Top Science Stories of 2004 85
borkbot writes "New Scientist has several round-ups of 2004. They include one for technology , space and biology . There's also an interesting peice about the most popular stories of the year."
Beware the new TTY code!
Re:Oh come on! (Score:1)
Re:Oh come on! (Score:1)
Geese!!! There's so much out there other than these "Top ten reasons..."....
I can't believe it (Score:4, Funny)
umm waitaminute, I fell for that the last time.
Speaking of skeletons: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can't believe it (Score:2)
...
Uh, you are in earnest here, no?
Missing Options (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Missing Options (Score:1, Insightful)
Behold, a new List: The top 10 discoveries excluded from top 10 lists. Hmmm, there seems something recursive about that.
Top Ten (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Top Ten (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Top Ten (Score:1)
Yeah, they should mix it up, such as "The middle 37 through 62 best ideas/songs/images/stories."
Re:Top Ten (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Top Ten (Score:1)
Re:Top Ten (Score:1)
You're supposed to start at 10, so we're all left guessing what's number one until the end!
OMFG (Score:3, Funny)
Re:OMFG (Score:2)
Of course, if you've got the pent, I'll take that too.
actually my favorite was to (Score:1)
What's your favorite? (Score:3, Funny)
"There's also an interesting peice (Score:2, Funny)
Such as the one about spelling reform, which I unfortunately missed.
Nature (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking of which : here are some of the places you can help with donations. [google.com]
Re:Nature (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nature (Score:1)
Mars rovers? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how they came up with the "most popular" stories.
Re:Mars rovers? (Score:1)
Re:Mars rovers? (Score:1)
If multiple news sources come out with the same story, then maybe no single article ranks high enough to count in the top. That is one of the potential drawbacks of using article popularity alone. I assume they are counting individual articles, otherwise the boundaries of what a "story" is may get fuzzy. For example, is a story about Spirit's lack of comparable water evidence (early in the mission) part of the same story, or a different one?
Re:Mars rovers? (Score:1)
Re:Mars rovers? (Score:1)
Just think how grim it all looked soon after the Spirit flash problem became apparent. It made the Opportunity landing team all the more nervious knowing that Opportunity may be the last shot (Spirit problem surfaced before Opp landed) and that it may have had the same flaw as Spirit. The cheif talked as if it was probably a major hardware failure. The press also hyped the doom and gloom.
Re:Mars rovers? (Score:2)
From the article;
"Now, we can reveal the top 10 stories of the 2004, as judged by you the readers.
The most clicked-on stories included
Discoveries? (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Mars rovers? (Score:2)
interplanetary war (Score:4, Funny)
Obviously, it's all a plot to draw attention away from the interplanetary war started by NASA with all those missles, err, probes, that we slammed intto Mars.
hawk
Given that everybody loves the lightning gun... (Score:4, Insightful)
Man, I thought this would be funny, (Score:2)
I wrote it, so someone else will have to fix this.
Variable Speed of light (Score:1, Insightful)
This story revealed that the speed of light, a sacrosanct universal physical constant, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.
I can never understand it when they say the speed of light changes. As I understand it, the meter is currently defined as the distance taken by a certain number of oscillations of a certain frequency of light, i.e. the distance light travels in a certa
Re:Variable Speed of light (Score:2)
Re:Variable Speed of light (Score:2)
Re:Variable Speed of ALPHA! (Score:2, Informative)
Recall that the Fine Structure constant is the inverse proportional of a woman's bodytype most closely approaching the area under the curves represented by Pamela Anderson's shape to the amount of clothing she has on.
Wait wtf were we talking about?
Re:What about The Passion? (Score:4, Funny)
Top Ten (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Top Ten (Score:1)
Damn! We missed the ending because of that. Stop waking, dude.
Where's Bob the Angry Flower? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Where's Bob the Angry Flower? (Score:1)
There 'ya go...
np: Autechre - Netlon Sentinel (EP7)
Black hole paradox (Score:2, Insightful)
But it's easy to consider sweeping stun guns more important. I wonder how many 'individuals' be part of a 'mob'
-Anon C.
Handsome men evolved thanks to picky females? (Score:3, Interesting)
Another study suggested that men may have swapped fighting for wooing and evolved into handsome hunks [newscientist.com] because of women's pickiness.
The article itself states "As our ancestors evolved, the ability to attract a female mate through good looks became [sic] may have become more important in the mating stakes than the ability to fight off male rivals..." and it goes on to say that the "changes were probably driven by choosy females who began to demand handsomeness, not brute force."
Unless I'm missing something here, the reasoning in the target article seems to be backwards. It could be that the author of the article in question is something along the lines of a Platonist about beauty (having a belief that there is an objective "form" of beauty that ancestral females had in mind when they were picking their mates). But, aside from that perspective, which is currently unpopular both philosophically and scientifically, I think that the reasoning usually goes more like this: we judge certain faces to be attractive (beautiful or handsome or whatever) because the people who have those features inherited them from ancestors who had greater reproductive success.
Although the details of this sort of reasoning may be somewhat debatable (e.g., why aren't the majority of people then considered to be beautiful or handsome instead of just your average Joe or Jane -- because of some technicalities having to do with the normal distribution of any given trait in the population and the fact that the people who happen to have all or most attractive features would be the statistically lucky ones at one tail of the distribution), it does make sense prima facie, as is evidenced by the use of a similar line of reasoning in the article on female attractiveness and fertility [newscientist.com] that is referenced in the same paragraph of the year in review.
I don't have access to the journal article that is referenced (in Biology Letters), so if someone is familiar with the particular article or the general debate in question, or if I'm missing some subtlety that makes things different in the male case, could you point it out to me?
Re:Handsome men evolved thanks to picky females? (Score:1)
Re:Handsome men evolved thanks to picky females? (Score:2)
Re:Handsome men evolved thanks to picky females? (Score:1)
1) More symmetrical
2) Fewer genetic disorders
3) Smell nicer
4) Men have more testosterone (e.g. big jaw bone), women have more estrogen.
What about library science? (Score:3, Interesting)
duh... (Score:2)
Am I the only one who saw the obvious in the picture they provided. It's extremely apparent that that "odd clumping" merely marks the beginning of a track much like the record that went into space with Voyager. There's only one thing to do: drag a needle across the surface of it so we can hear what they have to say.
Newscientist S**ks... (Score:2)
Way better than the recent Discover mag list (Score:2)