Category Archives: Science

INVENTED BY WOMEN

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When someone says the word “inventor,” prolific and history-making men like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, George Washington Carver and Benjamin Franklin spring to mind. But what about all the women who invented amazing things, women we don’t hear about very often?

We’ve rounded up eight awesome things — many of which we all use frequently — that you probably didn’t know were invented by ladies. Here’s to entrepreneurial girl power:

Windshield Wipers

windshield wipers

Mary Anderson thought up the windshield wiper out of necessity in 1903. During a road trip from Alabama to New York City, Anderson noticed drivers stopping to clear snow and ice off their windshields. Soon after, she came up with the windshield wiper — an arm with a rubber blade that could be activated without getting out of your car. She applied for a patent in 1904, and it was issued in 1905. Although the device did not gain popularity until nearly a decade later, it’s hard to imagine what it would be like to drive without windshield wipers today.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

m.huffpost.com/us/entry/3744401?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000003

Monogamy An Evolutionary Puzzle !

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By Carl Zimmer in NYT

“Monogamy is a problem,” said Dieter Lukas of the University of Cambridge in a telephone news conference last week. As Dr. Lukas explained to reporters, he and other biologists consider monogamy an evolutionary puzzle.

In 9 percent of all mammal species, males and females will share a common territory for more than one breeding season, and in some cases bond for life. This is a problem — a scientific one — because male mammals could theoretically have more offspring by giving up on monogamy and mating with lots of females.

In a new study, Dr. Lukas and his colleague Tim Clutton-Brock suggest that monogamy evolves when females spread out, making it hard for a male to travel around and fend off competing males.

On the same day, Kit Opie of University College London and his colleagues published a similar study on primates, which are especially monogamous — males and females bond in over a quarter of primate species. The London scientists came to a different conclusion: that the threat of infanticide leads males to stick with only one female, protecting her from other males.

Even with the scientific problem far from resolved, research like this inevitably turns us into narcissists. It’s all well and good to understand why the gray-handed night monkey became monogamous. But we want to know: What does this say about men and women?

As with all things concerning the human heart, it’s complicated.

“The human mating system is extremely flexible,” Bernard Chapais of the University of Montreal wrote in a recent review in Evolutionary Anthropology. Only 17 percent of human cultures are strictly monogamous. The vast majority of human societies embrace a mix of marriage types, with some people practicing monogamy and others polygamy. (Most people in these cultures are in monogamous marriages, though.)

There are even some societies where a woman may marry several men. And some men and women have secret relationships that last for years while they’re married to other people, a kind of dual monogamy. Same-sex marriages acknowledge commitments that in many cases existed long before they won legal recognition. Click link for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/02/science/monogamys-boost-to-human-evolution.html?ref=science&_r=0

Posted By F. Sheikh

philosophy from the preposterous universe

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Sean Carroll interviewed by Richard Marshal in 3 A.M. Magazine.

A worth reading discussion about Philosophy and Physics.

“Science has data in addition to reason, which is the best cure for sloppy thinking. So in principle it might be possible for a very rigorous metaphysician to be so careful that everything they say is both true and useful; in practice, we human beings are not so smart, and a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn things from the discoveries of science.”

“Sean Carroll is the uber-chillin’ philosophical physicist who investigates how the preposterous universe works at a deep level, who thinks spats between physics and philosophy are silly, who thinks a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn from discoveries of science, who asks how we are to live if there is no God, who is comfortable with naturalism and physicalism, who thinks emergentism central, that freewill is a crucial part of our best higher-level vocabulary, that there aren’t multiple levels of reality, which is quantum based not relativity based, is a cheerful realist, disagrees with Tim Maudlin about wave functions and Craig Callender about multiverses, worries about pseudo-scientific ideas and that the notion of ‘domains of applicability’ is lamentably under-appreciated. Stellar!”

“There’s an important point here worth emphasizing. Science has an enormous advantage over other disciplines when it comes to making progress: namely, the direct confrontation with data forces scientists to be more imaginative (and flexible) than they might otherwise bother to be. As a result, scientists often end up with theories that are extremely surprising from the point of view of everyday intuition. A philosopher might come up with a seemingly valid a priori argument for some conclusion, only to have that conclusion overthrown by later scientific advances. In retrospect, we will see that there was something wrong about the original argument. But the point is that seeing such wrongness can be really hard if all we have to lean on is our ability to reason. Science has data in addition to reason, which is the best cure for sloppy thinking. So in principle it might be possible for a very rigorous metaphysician to be so careful that everything they say is both true and useful; in practice, we human beings are not so smart, and a wise philosopher will always be willing to learn things from the discoveries of science.”

