Changing Locomotion in Midstream - The Full Report (1)
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Alexis Madrigal (41)
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"Community Funded Reporting" Spot.Us (8)
1 day, 20 hours
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[Editors Note: This is the first example of "community funded reporting" here at Spot.Us. To learn more about Spot.Us read this NY Times article. To fund another investigation - check our pre-beta wiki which still has two one actionable items. As this content is commissioned by the public it is free to any news organization or blog to republish. Thank you to the donors who made this possible. At the bottom is a non-exhaustive list ...
150,000 Amateur Astronomers Help Classify 900,000 Galaxies (2)
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Alexis Madrigal (41)
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Wired Science (76)
4 days, 3 hours
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Citizen scientists have helped astronomers identify more than 900,000 galaxies. Galaxy Zoo, a tool conceived and launched last July by an international team of physicists, harnesses humans' natural pattern-recognition skills to determine whether never-before-seen images of galaxies taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey are elliptical or spiral. It's clearly helpful to run a distributed program on a 150,000-strong human brain cluster, but what's in it for the everyday people paging through galaxy images? Two ...
Maps: Storm Surge Risk from Tropical Storm Gustav (11)
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Wired Top Stories (1330)
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Storm surge maps developed by a insurance risk management firm show that Tropical Storm Gustav, if it continues strengthening, could have a devastating impact wherever it hits along the Gulf Coast.
Interactive Timeline: Mars Phoenix Heads Into Extra Innings! (4)
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Having finished its nominal mission time of 90 days this week, Mars Phoenix enters extra innings as one of NASA's most successful missions, even if it didn't discover evidence for past or present life on Mars. Review the mission with this story and interactive timeline.
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Gatewayy said:
That little prob is awesome!
Anthropologists Find New Type of Urbanism in Amazon Jungles (7)
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Wired Science (76)
1 week, 2 days
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Recently-discovered Amazonian settlements could be a new type of metropolis, unseen elsewhere in the world and hidden until recently in the Kuikuro jungle, say anthropologists. Revealed by overgrown earthworks, the 100 square-mile urban units consist of clusters of interconnected villages ranging from 50-150 acres in size. The town-nodes were arranged along a highly-regular pattern of roads built around a central plaza about 500 feet across. The cities appear to have been at their height between ...
Tropical Storm Gustav Threatens U.S. Energy Infrastructure (3)
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Wired: Wired Science (11)
1 week, 2 days
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UPDATE (8:35 AM Pacific): Tropical storm Gustav continues to track towards the Gulf's energy infrastructure and with an intensity that suggests it will become a category-3 hurricane with sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, according to a National Hurricane Center update issued this morning. The storm's most likely path is now slightly to the west of New Orleans as seen in the updated picture above. Three days before the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's ...
Humans Can Learn from Subliminal Cues Alone (4)
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1 week, 2 days
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Scientists have demonstrated for the first time subconscious learning in humans akin to that detailed in rats and pigeons by the famed-behaviorist B.F. Skinner seventy years ago. The evidence comes from a cleverly designed experiment that eliminated conscious reasoning as a variable in conditioning. Study participants were shown a cue for less five hundredths of a second, far below the threshold for conscious vision. Then the respondents were asked to "use their intuition" to determine ...
Tropical Storm Gustav Threatens U.S. Energy Infrastructure (1)
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Wired: Wired Science (11)
1 week, 3 days
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UPDATE (8:35 AM Pacific): Tropical storm Gustav continues to track towards the Gulf's energy infrastructure and with an intensity that suggests it will become a category-3 hurricane with sustained winds of 115 miles per hour, according to a National Hurricane Center update issued this morning. The storm's most likely path is now slightly to the west of New Orleans as seen in the updated picture above. Three days before the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's ...
Usain Bolt Is Freaky Fast, But Nowhere Near Human Limits (63)
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As astonishing as Usain Bolt's record-breaking 100-meter sprint was, his time of 9.69 seconds is nowhere near what biostatisticians predict is the natural limit for the human body. But because he broke the mathematical model that had fit 100-meter record data for almost a century, Bolt's incredible performance could reset how fast researchers believe humans ultimately can run.
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tom said:
"Bolt is an outlier. He's enormous," Weyand said. "Typically when you get someone that big, they can't start."That's because muscle speed in animals is generally tied to their size. For example, rodents, being much smaller than elephants, can move their muscles much faster. The same holds true for human beings. Sprinters are short and have more fast-twitch muscle fibers, allowing them to accelerate quickly, but compromising their ability to run longer distances. Four hundred-meter runners, almost always taller, have the reverse composition of muscle fibers.Bolt, though, combines the mechanical advantages of taller men's bodies with the fast-twitch fibers of smaller men.
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Derick Valadao said:
One look at that graph and you get the point. Bolt crapped on years of research which held up for decades. This man is incredible.
Bolt's Record Tests Theories of Human Speed (1)
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Wired: Science (25)
1 week, 5 days
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As astonishing as Usain Bolt's record-breaking 100-meter sprint was, his time of 9.69 seconds is nowhere near what biostatisticians predict is the natural limit for the human body. But because he broke the mathematical model that had fit 100-meter record data for almost a century, Bolt's incredible performance could reset how fast researchers believe humans ultimately can run.
