Reckless Law Of The Month: Congressman Wants To Literally Politicize Science Funding
At least one congressman thinks he is better equipped to judge the merit of research than the world’s premier scientists. Representative Lamar Smith (CrunchGov Grade: F), co-author of the infamous Stop Online Piracy Act, wants the director of the National Science Foundation to certify that all research is meeting national priorities, based on the accusation that current scientific research isn’t doing a good enough job. ”It’s a dangerous thing for Congress, or anybody else, to be trying to specify in detail what types of fundamental research NSF should be funding,” said Presidential science advisor, John Holdren, on Smith’s proposed High Quality Research Act. According to Science magazine, the act would alter the mission of the NSF to require all research to advance national priorities and be both “groundbreaking” and “not duplicative.” Unfortunately, it’s a well-known fact that important research is often both incremental and done in parallel. Both evolution and ...
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Pigeons, a Darwin Favorite, Carry New Clues to Evolution
Genetic scientists are using pigeons to study the mutations that produce radically new kinds of anatomy.
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Foursquare’s New Interactive Map Plots Its Evolution From Local Check-In Site To Global Utility
Any mature Internet product always has difficulty proving its success or illustrating its evolution. Foursquare is definitely one of the companies with a product that fit into many buckets, depending on who you talk to. Today, the company has released a detailed, interactive and gorgeous, topographical map, plotting out 500 million check-ins from the past three months. There are quite a few things you can glean from this, perhaps the most interesting being that Foursquare isn’t a product that’s simply popular in San Francisco or New York City. Since launching at SXSW in 2009 in 10 major cities, the app has grown to 35 million registered members who are visiting places all over the globe. The company has raised $71.4 million to date, from every big player in venture capital, but some pundits and users aren’t sure where Foursquare is headed in the near or long-term. Foursquare’s strength, as most big platforms can attest to, is the data that it collects from its engaged users. As we ...
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Scientists Breed Big-Brained Guppies To Demonstrate Evolution's Trade-Offs
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists have long suspected that big brains come with an evolutionary price — but now they've published the first experimental evidence to support that suspicion, based on their efforts to breed big-brained fish. A Swedish team found it relatively easy to select and interbreed common guppies to produce bigger (or smaller) brains — as much as 9.3 percent bigger, to be precise (abstract). But the bigger-brained fish also tended to have smaller guts and produce fewer babies."
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MIT-Led Mission Reveals the Moon's Battered Crust Is Riddled With Cracks
SternisheFan sends this quote from the Boston Globe: "The moon's battered crust is riddled with deep fractures that may extend miles underground, according to the first findings from two NASA spacecraft orbiting Earth's nearest neighbor. The results of the mission, led by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist, surprised researchers, who said it will provide new insight into the evolution of the early solar system, and even help inform the search for life on Mars. Announced Wednesday, the discoveries are also a reminder that the familiar moon still holds secrets four decades after NASA ended its manned missions there. 'We have known that the moon's crust and other planetary crusts have been bombarded by impacts, but none of us could have predicted just how cracked the lunar crust is,' said Maria Zuber, the MIT geoscientist who led the mission, called GRAIL." Here are the abstracts from the three studies published in Science.
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