Asimov’s favorite of his short stories, and widely regarded to have an astonishing ending. It certainly is an incredible idea, and one I first encountered, personally, in Scott Adams’ ‘God’s Debris’.

Infographic on the scientific evidence for effectiveness of popular dietary supplements. ‘Showing tangible health benefits when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet.’

What a beautiful instrument.

A chart.

As of this writing, “6 on the International Space Station and 6 aboard Space Shuttle Discovery.”

Jesse Bering: “I don’t think any scholar ever captured the suicidal mind better than Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister in his 1990 Psychological Review article , ‘Suicide as Escape from the Self.’” An exploration of the six conditions that lead to suicide — academic, informative, and imploring.

A ton of scientific studies are flat-out wrong. And most of it doesn't really matter anyway.

"‘Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.’"

"Your Guide to Quackery, Health Fraud, and Intelligent Decisions"

On the history of autism and the dramatic increase of diagnoses in Silicon Valley.

"It seems the message of this research for those seeking to establish a new habit is to repeat the behaviour every day if you can, but don't worry excessively if you miss a day or two. Also be prepared for the long haul — remember the average time to reach peak automaticity was 66 days."

I wonder if it takes just as long to break a habit?

"Capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting, can get things done not because they have more will power, more drive, but because they know productivity is a game of cat and mouse versus a childish primal human predilection for pleasure and novelty which can never be excised from the soul. Your effort is better spent outsmarting yourself than making empty promises through plugging dates into a calendar or setting deadlines for push ups."

"Atul Gawande gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s School of Medicine last week. Here is what he told the graduating class."

On the need for building interconnected systems of care in medicine, rather than a hodgepodge of specialists not communicating with each other.

Written with the opinion that this is necessarily a Bad Thing. Revisit; this is interesting.

I want to revisit this later; it is an interesting retort to Michael Pollan and others' condemnations of current farming techniques.

So if people are naturally creative or not, to what degree does 'encouraging' creativity even work? And do we understand this enough to know what aspects of creativity we are encouraging, or rather I should say: do we know how to encourage the 'good' parts of being creative and not make people into schizophrenics/sociopaths?

This is absolutely beautiful. "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."

A gravitational space-time detector picked up extra noise, which has made some theorize that our entire universe is a hologram.

This is insanely fascinating, and I honestly don't understand it at all. "In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected." "We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram."

"'Garden of Eden', 2007 by Wollle shows eight pedestals, each of which is covered with an airtight Plexiglas box. Via the internet, the latest air pollution levels in the capitals of the G8-countries are obtained. The system reproduces these levels artificially inside these boxes, each of which contains a lettuce that serves an indicator of the quality of the air inside the capsules."

Count down to Christmas with amazing photos that will remind you just how scary-big this place is.

"The Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope."

Is this it? "Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. Daniel G. Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT, has developed a simple method to split water molecules and produce oxygen gas, a discovery that paves the way for large-scale use of solar power." "The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up."

"I’ve seen many images of the Earth and Moon together as taken by distant spacecraft, but this, seeing them in motion, really brings home just where we are: a planetary system, an astronomical body, a blue orb hanging in space orbited by a desolate moon

They can flip themselves into the air a bunch of centimeters by snapping their jaws. This video is wonderful.

Beautiful, deadly.

"HR753 is 23.5 light years away and only 5 months from the outer surface of your light cone — your ever-growing sphere of potential causality — which began its expansion from Earth on April 14 1985."

"As much as that sounds like a euphemism, it isn’t." What happens when you order pubic lice from LoveBugz, "The FanSite of the Lousing Lifestyle."

"With enough time, tarps, and successive creature-eaters, our victory over un-nature is inevitable." The story of GMO gone horribly awry.

"Panpyschism" is the theory that the entire universe is made up of bits of consciousness. "If you are poetically inclined, you might think of the rock as a purely contemplative being."

Currently sunny in...

From the US National Library of Medicine, a huge collection of free, public-domain images from anatomical atlases. A great wealth of material. Wish it were designed better and that the books were all scanned rather than some photographed.

An international body that promotes responsible forestry and printing practices. I've started noticing their seal around. It's good to know this is going strong.

"It is my mission to correctly re-shelve books to the appropriate section of the bookstore." Putting pseudo-scientific books about religion in the Religion section. Or Religious Fiction section. Or New Age section.

Excellent videos!

Can we ever truly know ourselves? No, and it would be awful if we did. "I think that life will continue to bewilder us for as long as we are self-conscious, thinking, feeling beings. "

"Wrist-slittingly depressing, yes, but there are glimmers of hope on the horizon."

"Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis, have created a glossy simulacrum of a museum, a slick imitation of a scientific enterprise veneered over long disproved religious fables..."

"...the rule, version 2.0: If you drop a piece of food, pick it up quickly, take five seconds to recall that just a few bacteria can make you sick, then take a few more to think about where you dropped it and whether or not it’s worth eating."

Margulis says that Gaia is "the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth's surface. Period."

String theory, hybrid cars, and more. A good five minute introduction, then check out Wikipedia.

Laughter as an ancient and crude social lubricant. Indeed!

A huge collection of arguments against the reality of global warming, and how to approach them.

"Our obsession with physical appearance may not be so shallow after all." Symmetry and youth rule.

Using Mathematica to write a program that generates the Big Bang sound. "The simulation lasts 100 seconds representing the first 760 thousand years of evolution of the universe, and varies the sound intensity to match the cosmic microwave..."

"...if the project is successful, the space-time around a tiny point within our universe will be distorted in such a way that it will begin to form a new superfluid space, and eventually break off..."

"It's a hysterical and spectacular mint-powered version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas."

"It's surprising and really exciting to know that there is such sophisticated information being passed along in the calls you can hear almost every day."

No longer probably a natural change. Definitely because of humans.

Holy shit. " While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations."

"With little mathematics, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification."

"Perhaps, she speculates, bees possess some ability to perceive not only light and magnetism but quarks as well."

"Rubinstein should be deeply embarrassed to have babbled on so about a subject on which he obviously knows nothing, and did not even trouble himself to take so much as a superficial look at what actual biologists say on the subject." A rebuttal to the ant

Science and sound experiments. Excellent recordings available.

"Finding water on different regions on Mars has implications for understanding its complex geologic history, the possible existence of past life and the sustenance of potential future astronauts."

Amazing. A folder full of these makes for an excellent screensaver.

"Fittingly, the asteroid carried the provisional designation 2001 DA42, thus commemorating the year of his untimely death, containing his initials, and incorporating the famous answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything."

"In order to decrease the total amount of energy your heating system has to supply, TURN DOWN THE THERMOSTAT AT NIGHT!"

"Saturn is scheduled to release its probe named Huygens that will actually attempt to land on the shrouded moon [Titan] in early January." "Will the truth be stranger than we imagined?"

Swirling colors!

The famous "Eye of God" composite photo. Stunning.

"Sliding through Earth's shadow, the Moon turned haunting shades of red and orange during the eclipse's total phase. The reddish hues are caused by sunlight scattered and refracted by the atmosphere into the Earth's otherwise dark central shadow region."

Fun things to do with microwaves.

"'Today we have made history. Today we go to the stars,' said Peter Diamandis, co-founder of the X Prize Foundation."

"After nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it, Stephen Hawking is saying he was wrong."

"These photos are stills from a video the scientists recorded at 1,000 frames-per-second of a marble-size steel ball dropping onto loose, fine sand."

"Flash! You're dead."

"A privately-developed rocket plane will launch into history on June 21 on a mission to become the world’s first commercial manned space vehicle."