You may have heard about Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon before. In fact, you probably learned about it for the first time very recently. If not, then you just might hear about it again very soon. Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.

Two new books now raise the question of whether Richard Feynman is rising to the status of superstar. The two books are very different in style and in substance. Lawrence Krauss’s book, Quantum Man, is a narrative of Feynman’s life as a scientist, skipping lightly over the personal adventures that have been emphasized in earlier biographies. Krauss succeeds in explaining in nontechnical language the essential core of Feynman’s thinking. Unlike any previous biographer, he takes the reader inside Feynman’s head and reconstructs the picture of nature as Feynman saw it. This is a new kind of scientific history, and Krauss is well qualified to write it, being an expert physicist and a gifted writer of scientific books for the general public. Quantum Man shows us the side of Feynman’s personality that was least visible to most of his admirers, the silent and persistent calculator working intensely through long days and nights to figure out how nature works.

"By clicking on the image above, you'll be able to explore:

*The history of the Periodic Table in just 2 minutes
*How certain elements changed the course of history
*How the different parts of our planet are made up of the same elemental building blocks
*Where different elements occur, and what places they get their names from
*Which elements make up the human body
*The elements that are vital, and dangerous, to human life"

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words.

“Time” is the most used noun in the English language, yet it remains a mystery. We’ve just completed an amazingly intense and rewarding multidisciplinary conference on the nature of time, and my brain is swimming with ideas and new questions. Rather than trying a summary (the talks will be online soon), here’s my stab at a top ten list partly inspired by our discussions: the things everyone should know about time. [Update: all of these are things I think are true, after quite a bit of deliberation. Not everyone agrees, although of course they should.]

Believe it or not, some chemists do have a sense of humour, and this page is a testament to that. Here we'll show you some real molecules that have unusual, ridiculous or downright silly names. If you know of any other potential candidates for this page, please let me know. People from all over the world have sent me so many contributions to this page, that I've now had to split it into four smaller pages.

In honour of the International Year of Chemistry, Dimensions takes a peek behind recent changes to the periodic table — that marvel of simplicity and scientific achievement that represents the building blocks of chemistry.

Comparing 'amounts' of radiation.

The Periodic Table of Videos is a collaboration between the University of Nottingham's School of Chemistry and video journalist Brady Haran.

We initially made videos about all 118 elements.

Starting today, I'll be posting on a different element each weekday (the blog will run through early August), starting with the racy history of an element we've known about for hundreds of years, antimony, and ending on an element we've only just discovered, the provisionally named ununseptium. I'll be covering many topics—explaining how the table works, relaying stories both funny and tragic, and analyzing current events through the lens of the table and its elements. Above all, I hope to convey the unexpected joys of the most diverse and colorful tool in all of science.

Out of all Isaac Newton’s myriad interests, alchemy appears to have been his passion. His famous works on optics, mechanics and mathematics were mere side-thoughts in comparison to the thirty years he spent on alchemy. He read hundreds of alchemical texts and wrote more than one million words in his notebooks. These notebooks include experimental notes, which appear to only hint at the many hours spent in his laboratory. His thoughts on alchemy developed throughout his life but he seems to have never let go from the belief in a ‘subtle, vegetative agent’ that produces all of nature’s marvellous forms.

For the past month, Sam Kean has been blogging the periodic table for Slate, in conjunction with his new book The Disappearing Spoon. The blog explored the history and science behind 25 different elements, from antimony to yttrium. But one question has been left unaddressed: What the heck do these elements look like? Some elements, of course are part of our daily lives: We all know what gold and iron look like. But could you pick bismuth out of a lineup? Francium? Tungsten? Click the launch module to see photographs of the elements Kean has discussed in his Slate blog.

Hover over an element and get basic info.

Whisper it, but the periodic table does not exist even in the way that the Tube map exists, representing the actual position of the stations on the ground. But the table traps the elements it represents in a kind of prison and stops us seeing them for themselves.

At readings of my new book, Periodic Tales, parents have come up to me afterwards and told me their child is having “to do the periodic table”, and how can they help?

Here’s how: get them thinking about the individual elements instead. After all, the periodic table is only a checklist of what is truly elemental. Mendeleev’s table shows how the properties of each are similar, but this tends to obscure their uniqueness. What is more, each element is linked to our lives in unique and often unexpected ways. We know them through our human culture, how they have been woven into our objects and stories, not by entering the privileged space of a laboratory.

