Scientists are uniquely qualified to describe the universe in numbers and equations, but sometimes it takes an imaginative novelist to distill discoveries into words. For his book ‘Brave New Words, freelance lexicographer Jeff Prucher uncovered a slew of words that many people assume came from science, but actually originated in the pulpy pages of early science fiction. Here are four of his favorites. Zero-gravity: While most people associate the term with outer space, ‘zero gravity first described the center of the Earth. In 1938, fairly obscure writer Jack Binder imagined a momentary weightlessness while traveling from our planet’s core to the surface. Arthur C. Clarke later shortened it to ‘zero-g in his 1952 space novel ‘Islands in the Sky. Computer virus: Dave Gerrold is probably most famous for his ‘Star Trek episode about a different kind of overproducing nuisance (‘The Trouble With Tribbles, first broadcast in 1967). But in 1972, he used the analogy of a ‘virus to describe self-replicating software in his book ‘When Harlie Was One, about a computer that thinks it’s human. The term actually appeared in print a short time after researchers spotted the first computer virus spreading through ARPANET, the precursor […]
So what kind of teachers could a school get if it paid them $125,000 a year? An accomplished violist who infuses her music lessons with the neuroscience of why one needs to practice, and creatively worded instructions like, ‘Pass the melody gently, as if it were a bowl of Jell-O! A self-described ‘explorer from Arizona who spent three decades honing her craft at public, private, urban and rural schools. Two with Ivy League degrees. And Joe Carbone, a phys ed teacher, who has the most unusual résumé of the bunch, having worked as Kobe Bryant’s personal trainer. ‘Developed Kobe from 185 lbs. to 225 lbs. of pure muscle over eight years, it reads. They are members of an eight-teacher dream team, lured to an innovative charter school that will open in Washington Heights in September with salaries that would make most teachers drop their chalk and swoon; $125,000 is nearly twice as much as the average New York City public school teacher earns, and about two and a half times as much as the national average for teacher salaries. They also will be eligible for bonuses, based on schoolwide performance, of up to $25,000 in […]
Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science. High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world. In the study, the UCL team found that complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. Using computer simulations of social learning, they showed that high and low-skilled groups could coexist over long periods of time and that the degree of skill they maintained depended on local population density or the degree of migration between them. Using genetic estimates of population size in the past, the team went on to show that density was similar in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle-East when modern behaviour first appeared in each of these regions. The paper also points to evidence that population density would have dropped for […]
President Obama has noted that it would be impossible to balance the federal budget without constraining our health-care expenditures. Federal government health-care outlays and tax breaks of more than $1 trillion in 2008 consumed 7.5 percent of America’s gross domestic product (GDP). While evidence clearly suggests that we should pursue two proven methods of health-care cost containment — care organization and patient-provider incentives — the debate in Washington seems to overlook these fundamental issues. Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the president and Congress have focused on three interventions aimed at controlling health-care costs: health information technology, preventive care services and comparative effectiveness research. Over time, these initiatives will undoubtedly increase the value of health care in the United States by efficiently organizing patient and research data, helping people live healthier lives and informing providers about which treatments offer the best results. But in the short term, these programs will not yield the significant cost savings we need. Rather, this trio of planks must be placed firmly upon the foundation of organized health-care delivery and aligned incentives. First, we need to design a health-care system that delivers better-integrated, coordinated care. There are organizations — usually […]
That people, from politicians to priests, cheat and lie is taken for granted by many. But scientists, surely, are above that sort of thing? In the past decade the cases of Hwang Woo-Suk, who falsely reported making human embryonic stem cells by cloning, and Jan Schön, a physicist who claimed astonishing (and fabricated) results in the fields of semiconductors and superconductors, have shown that they certainly are not. However, on these occasions the claims made were so spectacular that they were bound to attract close scrutiny, and thus be exposed eventually. In the cases of Dr Hwang and ex-Dr Schön, the real question for science was not whether it harbours a few megalomaniac fantasists, but why the frauds were not exposed earlier when the papers that made the claims were being reviewed by peers. Lower-level fraud, however, is much harder to detect: the data point invented or erased to make a graph look better, or to make a result that was not quite statistically significant into that scientific desideratum, the ‘minimum publishable unit; the results ‘mined retrospectively for interesting correlations, rather than used to test pre-existing hypotheses; the photograph that has been ‘enhanced to bring out what the researcher […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
