February 2012
15 posts
“After the earth dies, some five billion years from now, after it’s burned...”
– Carl Sagan
January 2012
9 posts
The Cost of Knowledge →
science:
Science should be open. If you support that sentiment, this initiative is good news. It is a call for researchers to declare a boycott of Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of scientific journals in the world. Elsevier makes enormous profits off the free labor of scientists all over the world. Scientists do the research, write the papers, do the editing and peer-review, and then...
Chat History →
December 2011
5 posts
Feeling Pain and Being in Pain →
science:
So memory isn’t so simple. You know what else turns out to be unexpectedly complex? Pain. Pain is unpleasant. When something hurts, we don’t like it. Right? Now, there exist cases of congenital analgesia, or hereditary inability to feel pain. And most of us have experienced the effects of local anesthetics, so it’s not entirely out there to imagine that someone could experience normally...
November 2011
21 posts
Where children sleep →
science tumbled: Science Behind the Factoid: We're... →
science:
We are all made of star stuff, Carl Sagan said. This isn’t so much a factoid as a plain fact, but it’s worth taking a look at exactly what this astonishing fact really means.
The modern theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, or the theory of how atomic nuclei are created inside stars, started with…
Watchlet this one build.
Hyperbole and a Half →
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most...”
– Sigmund Freud (via bbbbird)