There is hardly a boy or a girl alive who is not keenly interested in finding out about things. And that’s exactly what chemistry is: Finding out about things–finding out what things are made of and what changes they undergo. What things? Any thing! Every thing!
–The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments

Try as you might, you can't walk in a straight line without a visible guide point, like the Sun or a star. You might think you're walking straight, but as NPR's Robert Krulwich reports, a map of your route would reveal you are doomed to walk in circles.

When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison's skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time — a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry's brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin.

On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on December 10, 1904 to Sir William Ramsay (1852–1916) “in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system,” this article reviews his life and career and discusses his most important contributions.

Although Dmitri Mendeleev is often considered the "father" of the periodic table, the work of many scientists contributed to its present form.

"We etch a tiny periodic table onto a hair belonging to chemistry Professor Martyn Poliakoff. "

List of alternative ways of visualising  the periodic table.

Image showing state at room temp, appearance in nature (element, compound, both) and common uses.

See summaries, photos and related images (usage, discoverer, etc)  for each element.

Toggle views for properties, orbitals, isotopes etc. Select elements, groups and periods for Wikipedia summaries, photos, podcasts.

For 350 years, the Royal Society has called on the world's biggest brains to unravel the mysteries of science. Its president, Martin Rees, considers today's big issues, while leading thinkers describe the puzzles they would love to see solved.

As you'd imagine, smiles ensue. But Radiolab is more than just a post-ironic, earnestly clever refashioning of findings for the literate and curious not apt to subscribe to Nature or The Lancet. What seems like dumbing-down harbors revelation: To listen to enough Radiolab is to see that scientists haven't simply replaced the theologians, the metaphysicians and the social critics as posers and answerers of the biggest questions. They've also become, in a time of gene-splicing and hadron-colliding and psychopharmacology, our true avatars of creative expression, the last radical artists left.

A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the base pitch of the tone moving upwards or downwards, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.[1] It has been described as a "sonic barber's pole".[2]

“Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” is an odd title for a weird book. Not weird bad, just weird in a way that makes you stop and think about what precisely the author, Douglas Coupland, is up to. Like the man it chronicles, Coupland’s book is full of unconventional angles, ricochets and resonances. Rather than offering a doorstop-size addition to the Great Man canon, it comes in at just over 200 pages that nonetheless sprawl and unfold to their own idiosyncratic rhythm.

This is a web site (still under construction) for young students - and anyone else - who are (like me) thrilled by the challenges posed by real science, and who are - like me - determined to use their brains to discover new things about the physical world that we are living in. In short, it is for all those who decided to study theoretical physics, in their own time.

Most psychological science is the science of being and feeling like a human being, and since there is only one human being that I have or ever will have experience in being, it is not always clear to me where my career ends and my personal life begins. And this is especially salient to me right now because, like many other adult gay commentators and horrified onlookers, the raft of gay teen suicides in recent weeks has reawakened memories of my own adolescent battles with suicidal thought. There is so much I want to say about this, in fact, that I’ll be breaking this column up into two separate posts, for I’m reminded of the many illuminating theories and studies on suicide I’ve come across over the years that helped me to understand—and more importantly to overcome and to escape from—that frighteningly intoxicating desire to prematurely rid myself of a seemingly interminable hell.

ONE STARRY NIGHT 35 years ago, I drove the physicist Freeman Dyson through the British Columbia rain forest toward a reunion with his estranged son, George. The son, then 22, was a long-haired, sun-darkened, barefoot dropout with an uncanny resemblance to Thoreau. He had emigrated to Canada during the Vietnam War, and he lived 95 feet up a Douglas fir outside Vancouver. His passion was the aboriginal North American skin boat. In a workshop near his tree house, he had resurrected the baidarka, the kayak of the Aleutian Islands—a watertight second skin, lightweight and nimble, in which the Aleut hunter originally, and young George himself eventually, became a kind of sea centaur, half man and half canoe. The father, Freeman, was then and continues to be a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, employed there, as Einstein was before him, to think about whatever he finds interesting.

How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

Rule 30 is a one-dimensional binary cellular automaton rule introduced by Stephen Wolfram in 1983.[1] Wolfram describes it as being his "all-time favourite rule"[2] and details it in his book, A New Kind of Science. Using Wolfram's classification scheme, Rule 30 is a Class III rule, displaying aperiodic, chaotic behaviour.

