Damian’s Tumblr
(Source: catscientists)
Today’s breakfast-time viewing: Professor Donald Sadoway on the invention of liquid-metal batteries and the usefulness of professors.
The idea is beautifully simple—they are taking the problem of batteries’ habit of overheating and turning it in to an asset by designing the battery to run at molten-metal temperatures. I imagine the devil is in the details, such as how to square a half-shipping container-full of molten antimony with health & safety at work regulations.
Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.
I have linked to her before but this green thing is so pretty.
A Lego model of the Atlas experiment (Sascha.Mehlhase.Info via the Guardian)
Rachel Sussman is on a mission to photograph The Oldest Living Things in the World
Scientists are working on methods for detecting rose-tinted spectacles.
How much do people whose language has a different set of colour-words perceive colour differently from each other?
BBC Horizon: Do you see what I see? “The Himba tribe”
(Via Ben Jeffery)
(Source: youtube.com)
Mobile phones continue to not cause cancer—at least if you are Danish and over thirty.
In a world where we know lots of other everyday habits cause illness and increased mortality, perhaps it is time for the Daily Mail tendency to admit that perhaps there existi things that neither cause nor cure cancer and mobiles fall in to that category.
Mobile phones do not cause cancer, landmark study finds | Technology | guardian.co.uk)
A table from the article “Communicating the Science of Climate Change,” by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol, from the October 2011 issue of Physics Today, page 48: (via AGU Blogosphere via jwz)
