The W3.org (THE standards body for the web) has a video element in its HTML5 draft standard 2008-06-10. A standard way of defining videos will make it easier to write and use web pages that contain videos, allow standards-compliant browsers to give you a consistent interface to videos, as well as encouraging development of add-ons that can integrate such content, including better mash-ups. Read more »
I’m not one for watching YouTube, but a recent Nature blog post ("Did people learn nothing from Icarus? 2008-05-16) and links in some of the comments on mini-micro-flying contraptions (especially the Leonardo da Vinci parachute test and Inspector Gadget-like backpack helicopter) are pretty interesting. Read more »
There’s been a breakthrough in "Jurassic Park" technology, not for dinosaurs, but for the thylacine (Stripypseudocanis taswegicus). Read more »
Just published (2008-05-15) in Nature (doi:10.1038/453257a) is The Next Big Climate Challenge, which argues that significant funding is needed for climate modellers, indeed so much that climate modelling and the supercomputing grunt it requires, should be considered as international "big science", with projects funded internationally in the same manner (although hopefully more effective) than CERN’s hadron smasher and space telescopes. Read more »
We already have a proven and widely used means of carbon capture and storage that does not threaten a massive disaster as pumping CO2 underground does, yet the latte drinkers who consider themselves green hate it. Read more »
I realized the US science teachers are pressured to teach "creationism" in science classes in glowing terms, but I didn’t realize just how many actually believe it. Read more »
In my Nature newsletters recently is an announcement for The John Templeton Foundation, which is funding research to prove intelligent design, among other things. The newsletter included the following:
Does science make belief in God obsolete? Join the conversation among leading scientists and scholars. www.templeton.org/belief.
I’ll be visiting the site, and hope to provide some notes about content soon.
Read more »
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