[Follow up post] And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the comments became very active. So let's take a look at some of what was said, and let's see what we can further learn about black holes from answering your questions.

On Wednesday, based on observations from large telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, astronomers announced that the Earth has, if not a twin, at least a planetary cousin. It’s called Gliese 581g, so named for the small, dim star some 20 light-years away that it circles in a 37-day orbit. One of its co-discoverers, Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has proposed a more memorable appellation: Zarmina’s World, after Vogt’s wife.

It makes sense to apply Cytori’s technology to enhance breasts instead of, say, repair urinary sphincters as a strategic way to move the patented technology out of rats and into people as soon as possible. Hearts, kidneys, and even sphincters have to work in order for us to survive. But we can live just fine without breast tissue, and, outside of feeding offspring, breasts don’t have to do much. The fact is, the scientific and regulatory hurdles to getting Cytori’s cells into clinical use will be easier to clear for breasts than for other tissue: Breasts simply aren’t as necessary as other organs, so the bar for proving to regulators that the technology works will be lower.

"Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line." So writes acclaimed mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in his path-breaking book The Fractal Geometry of Nature. Instead, such natural forms, and many man-made creations as well, are "rough," he says. To study and learn from such roughness, for which he invented the term fractal, Mandelbrot devised a new kind of visual mathematics based on such irregular shapes. Fractal geometry, as he called this new math, is worlds apart from the Euclidean variety we all learn in school, and it has sparked discoveries in myriad fields, from finance to metallurgy, cosmology to medicine. In this interview, hear from the father of fractals about why he disdains rules, why he considers himself a philosopher, and why he abandons work on any given advance in fractals as soon as it becomes popular.

Dealing with the ultimate questions of life's origins, this study examines the pride, passion, and courage of the cosmological scientists who explore the origins, structure, and fate of the universe.

Impossible colors are hues that can only be perceived under specific conditions. Examples of impossible colors are bluish-yellow and reddish-green[citation needed]. This does not mean the muddy brown color created when mixing red and green paints, or the green color from yellow and blue, but completely unique "new" colors.

Experiments are surely changing the way we conduct social science. The number of experiments reported in major social-science journals is growing rapidly across education, criminology, political science, economics, and other areas. In academic economics, several recent Nobel Prizes have been awarded to laboratory experimentalists, and leading indicators of future Nobelists are rife with researchers focused on RFTs.

RT @bengoldacre: Fascinating details from Max Clifford: on the world behind McKeith's curtains http://dlvr.it/9GH3F

How would a creature limited to two dimensions be able to grasp the possibility of a third? Edwin A. Abbott's droll and delightful 'romance of many dimensions' explores this conundrum in the experiences of his protagonist, A Square, whose linear world is invaded by an emissary Sphere bringing the gospel of the third dimension on the eve of the new millennium. Part geometry lesson, part social satire, this classic work of science fiction brilliantly succeeds in enlarging all readers' imaginations beyond the limits of our 'respective dimensional prejudices'. In a world where class is determined by how many sides you possess, and women are straight lines, the prospects for enlightenment are boundless, and Abbott's hypotheses about a fourth and higher dimensions seem startlingly relevant today. This new edition of Flatland illuminates the social and intellectual context that produced the work as well as the timeless questions that it raises about the limits of our perception and knowledge.

Last week we asked you to put your toughest energy questions to nine world-leading energy scientists. You responded with more than 350 serious and searching questions on everything from renewable energy to nuclear power. Here are 10 of the best questions, answered by the awards committee of nine scientists on the Global Energy prize.

Its mysterious power may be a clue to a new theory about brains and bodies.

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first. Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science.

On the evening of June 20th, several hundred physicists, including a Nobel laureate, assembled in an auditorium at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing for a lecture by the Chinese mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. In the late nineteen-seventies, when Yau was in his twenties, he had made a series of breakthroughs that helped launch the string-theory revolution in physics and earned him, in addition to a Fields Medal—the most coveted award in mathematics—a reputation in both disciplines as a thinker of unrivalled technical power.

A starting point for a lot of Damasio’s research was the 19th-century case of Phineas Gage. He was a railroad worker who took a rod through his head, and it should have killed him, but he survived. What’s really interesting is that his personality changed. He retained his ability to use words articulately, and he was certainly OK doing mathematics. But, basically, he became a jerk.