How the Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole in the World (3)
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: In the Cold War '60s, as the space race heated up, another race began: to the center of the earth. Well, perhaps the Soviets and Americans couldn't drill quite that deep, but they could try to get to the so-called Moho, more formally the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the theorized but much-disputed boundary between the mostly solid crust and the magma-filled mantle. After the launch of an American drilling program to reach the boundary, the Russians ...
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Chad said:
I have only skimmed this so far, but it seems fascinating.
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Emmett said:
Do you really need a reason to play in the dirt?
How the Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole in the World (2)
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Wired: Science (25)
1 week, 5 days
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: In the Cold War '60s, as the space race heated up, another race began: to the center of the earth. Well, perhaps the Soviets and Americans couldn't drill quite that deep, but they could try to get to the so-called Moho, more formally the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the theorized but much-disputed boundary between the mostly solid crust and the magma-filled mantle. After the launch of an American drilling program to reach the boundary, the Russians ...
How the Soviets Drilled the Deepest Hole in the World (48)
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Wired Top Stories (1330)
1 week, 5 days
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: In the Cold War '60s, as the space race heated up, another race began: to the center of the earth. Well, perhaps the Soviets and Americans couldn't drill quite that deep, but they could try to get to the so-called Moho, more formally the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the theorized but much-disputed boundary between the mostly solid crust and the magma-filled mantle. After the launch of an American drilling program to reach the boundary, the Russians ...
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Emmett said:
Do you really need a reason to play in the dirt?
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Chad said:
I have only skimmed this so far, but it seems fascinating.
The Digg Science Review (2)
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Wired: Wired Science (11)
2 weeks, 1 day
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Like it or not, what gets made popular on the social media site Digg influences what young males between the ages of 16 and 30 know about science. There's plenty of smart, timely, interesting science news on the site, but much of the linked content is recycled, lame, or downright wrong. So, your friendly Wired Science contributors, Brandon Keim and myself, created this weekly series, The Digg Science Review, to help you parse the headlines ...
Beer, Vitamins and Jessica Simpson: Get the Facts (1)
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Wired Science (76)
2 weeks, 1 day
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Celebrity watchers erupted with ecstasy at the news this week that Jessica Simpson had agreed to pitch a small Dallas brewery's vitamin-enhanced beer. We frowned on this idle celebration, even if her promo pic was funny and the name of the beer was too (Stampede Light Plus). We didn't even chuckle that the ad featuring Jessica "Chicken of the Sea" Simpson had the tagline: "Be Smart. Drink Smart." No, we took no pleasure in this. ...
Flash Creators Reveal App for Saving Money on Energy (2)
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2 weeks, 3 days
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Greenbox, a startup founded by the creators of Flash, announced the roll-out of its power consumption monitoring application today. Installed along with networked electrical meters to a limited number of homes by Oklahoma Gas and Electric, the new trial is Greenbox's first move into a market that's quickly become crowded with competitors like Tendril, Agilewaves, and DIY Kyoto. All these applications allow their users to see how much energy they're using and, if they want ...
A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism (1)
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LXer Linux News (50)
2 weeks, 3 days
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Clay Shirky is a leading thinker about how the Internet is changing the world. In his writing, especially the recent book, Here Comes Everybody, he detailed how the networked world allows people to form leaderless groups that still do useful work. Through illuminating examples like his calculation that Wikipedia was created in about the same amount of time that Americans spend watching commercials each weekend, Shirky argues that humans in the post-industrial age are just ...
Open data abets the rise of the citizen-analyst (1)
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The Pop!Tech Blog (2)
2 weeks, 3 days
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Jay Rosen, the celebrated journalism professor at NYU, Twittered Monday: “The natural authority of any reporter, pro or amateur, celebrated or unknown, lies with, ‘I’m there, you’re not, let me tell you about it.’” As a reporter who reports on issues global and virtual, he got me thinking about where ‘there’ could be in my beat. My value as a reporter, I realized, is actually in defining the location — mapping — where the news ...
A Wiki for the Planet: Clay Shirky on Open Source Environmentalism (9)
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Wired Top Stories (1330)
2 weeks, 3 days
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Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, talks about Facebook's current limitations, why conserving oil might not actually help the world, and why Linux programmers and Critical Mass cyclists might be the new models for political action.
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Daniel Bachhuber said:
I have seen the light, and one spectrum of it screams "open source organization"! Now, how to scale effectively...
Video: Installing the World's Deepest Drilling Oil Rig (2)
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Wired Science (76)
2 weeks, 5 days
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The world's deepest-drilling oil platform is maneuvering into place in the Gulf of Mexico. Shell's Perdido oil platform will drill for petroleum more than 8,000 feet below the water's surface. Even though oil prices have dipped from their all-time highs earlier this summer, they are still far higher than at any time since the early 1980s. That's made deep ocean drilling, which is considerably more expensive than most other recovery techniques, a viable enterprise. The ...
