"The larger lesson is that those sleepy students, like a brain-damaged patient, benefit from the inability to focus. Their minds are drowsy and disorganized, humming with associations that they’d normally ignore. When we need an insight, of course, those stray associations are the source of the answer."

"I'm going to show you two kinds of nothing. The first is a small patch of space, way, way out in the universe, remote from everything, with nothing in it ... And next, I'm going to show you a painting. Except it isn't a painting, it's a canvas, on which you see...absolutely nothing."

"Imagine a Venn diagram showing the intersection of web geeks and science geeks ...that's a pretty big intersection. Science Hack Day is for anyone with an interest in bringing science and technology together. If you're a coder, designer, scientist, hacker or just an enthusiastic person with good ideas, Science Hack Day is for you."

From Planck length to gigaparsec ... and beyond!

"Relative to the témoins and to the national standards, Le Grand K has been losing weight — or, by the definition of mass under the metric system, the rest of the universe has been getting fatter."

The "inverse femtobarn" is a measurement of particle collision events per femtobarn. from Wikipedia.

"'I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much undetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.'"

"The radical, syndicated program 'Radiolab' creates striking sound effects to communicate big ideas. List to excerpts in this sonic gallery."

From the World Question Center 2011.

Simply because the sun is always setting

"Embedded memories and conspiring brain regions, scientists now believe, are the true source of ad-hoc creativity." from Seed.

"Archaeoacoustics is the discipline that explores acoustic phenomena encoded in ancient artifacts. For instance, theoretically a pot or vase could be 'read' like a gramophone record or phonograph cylinder for messages from the past." from Wikipedia.

"The Institute For Figuring is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring."

Project Sunshine aims to harness the power of the sun to tackle the biggest challenge facing the world today: meeting the increasing food and energy needs of the world's population in the context of an uncertain climate and global environment change.

"The Schumann resonances (SR) are a set of spectrum peaks in the extremely low frequency (ELF) portion of the Earth's electromagnetic field spectrum. Schumann resonances are global electromagnetic resonances, excited by lightning discharges in the cavity formed by the Earth surface and the ionosphere." from Wikipedia.

At 174 trillionths of a trillionth of a newton...from Scientific American.

Nanowires growing from bacteria might link up distant chemical reactions in sediments. from Nature News.

Human genome at ten. The more biologists look, the more complexity there seems to be. Erika Check Hayden asks if there's a way to make life simpler. from Nature News.

"We take visual imagination for granted. But the blank inner world of a patient called MX demonstrates the rich neural processes needed to create the images in our heads." from Discover.

"Wilson speculates that dreams are also an attempt to search for associations between seemingly unrelated experiences, which is why it’s so important for the controlling conscious self to disappear." from NYT Opinionator blog.

A new device tests the limits of Schrödinger's cat. from Scientific American.

Hubble 3D opens in IMAX theaters Friday, March 19.

"It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it." by Al Gore in NYT.

from Information Is Beautiful.

"...physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the universe was only a microsecond old." from NYT.

In the last two decades, network theory has emerged as a way of making sense of everything from the World Wide Web to the human brain. Now, as ecologists have begun applying this theory to ecosystems, they are gaining insights into how species are interconnected and how to foster biodiversity. from Yale Environment 360.

"To investigate the neural substrates that underlie spontaneous musical performance, we examined improvisation in professional jazz pianists using functional MRI." from PLoS ONE.

Concerts from the Library of Congress, 2008-2009. Presented by the Library's Music Division and the Science, Technology and Business Division.

Material ConneXion is a consultancy that connects materials scientists and design specialists with anyone seeking a better—stronger, lighter, more sustainable—material. They also curate a library of innovative materials that everyone from industrial designers to fashion students can access for research. In their annual Medium Awards, they recognize 12 exceptional new materials, now on display at their headquarters in New York City. from Seed.

The museum of science, art and human perception. Housed within the walls of San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts, the Exploratorium is a collage of hundreds of science, art, and human perception exhibits. The Exploratorium is a leader in the movement to promote museums as informal education centers.

"...embodied cognition, the idea that the brain is not the only part of us with a mind of its own." from nyt.

The Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results (JSUR) is an open-access forum for researchers seeking to further scientific discovery by sharing surprising or unexpected results. These results should provide guidance toward the verification (or negation) of extant hypotheses.

Acoustic ecology studies were established in the 1960s by naturalist R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia as an attempt to define the relationship between humans and their environment, as mediated through sound. With a focus that spans both science and art, the continuum of acoustic ecology often attracts individuals who are part researcher, part composer, and part adventurer. from seed.

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient mechanical calculator (also described as the first known mechanical computer) designed to calculate astronomical positions. from wikipedia.

Chaos is everywhere in the natural world, present in the coiling of smoke rings, the fronds of ferns, and the beating of our hearts. But at the level of quantum physics, chaos as we now define it is unquantifiable. from seed.

