From Democracy Now!: As the Justice Department announces it has closed nearly half of its investigations into unresolved killings from the civil rights era, we look back at the 1964 murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the subject of the new documentary Neshoba: The Price of Freedom. Although dozens [...]
“Bird strikes to commercial aircraft pose both a financial and safety risk. Safety engineers at Boeing are interested in ways to minimize both. This often involves understanding the most damaging strikes. Anytime an object collides with another object, there is kinetic energy. It follows that this is true when birds strike aircraft. Visualizing the kinetic [...]
On a local level, it’s easy to see how the 21st century sustainable movement is taking form, but what does this trend look like on a national level? On an International level? This report released by the Institute of Science in Society discusses the quantity and direction of international investments, providing a crystal ball-like vision [...]
Gonzalo Vizcardo: I’ve recently been researching peer-to-peer lending, where people group to lend to others, bypassing banks and, thus, for those who lend, earning higher interest rates, and for those who borrow, paying lower interest rates. “Prosper is the world’s largest peer-to-peer lending marketplace with more than 1,010,000 members and over $210,000,000 in funded loans. [...]
From GOOD.is: Energy consumption is arguably the largest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions and is at the center of much of the blame for climate change. To better understand how we use this carbon-creating energy, this is a look at which states use the most.
From the Huffington Post: In January, NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station sent the first real-time tweets from space. Soon after, Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi began tweeting stunning photographs of the view from above back to Earth. Now that Soichi has returned home, NASA astronaut Douglas Wheelock has continued live-tweeting photos from the ISS. [...]
The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life by Erving Goffman was published in 1959 and is considered a seminal book in sociology. I found it a stimulating read as it began to answer the question of “what makes up our perception?”. According to Goffman, our perception is created by our interactions with each other and [...]
The Large Hadron Collider successfully created a ‘mini-Big Bang’ on Nov 7 by smashing together lead ions instead of protons and creating temperatures of more than ten trillion degrees, a million times hotter than the center of the Sun.
They hope to learn more about the plasma the Universe was made of a millionth of a second after the Big Bang by studying the quark-gluon plasma generated in the experiment, specifically the ‘strong force,’ which binds the nuclei of atoms together and is responsible for 98% of their mass.
“It isn’t financial incentives. It isn’t more information. It’s guilt. Studies dating back at least three decades clearly show the power of social norms. We tend to ascribe our actions to more high-minded motives, or to practical concerns about money. But at its core, our behavior often boils down to that old mantra: Monkey see, [...]
From TED.com: “TED collaborates with animator Andrew Park to illustrate Denis Dutton’s provocative theory on beauty — that art, music and other beautiful things, far from being simply “in the eye of the beholder,” are a core part of human nature with deep evolutionary origins.”