The context of the story is Empire and colonialism. The relationship is between this guy who comes from India to Cambridge and the grand figure of Eddington, and a denouement completely tainted by colonial strategies. I think that’s interesting as a picture of the world at the time.

Graham Farmelo said that he’d never met anyone – even in Bristol where Paul Dirac grew up and lived – who’d ever heard of him: the greatest English physicist since Newton! Instead they’d lionised Archie Leach, who was in the same class at school. Archie had gone to America and changed his name to Cary Grant.

It turns out that even simple equations can have such complicated behaviour that, in practice, it’s impossible to predict the outcome, which is described as ‘chaotic’. And what’s interesting is that we’ve found this in lots of different areas: from biology to genetics, to computer science and physics, and even in evolutionary systems.

Complexity is saying that sometimes out of simple equations you can get complex behaviours that may not be random but perhaps structured. So the question then is how it is possible to predict where complexity emerges? Complexity the book is concerned with the creation of an institute in Santa Fe to address these questions…from evolutionary systems to cities, to financial markets.

How can a few black marks on a white page evoke an entire universe of sounds and meanings? In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene provides an accessible account of the brain circuitry of reading and explores what he calls the "reading paradox": Our cortex is the product of millions of years of evolution in a world without writing, so how did it adapt to recognize words? Reading in the Brain describes pioneering research on how we process language, revealing the hidden logic of spelling and the existence of powerful unconscious mechanisms for decoding words of any size, case, or font.

Arcology, a portmanteau of the words "architecture" and "ecology",[1] is a set of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density. These largely hypothetical structures would contain a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities and minimize individual human environmental impact. They are often portrayed as self-contained or economically self-sufficient.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.

Beach reads don’t have to be new best sellers or formulaic romances. In fact, summer is the perfect time to dig deep into books, classics and otherwise, you’ve missed. We asked exemplary authors in particular fields to recommend the books that matter most to them—the ones they keep going back to and, in many cases, that made them want to write. Their literary mix tapes, of a sort.

Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,400-page set that is destined to reinvent cooking. The lavishly illustrated books use thousands of original images to make the science and technology clear and engaging.

Puberty is difficult enough. Imagine going through it when you’re nine.

How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers.

On The Science, Pseudoscience and Lunatic Logic of Earthquake Prediction

'Gary Foshee, a collector and designer of puzzles from Issaquah near Seattle walked to the lectern to present his talk. It consisted of the following three sentences: "I have two children. One is a boy born on a Tuesday. What is the probability I have two boys?"'

"A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse."

How film-makers have (consciously or otherwise) adopted the 1/f fluctuation to reflect human attention spans.

"Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. It is a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it."

"You're six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations—and lived to tell the tale. Here's PM's 120-mph, 35,000-ft, 3-minutes-to-impact survival guide."

"It was once the “land of a thousand cities” and home to some of the world’s most renowned scientists, poets, and philosophers. Today it is seen mostly as a harsh backwater. To imagine Central Asia’s future, we must journey into its remarkable past."

"A wandering mind can do important work, scientists are learning - and may even be essential."

"That success is in the eye of the unsuccessful would seem to be the great unspoken dilemma dogging critics asked to consider the work of the rich and famous author and inspirational speaker Malcolm Gladwell. No matter how well intentioned or intellectually honest their attempts to assess his ideas, the subtext of Gladwell's perceived success, and its implications for their own aspirations in the competitive thought-generation business, obscures their judgment and sinks their morale."

"The Metropolitan Club, on Fifth Avenue at 60th street, is a palazzo in the mighty Manhattan style. Damn the expense. That’s what J.P. Morgan is supposed to have said when he commissioned Stanford White, the city’s most flamboyant architect, to build him a private gentleman’s club in 1894. Inside, on a Monday evening in late January, only a few members drifted over the red, monogrammed carpets, but it was still early, only a little after seven. This, however, is when Marilyn vos Savant likes to show up."

"In the early years after the second world war, health researchers in Britain noticed a curious epidemic: people had begun dying of heart attacks in unprecedented numbers. Nobody knew why, and so a scientist in London named Jerry Morris set up a vast study to examine the heart-attack rates in people of different occupations – schoolteachers, postmen, transport workers and more."

Fascinating piece on looking at cities through mathematical eyes - what laws define how our cities grow?