Celebrating insects in art and the art of being an insect

Chromoscope has been created using public-domain datasets from a number of all-sky astronomy projects. It lets you easily move around the sky and fade between wavelengths using a simple user-interface to illustrate the similarities and differences between what is visible at each wavelength.

A selection of the year’s best books for the science enthusiasts on your list, whether they are Manhattan naturalists, Scientific Revolution buffs, or lovers of microbial manga. from seed.

When Carsten Kamenz of Berlin's Humboldt-University turned his electron microscope on arachnid "book lungs," he found a landscape of sere, alien beauty—canyons and beaches of chitin that, at higher magnifications, split into thin pages fringed with lacy arches and carpeted with mushroom-like structures.

With toxic compounds turning up in animals, food, and people all over the world, scientists are calling for green chemistry: a sustainable ethos of product design.

Spending hours on the net isn't only changing the way we work, shop and socialise. A leading neurologist says it is subtly re-wiring the way we think and behave – often for the better.

In April 2009, Time Warner Cable announced its largest-ever charitable commitment of $100 million cash and in-kind over five years to inspire students to pursue science and technology education and careers.

What happens when science nerds get hold of knitting needles and crochet hooks? Marvelous, wonderful things, that's what. Here we present a sampling of our favorite knitted and crocheted science creations. from Discover.

To mark its centenary, in June the Science Museum in London had its curators select the 10 objects in its collection that had made the biggest mark on history. These then went to a public vote to find the most important invention of past centuries. Visitors to the museum and online voters cast nearly 50,000 votes. Find out the winners. from new scientist.

This real-time simulation displays the CO2 emissions of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates.

350.org is an international campaign dedicated to building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis--the solutions that science and justice demand. Our mission is to inspire the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis—to create a new sense of urgency and of possibility for our planet.

Here we have collected 13 stunning images of some of the world’s most impressive and beautiful glaciers, captured from space by astronauts and satellites. from wired science.

disorientation begets creative thinking. from nyt.

Photomicrography Competition. Small World is regarded as the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope.

moonbell transforms the topography of the moon into sound.

Over 30,000 still images and video, as well as local information about changing biodiversity, have been uploaded to the Encyclopedia of Life via new tools that let the public contribute as never before to a global online science collaboration of unprecedented scale.

the first observations made by the new Wide Field Camera 3 aboard the upgraded NASA Hubble Space Telescope.

Mysteriously beautiful fractals are deepening our understanding of nature. from NOVA | PBS Video.

over time the constant hyperactivation of the stress response can unbalance the entire feedback loop. from nyt.

"We all know, I think, that a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable."

"We are, all of us, abandoning taxonomy, the ordering and naming of life." from nyt.

superconducting aluminium and silicon circuit on a sapphire wafer to make five-state qubits.

from Harper's Magazine.

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems.

Off-planet, “green” lifestyles aren’t just fashionable, they’re required. Any eventual residents of a lunar base or Martian habitat will almost certainly be vegetarians, and thrift will be crucial for survival. “You must strive to recycle virtually every atom of everything that you’ve brought with you,” Dixon says. “And the technology required to achieve that is exactly what we need here on Earth to reduce our environmental imprint and create more sustainable ecosystems, all so we can manage to survive here a bit longer than we otherwise might.”

psychological distance and creativity. from scientific american.

The plan is to test a controversial theory: the possibility that gravity drops slightly during a total eclipse.

The Mind and Life Institute is dedicated to fostering dialogue and research at the highest possible level between modern science and the great living contemplative traditions, especially Buddhism. It builds on a deep commitment to the power and value of both of these ways of advancing knowledge and their potential to alleviate suffering.

a small but growing body of research suggests that barefoot is the way to run. from wired.

A new breed of architectural objects, inspired by quantum physics and other fields of theoretical science.

the biology of caloric restriction. from nyt.

Oliver Sacks explores how the power of music can make the brain come alive. (Note: Due to rights restrictions, this program is only available for streaming on the NOVA website for one week, from July 1-7, 2009.)

Imagine Science Films is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization committed to promoting a high-level dialogue between scientists and filmmakers. ISF encourages a greater collaboration between scientists who dedicate their lives to studying the world we live in and filmmakers who have the power to interpret and expose this knowledge, ultimately making science accessible and stimulating to a broader audience.

broader connections between music, emotion, and speech.

layered accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria.

the seed design video series.

making science user-friendly

fragrance as high art.

to cultivate and sustain a general public informed by the content of science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future.

a look into the future that never was.

nanofiber scaffolds seeded with patient-derived stem cells could repair ravaged joints.

new media and brain plasticity. from seed.

new experiments in developmental psychology. from seed.

the science of concentration. from nyt.