A senior administrator at Claremont McKenna resigned after acknowledging he falsified college entrance exam scores for years to rankings publications such as US News.
Nearly 30 years ago, US News & World Report debuted its list of “America’s Best Colleges”. The magazine hoped its college rankings would be a game-changer for students and families. But instead they have had a much bigger affect on colleges themselves.
Continue reading… “Colleges obsess over national rankings, not students”
Ahhhh. Massage.
Stiff muscles definitely benefit from a rub down, but scientists have never quite known why. Now, a team of researchers has shown that it works by changing your gene expression — quite literally, your body is hard-coded to release pain-easing chemicals when you’re massaged.
If you listen to people in the world of alternative medicine, they’ll normally tell you that massage “releases toxins”. That is bull, and scientists know it. But knowing an answer is wrong doesn’t give you the right one. No, doing some science does…
Continue reading… “Massage feels good because it changes your gene expression”
I just learned about Ferrofluid today. It can do some amazing things, like this video shows. After the jump is a second video explaining HOW ferrofluid works.
From the YouTube descriptioin:
A steel sculpture with changing magnetisation is coated with ferrofluid.
The fluid is pulled in the direction of increasing flux density and forms peaks, which become smaller in higher flux density. At an accumulation of fluid at ridges, the flux density at the surface decreases. The flow and the distribution of the fluid can be observed at several characteristic locations…
Antioch College
It sounds crazy but you can actually go to a private liberal arts college that will give you a full-ride tuition scholarship for four years. Seriously.
Continue reading… “Antioch College offers $106,000 education for free”
Big sound using age old principles.
I know I’ve been all about the old-fashioned-looking iPhone speakers lately, most of which are electricity-free. And 3D printing. So I’m jazzed the two have come together with this 3D printed iVictrola Gramophone dreamed up by Schreer Design and manufactured by Shapeways.
Check. It. Out. (video after jump…)
Continue reading… “iVictrola gramophone printed on a 3D printer magnifies your music”
A female spotted salamander gravid with eggs in route to her breeding pool. There she will lay a cluster of approximately 100 eggs. Eight to ten weeks later, those eggs will hatch as larvae. In late summer, if the pool has not already dried, larvae will metamorphose into juveniles that migrate to the adjacent upland habitat.
Spotted salamanders exposed to contaminated roadside ponds are adapting to their toxic environments, according to a Yale paper in Scientific Reports. This study provides the first documented evidence that a vertebrate has adapted to the negative effects of roads apparently by evolving rapidly…
Continue reading… “Road Runoff Spurring Spotted Salamander Evolution”
Several states already limit trans-fat in school cafeterias.
Colorado is the nation’s leanest state and it is taking aim at junk food in school cafeterias as it considers the nation’s toughest school trans-fat ban.
Continue reading… “Colorado considers nation’s toughest trans-fat ban in schools”
The countries with the most highly educated citizens are also some of the wealthiest in the world.
College graduation rates in developed countries have increased nearly 200%, in the past 50 years according to Education at a Glance 2011, a recently published report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). While education has improved across the board, it has not improved evenly, with some countries enjoying much greater rates of educational attainment than others, according to the report.
Continue reading… “Top 10 most educated countries in the world”
The world of academics is changing rapidly.
OpenCourseWare, or OCW, is a term applied to course materials created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The movement started in 1999 when the University of Tübingen in Germany published videos of lectures online in the context of its timms initiative. The OCW movement only took off, however, with the launch of MIT OpenCourseWare at MIT in October 2002 and has been reinforced by the launch of similar projects at Yale, Michigan University, and the University of California Berkeley…
(infographic after jump)
Continue reading… “The state of OpenCourseWare (infographic)”
The highly entertaining Vi Hart is back with another episode of Doodling in Math Class. Her videos are fun to watch, clear and easy to understand, and express the joy of scientific discovery: Continue reading… “Fibonacci Numbers, Lucas Numbers, and the way plants grow”
Now you can listen to trees literally.
Aside from the gentle rustling of leaves in the breeze, or the creaking of a bough in a winter gale, a tree’s character may best be described as ‘the strong and silent type’ — but, as so often is the case with such personalities, they just might have the most hauntingly beautiful stories to tell.
For nearly a century, dendrochronologists have practiced reading tree-rings for clues about the lives of trees. And though the field of study has helped immensely to shed light on historic growth cycles for scientists, it’s all been rather dry and clinical. But now, thanks to a special turntable designed to read tree-rings like tracks on an LP, a tree’s biography can now actually be heard as its discography…
(video after jump)
Continue reading… “Modified turntable reads tree-rings as music”
A powerful X-ray laser pulse from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent Light Source comes up from the lower-left corner (shown as green) and hits a neon atom (center). This intense incoming light energizes an electron from an inner orbit (or shell) closest to the neon nucleus (center, brown), knocking it totally out of the atom (upper-left, foreground). In some cases, an outer electron will drop down into the vacated inner orbit (orange starburst near the nucleus) and release a short-wavelength, high-energy (i.e. “hard”) X-ray photon of a specific wavelength (energy/color) (shown as yellow light heading out from the atom to the upper right along with the larger, green LCLS light).
Scientists working at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have created the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, fulfilling a 45-year-old prediction and opening the door to a new range of scientific discovery.
The researchers, reporting in Nature, aimed SLAC’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at a capsule of neon gas, setting off an avalanche of X-ray emissions to create the world’s first “atomic X-ray laser.”
“X-rays give us a penetrating view into the world of atoms and molecules,” said physicist Nina Rohringer, who led the research. A group leader at the Max Planck Society’s Advanced Study Group in Hamburg, Germany, Rohringer collaborated with researchers from SLAC, DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Colorado State University…
Continue reading… “Scientists create first atomic X-ray laser”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.