Nov 10, 2015 01:26 AM
Can There Be Too Much Story in Science?
http://blog.distillations.org/post/13287...cience-can
EXCERPT: At CHF we love science and storytelling, and we believe they enhance one another. But a recent New York Times article raised the question of the place of narrative in the case of Elizabeth Holmes and her startup blood testing company Theranos. A Stanford dropout and one of the youngest billionaires in the United States Holmes developed a method of using a finger prick rather than intravenous blood draw to test for a large number of illnesses....
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Why is science fiction so obsessed with Mars?
http://www.futurity.org/mars-science-fic...1045372-2/
EXCERPT: [...] “When I teach science fiction, I quote [Samuel R] Delany, who says, ‘Science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present…. Science fiction is about the current world—the given world shared by writer and reader.'”
[So] why does Mars seem to loom so large in popular culture? One of the best answers I’ve read is from Isaac Asimov’s introduction to an edition of H. G. Wells’s "The War of the Worlds". He basically suggests that much of our fascination with Mars and the notion of life on Mars has to do with a matter of translation—or a mistranslation—of the Italian word canali....
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UFO Clouds' Are Real. Here's How They Happen
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/...r-science/
EXCERPT: [...] Meteorologists call them lenticular clouds, which form when strong, moist winds blow over rough terrain, such as mountains or valleys. [...] As the wind flows over large features it may cool, causing it to condense into disk-shaped clouds that develop perpendicular to the direction of the air flow. [...] A number of past reports of UFO sightings have been linked to lenticular clouds, which can form in many places around the world....
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Ice Volcanoes Could Be on Pluto
http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...-on-pluto/
EXCERPT: [...] They resemble icy volcanoes, known as cryovolcanoes, on Neptune’s moon Triton and other frozen worlds. Flowing ice, rather than hot lava, fuels cryovolcanoes.
“We’re not yet ready to announce we have found volcanic constructs at Pluto, but these sure look suspicious and we’re looking at them very closely,” says Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist [...] If Pluto does indeed have cryovolcanoes, it suggests the volatile ices that coat its surface can flow relatively easily both at the surface and just below it, says Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist...
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How Vultures Can Eat Rotten Meat
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/vult...oning.html
EXCERPT: [...] The thing is, rotten meat can have harmful bacteria on it, like pathogens that cause food poisoning, or even anthrax. If you or I ate those microbes, we’d be in big trouble. But vultures don’t seem to care. They’ll actually go a disgusting step further. To get at the fleshy goodness inside a rotting carcass, they’ll peck in at the animal’s softest spots, like the anus, inadvertently scooping up feces along with the bacteria-ridden meat.
So, how do vultures cope? Well, they have incredibly acidic stomachs, which help them to digest bone and kill diseases like anthrax. They’ve also evolved either immunity or at least a level of tolerance for certain types of bacterial toxins. In fact, their intestines are naturally colonized by species of bacteria that are related to disease-causing ones typically found on rotting meat....
http://blog.distillations.org/post/13287...cience-can
EXCERPT: At CHF we love science and storytelling, and we believe they enhance one another. But a recent New York Times article raised the question of the place of narrative in the case of Elizabeth Holmes and her startup blood testing company Theranos. A Stanford dropout and one of the youngest billionaires in the United States Holmes developed a method of using a finger prick rather than intravenous blood draw to test for a large number of illnesses....
- - - - - - - -
Why is science fiction so obsessed with Mars?
http://www.futurity.org/mars-science-fic...1045372-2/
EXCERPT: [...] “When I teach science fiction, I quote [Samuel R] Delany, who says, ‘Science fiction is not about the future; it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present…. Science fiction is about the current world—the given world shared by writer and reader.'”
[So] why does Mars seem to loom so large in popular culture? One of the best answers I’ve read is from Isaac Asimov’s introduction to an edition of H. G. Wells’s "The War of the Worlds". He basically suggests that much of our fascination with Mars and the notion of life on Mars has to do with a matter of translation—or a mistranslation—of the Italian word canali....
- - - - - - - - -
UFO Clouds' Are Real. Here's How They Happen
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/...r-science/
EXCERPT: [...] Meteorologists call them lenticular clouds, which form when strong, moist winds blow over rough terrain, such as mountains or valleys. [...] As the wind flows over large features it may cool, causing it to condense into disk-shaped clouds that develop perpendicular to the direction of the air flow. [...] A number of past reports of UFO sightings have been linked to lenticular clouds, which can form in many places around the world....
- - - - - - - -
Ice Volcanoes Could Be on Pluto
http://www.scientificamerican.com/articl...-on-pluto/
EXCERPT: [...] They resemble icy volcanoes, known as cryovolcanoes, on Neptune’s moon Triton and other frozen worlds. Flowing ice, rather than hot lava, fuels cryovolcanoes.
“We’re not yet ready to announce we have found volcanic constructs at Pluto, but these sure look suspicious and we’re looking at them very closely,” says Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist [...] If Pluto does indeed have cryovolcanoes, it suggests the volatile ices that coat its surface can flow relatively easily both at the surface and just below it, says Robert Pappalardo, a planetary scientist...
- - - - - - - - -
How Vultures Can Eat Rotten Meat
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/vult...oning.html
EXCERPT: [...] The thing is, rotten meat can have harmful bacteria on it, like pathogens that cause food poisoning, or even anthrax. If you or I ate those microbes, we’d be in big trouble. But vultures don’t seem to care. They’ll actually go a disgusting step further. To get at the fleshy goodness inside a rotting carcass, they’ll peck in at the animal’s softest spots, like the anus, inadvertently scooping up feces along with the bacteria-ridden meat.
So, how do vultures cope? Well, they have incredibly acidic stomachs, which help them to digest bone and kill diseases like anthrax. They’ve also evolved either immunity or at least a level of tolerance for certain types of bacterial toxins. In fact, their intestines are naturally colonized by species of bacteria that are related to disease-causing ones typically found on rotting meat....
![[Image: RvN7jyR.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/RvN7jyR.jpg)