”

3:AM: I was interested to see ‘mad dog naturalist’ Alex Rosenberg’s position being regarded as provocative by most of the assembled where perhaps I might have expected his austere brand of naturalism to have been acceptable. Were you surprised by this?

SC: Not at all surprised. Alex is a fantastic person to have a meeting like that, because he is absolutely committed to an unflinching acceptance of the consequences of his worldview, which in this case means tossing out all sorts of common-sense everyday phenomena as “illusions.” That gets right to the heart of the challenge to the modern naturalist: given that the world really is just a quantum state evolving in Hilbert space (or whatever physics ends up telling us that it is), what is the status of tables and chairs, baseball and democracy, beauty and moral responsibility? Everyone in the room agreed that the fundamental-physics picture gives a correct way of talking about the world; but is it the only way, and if not, what are the relationships between the different ways of talking?”

3:AM: Finally, are there any new ideas or facts coming out of physics now that will leave us all here at 3ammagazine in a state of mind boggled shock that will require us to revolutionize previously held views?

SC: Taking seriously this idea of “domains of applicability” of scientific theories, I think it is dramatically under-appreciated that we already have a theory (the Standard Model of particle physics plus general relativity) whose domain of applicability includes all of everyday experience. We will not be discovering any new fundamental forces or particles that are relevant to ordinary human life; we have the basic rules of that realm figured out. (Which isn’t to say we’re anywhere close to understanding how those basic rules are manifested in complicated real-world situations.)

But reality is much larger than the realm of our everyday experience, and we’re very far from having the whole world figured out. Obviously we don’t understand dark matter, dark energy, the Big Bang, quantum gravity, etc. We don’t even have a consensus on what really happens during the process of a quantum measurement. My own guess is that the most dramatic potential for new ideas lies at the intersection of quantum theory and cosmology. I previously confessed to having fondness for the multiverse, but we honestly don’t have a compelling model of it as yet. It’s absolutely conceivable that the whole multiverse idea is dramatically on the wrong track, and the truth is going to look completely different once we understand how space and time emerge from quantum mechanics. Even better and more exciting would be if we find that our current view of quantum mechanics is completely wrong and has to be replaced by something deeply different – I should only be so lucky. Click below for full interview;

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-philosopher-physicist/

Posted By F. Sheikh

‘Definining Science-Where To Draw The Line Between Science and Non-Science?’ By Sean Carroll

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“Defining the concept of “science” is a notoriously tricky business. In particular, there is long-running debate over the demarcation problem, which asks where we should draw the line between science and non-science. I won’t be providing final any final answers to this question here. But I do believe that we can parcel out the difficulties into certain distinct classes, based on a simple scheme for describing how science works. Essentially, science consists of the following three-part process:

  1. Think of every possible way the world could be. Label each way an “hypothesis.”
  2. Look at how the world actually is. Call what you see “data” (or “evidence”).
  3. Where possible, choose the hypothesis that provides the best fit to the data.

The steps are not necessarily in chronological order; sometimes the data come first, sometimes it’s the hypotheses. This is basically what’s known as the hypothetico-deductive method, although I’m intentionally being more vague because I certainly don’t think this provides a final-answer definition of “science.”

The reason why it’s hard to provide a cut-and-dried definition of “science” is that every one of these three steps is highly problematic in its own way. Number 3 is probably the trickiest; any finite amount of data will generally underdetermine a choice of hypothesis, and we need to rely on imprecise criteria for deciding between theories. (Thomas Kuhnsuggested five values that are invoked in making such choices: accuracy, simplicity, consistency, scope, and fruitfulness. A good list, but far short of an objective algorithm.) But even numbers 1 and 2 would require a great deal more thought before they rose to the level of perfect clarity. It’s not easy to describe how we actually formulate hypotheses, nor how we decide which data to collect. (Problems that are vividly narrated in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, among other places.)

But I think it’s a good basic outline. What you very often find, however, are folks who try to be a bit more specific and programmatic in their definition of science, and end up falling into the trap of our poor lexicographic enthusiasts: they mistake the definition for the thing being defined.

Along these lines, you will sometimes hear claims such as these:

  • “Science assumes naturalism, and therefore cannot speak about the supernatural.”
  • “Scientific theories must make realistically falsifiable predictions.”
  • “Science must be based on experiments that are reproducible.”

In each case, you can kind of see why one might like such a claim to be true — they would make our lives simpler in various ways. But each one of these is straightforwardly false.” Click link to read full article;

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/07/03/what-is-science/

Posted By F. Sheikh