Category: Arrogance
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Microbes, arrogance, wrong perceptions.
Methane-producing microbes may be responsible for the largest mass extinction in Earth's history. Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out -- by far the largest of this planet's five known mass extinctions. It turns out that Methanosarcina had acquired a…
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Scientific dogmatism, basic research, arrogance...
For years, some biomedical researchers have worried that a push for more bench-to-bedside studies has meant less support for basic research. Now, the chief of one of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) largest institutes has added her voice—and hard data—to the discussion. Story Landis describes what she calls a “sharp decrease” in basic research…
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I am God. I am God. I am God! [augmented reality]
I slip on the virtual reality headset, expecting the real world to vanish. Instead, something odd happens: I can still see the room I'm in, but it's slightly blurry. I look down at my body – everything's where it should be. With the click of a button the floor suddenly becomes cluttered with virtual objects…
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Unitarity axiom, research funding & Science as the new religion!
Unitarity axiom. In quantum physics, unitarity is a restriction on the allowed evolution of quantum systems that ensures the sum of probabilities of all possible outcomes of any event is always 1. More precisely, the operator which describes the progress of a physical system in time must be a unitary operator. When the Hamiltonian is…
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Unknown Santa. The only way...
Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), will be the next CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The oncologist and former Genentech executive will take the reins of the huge philanthropy from retiring CEO Jeff Raikes on 1 May 2014, overseeing the foundation’s activities in global public health,…
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