Maria Glod, a Washington Post Staff Writer, has a good overview of the problem in her story for the Washington Post today (). The US has had the same levels of performance as in the mid-1990's. While we may want to point out that the US gets a lot of Nobel Prizes, perhaps reflecting some creativity, we cannot deny that our youth have a reduced basic knowledge of the facts.… Continue

The New York Times reported today on San Diego's Dr. Sara Mednick, a associate professor at UCSD. In her study, performance was assessed after three interventions: a nap, 200mgs of caffeine, or a placebo. The results: performance in motor and verbal tasks improved by napping, but not caffeine.

So while you may feel like you are typing faster after a cup of coffee, you are making more mistakes, too.



Dr. Mednick is part of the San Diego… Continue

The US has shown a long standing lead in computer technology at the high end. New players in Europe and Asia are looking to potentially dethrone the US as the leader in the fastest supercomputer. The current leader, IBM currently has a machine at Los Alamos that can perform 1.1 petaflops--about a million times faster than a decent desktop personal computer. Because of the ever falling price of CPUs, it is now possible to built supercomputers at a much… Continue

Because it costs $15,000 per pint to bring water into space, NASA developed a system that can convert other um...'fluids' into drinkable water. NASA sent "jars of sweat" to researchers asking them to get drinkable water from this other less thirst-quenching sources of water.



This example of pushing technology and our perceptions of clean water sources has huge Earth-bound implications. In 2006, waterborne diseases were estimated to cause 1.8 million deaths each year while about 1.1… Continue

It might be some Higgs bosons. The Large Hadron Collider started up today and I think we are all slightly nervous for two reasons. Firstly, that they might not find anything and they will have spent 14 years and $8 billion on a very large potential wine cellar or subterranean 17-mile jogging track. Secondly, that they might find something and inadvertently start some weird 'quantum fire' that scorches our bosons--if you know what I mean. Keep that fire extinguisher… Continue