Bees use mathematical prowess to communicate the exact location of nearby food to other bees via a technique dubbed the "bee dance." It is the only known instance of symbolic communication in the animal kingdom (unless we consider there are deeper metaphors in "Real Housewives of New Jersey") and today a group of scientists are building a robot that can mimic that behavior of bees.In the 1940s,...
read moreSince "The Avengers" is a giant movie this year, when you think of something that shoots lightning, you might think of Thor. If so, perhaps your clever joke would be "Can we name that Laser-Induced Plasma Channel "Mjolnir"?If you're old like me, "Star Trek" will be more your thing and "Set your phasers to fry" will be more your speed.(1) read...
read moreSigmund Freud wrote in The Interpretation of Dreams that "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" - he meant not everything was about sex, which must really frustrate evolutionary psychology grad students(1), being as he is the most famous psychiatrist ever and was wrong about almost everything else but correct on that point.But that also means a cigar isn't always just a cigar, even in the...
read moreSometimes declaring bankruptcy is a good thing. In the case of Abound Solar Inc., a U.S. solar manufacturer that had American taxpayers on the hook for $400 million, the good thing is they closed the doors after only losing us $70 million in Department of Energy funds.Chump change, I know, since we have committed $72 billion on alternative energy in the last few years, but $330 million here...
read moreWho hasn't thought about Chasing UFOs? When I saw "Independence Day" in 1996 I first thought, "A Mac can bring down an entire alien civilization? Their users really are creative!" but then I wondered if some day, someone might actually get paid to find aliens.Well, that day is here. But I have to warn you, the language is bad in this UFO stuff. read...
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