TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Feds: Don't tip off miners on surprise inspections By SAM HANANEL 2010-08-26T20:47:53ZWASHINGTON (AP) -- Some mine companies are tipping off their underground workers before federal officials make surprise inspections, an illegal practice that has become more prevalent since a West Virginia explosion killed 29 miners, the nation's top mine official said Thursday.... hosted.ap.org |
Would you like 1 hump or 2 with your dinosaur? By SETH BORENSTEIN 2010-09-08T18:26:59ZWASHINGTON (AP) -- The weird world of dinosaurs has just gotten a tad more bizarre. Scientists found a nearly complete fossil of a new dinosaur that sports a noticeable hump, maybe as possible advertising.... hosted.ap.org |
Prizes honor studies in vision loss, obesity By MALCOLM RITTER 2010-09-21T04:01:54ZNEW YORK (AP) -- Three scientists have won prestigious medical prizes - one for devising a treatment for a major cause of vision loss and two for laying the groundwork for an explosion in obesity research.... hosted.ap.org |
Move Over, Carbon, Humans Are Jolting Nitrogen, Too Humans have appropriated much of the planet's nitrogen cycle, with big environmental consequences. feeds.nytimes.com |
Benoît B Mandelbrot: the man who made geometry an art The sphere of maths has borne few as provocative as the man whose 'fractals' demonstrated the universe's playful irregularityFew recent thinkers have woven such a beautiful braid of art and science as Benoît B Mandelbrot, who has died aged 85 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (The B apparently doesn't stand for anything. He just felt like adding it.) Mandelbrot was a provocative mathematician, a subversive geometer. He left a beautiful legacy in visual art, for Mandelbrot was the man who named and explained fractals – those complex, apparently chaotic yet geometrically ordered shapes that delight the eye and fascinate the mind. They are icons of modern understanding of the universe's complexity.The Mandelbrot set, one of the most famous fractal designs, is named after him. With its fizzing fringe of crystal-like microforms blossoming out of a conjunction of black circles, this fractal pattern looks crazy but is the outcome of geometrical calculations.Geometry, said Mandelbrot, is seen as "dry" because it can only explain regular shapes like the square, the cylinder and the cone. Such shapes have been analysed mathematically since the time of the ancient Greeks, which is why traditional geometry is known as Euclidean geometry. But in the 19th and 20th centuries, physicists and mathematicians started to think beyond Euclid and his regular universe. Mandelbrot was not the first, but with his startling fractals concept he created a visual manifesto for a non-Euclidean universe.Fractals – and I'd be delighted if mathematicians can give a better explanation below– are shapes that are irregular but repeat themselves at every scale: they contain themselves in themselves. Mandelbrot used the example of a cauliflower which, like a fern, is a fractal found in nature; if you look at the smallest sections of these vegetable forms, you see them mirroring the whole.Mandelbrot, who worked at IBM before becoming a professor at Yale, started thinking about irregular shapes by looking at maps of Great Britain. The squiggly shape of the UK mainland fascinated him and he wondered whether it was possible to make a mathematical model of its perimeter. Can you measure the British coastline? He discovered that you can at a distance, but that then the closer you look, the more you find. In a sense, guardian.co.uk |