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Top Science Stories of 2004
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."
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umm waitaminute, I fell for that the last time.
I think a slashdot poll is in order so people have a proper place to complain about missing options ;)
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Geese!!! There's so much out there other than these "Top ten reasons..."....
my dreams come true, A lightning gun in real life. Now all I need is the Quad and I'm set. ooh ooh, even better, the Beserker Rune.
Mine is the "Sweeping stun guns to target crowds." Phasers on stun!
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
...about the most popular stories of the year."
Such as the one about spelling reform, which I unfortunately missed.
Well the biggest story this year has to do with Nature. Which I guess it's what science is all about.
Speaking of which : here are some of the places you can help with donations.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
I wonder how they came up with the "most popular" stories.
I forsee an upswing in conductive clothing with insulated liners, and ground connections.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
6. Speed of light may have changed recently
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 certain number of seconds.
So if the speed of light changes, the length of the meter changes, making the speed of light the same as it was before. Certainly you could say that the length of a meter changed, but you'd need to refer to some outside standard, and then it would be just as accurate to say the outside standard changed, instead of having the speed of light change.
In a hastily called press conference U.S. President George W. Bush, today announced a "nationwide mobilization of America's scientific and commercial resources" to create renewable and sustainable replacements for fossil fuels. When asked how the deficit-ridden government would pay for such an effort Bush replied that America's military would be rapidly drawn down to the level necessary to preserve the territorial integrity of the United States. "After all," joked the President, "we already have all of the food we need, once we have all of the energy we need there won't be anything to fight over." -And then I awoke.
This was interesting story....
Yeah? Well I think you're overrated too.
get the Radioactive Rune set a few traps, then luck up and get the Beserker rune. Watch the suckers burn and die within seconds of entering the wrong room. Especially a map that was very few, very large rooms......muahahahahaha
It's PIEce, like a piece of PIE.
I think cracking the black hole paradox should top the list. The reason is, this one will have a lot to do with how we try to understand and explore the universe in very long run. I am talking in the Assimovian context - like 10k years from now.
But it's easy to consider sweeping stun guns more important. I wonder how many 'individuals' be part of a 'mob'
-Anon C.
From 2004: The year in biology and medecine
Another study suggested that men may have swapped fighting for wooing and evolved into handsome hunks 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 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?
There might have been water millions of years ago is a great discovery?
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?
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
Yes! There needs to be a psychology of insanity section!
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Seriously. LISNews.com is featuring a rundown of the top library stories of 2004. Much of Slashdot's news crosses over with library science, just as much of IT relates with what librarians do nowadays. So please take a look to see what we're been up to. Librarians need more tech-savvy people familiar with the challenges we're facing.
I wonder how they came up with the "most popular" stories.
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
But it also discovered a few more to puzzle over, such as an unexplained clumping of material within the rings, revealed by unique close-up images.
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.
Direct away from face when opening.
definitely not insightful.
I wrote it, so someone else will have to fix this.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
New Scientist has recently switched its display format such that it cannot be displayed in Netscape 4.79. This is in contrast to sites such as the NY Times or /. that believe getting the information out is more important that some fancy display format. Why is Netscape 4.79 still a reasonable brower? Its smaller, its faster, and it is less likely to be targeted for security holes than IE, Mozilla or Firefox.
Last week there was a special program on the Science Channel (I think) highlighting the top 100 recent developments, with commentary by a panel of editors from Discover magazine. Maybe the print version was better, if there was one, but I was surprised by the fluffiness of the commentary and how uninformed the panel seem to be. These New Scientist articles are much more interesting.