico Fermi?"

In my short career writing about physics, I've run across the name "Fermi" quite a few times. There's Fermilab, fermions, fermium, the Fermi Gamma Ray Space telescope. This Fermi gentleman has quite a legacy.

[Photo by Samuel Goudsmit, courtesy of Emilio Segrè Visual Archive]

For a long time, I didn't give Enrico Fermi too much thought. I knew he was a physicist, probably an important one, who lived during the first half of the 20th century and belonged to the honored group of people who pioneered many subjects in modern physics. When I finally read a physics history book that featured Fermi, I got a bit of a shock: the author painted Fermi in a rather negative light. He portrayed Fermi as an attention hog, a control freak, and kind of a poseur. The author suggested that Fermi wasn't a true creative genius like many his contemporaries, such as Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac.

This confused me because, if this portrayal was accurate, then why the heck did this guy have so many things named after him? And suddenly I felt a little embarrassed that I didn't know more about this man.

In today's new podcast, I try to solve this little mystery. I can't say for sure that Fermi wasn't a control freak and an attention hog. But I think I can safely say he was an amazing physicist and in many ways, an amazing person. A former student of Fermi's described him as "the last universal physicist," by which he meant that Fermi knew a lot about all areas of physics. He made major contributions to quantum physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and many other subjects, in both experiment and theory. With the highly specialized fields we have today, it just doesn't seem possible to be a "universal physicist" any more.

But what really struck me about Fermi was his teaching ability. Fermi published many articles that drew together the complex ideas that were flooding out of the field. As a result, many young physicists learned a great deal from this man, even if they didn't know him personally. He was an excellent teacher, mentor and collaborator, and no less than 10 of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes. Fermi always demanded that people make their ideas clear. He was arguably one of the most well-informed physicists in the world, but he was never afraid to ask questions when he didn't understand something. Perhaps this is how he came to be a universal physicist.

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Geoengineering with iron might work after all

post from New Scientist - Environment on 18 July 2012 01:00:00 PM. © New Scientist - Environment

Trapping carbon dioxide by tipping iron into the sea seemed like a non-starter, but an 8-year-old experiment suggests otherwise

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Japanese Robot Can Beat Humans At
Rock-Paper-Scissors Every Time

post from Singularity Hub on 18 July 2012 12:54:44 PM. © Singularity Hub

What good is a 1-millisecond advantage? For humans, not much, but for a Japanese robot, it’s means victory every time…at [...]

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Cosmoquest Science Hangout Wednesday July 18 2300
UTC: Jeff Foust, space industry analyst

post from Planetary Society Blog on 18 July 2012 12:50:23 PM. © Planetary Society Blog

I'll be hosting this week for Emily, and my guest will be space industry analyst Jeff Foust, editor of The Space Review.

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Atlanta Skeptics pre-Dragon*Con star party!

post from Bad Astronomy on 18 July 2012 12:24:25 PM. © Bad Astronomy

For the past few years, the night before Dragon*Con in Atlanta officially starts, Maria Walters and the Atlanta Skeptics have held a wonderful star party to help raise money in honor of Jeff Medkeff, an astronomer and friend who died of liver cancer.[...]

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Do Dolphins think nonlinearly

Story Source

Research from the University of Southampton, which examines how dolphins might process their sonar signals, could provide a new system for man-made sonar to detect targets, such as sea mines, in bubbly water.

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http://machineslikeus.com/news/do-dolphins-think-nonlinearly

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Artificial Irrelevance: The robots are coming

The creation of artificial intelligence more sophisticated than a human brain, even by accident, is now a very real prospect warns Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn.

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