Month: January 2013

Folding Empanadas Into Your Super Bowl Spread (audio)

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Folding Empanadas Into Your Super Bowl Spread
by NPR Staff
January 30, 2013
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/30/170668788/folding-empanadas-into-your-super-bowl-spread

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Encoded In DNA

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Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Encoded In DNA
January 25, 2013
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/25/170267855/shakespeares-sonnets-encoded-in-dna

Reporting in Nature, researchers write of encoding a variety of files—jpg, mp3, txt and pdf—in strands of DNA.
Lead author Nick Goldman says DNA is extraordinarily long-lasting, compared to today’s hard drives and magnetic tapes.
And if all the world’s information were written in DNA, he says, it would fit in the back of a station wagon.

what did you store in that DNA? … anything is just as possible. But we chose a photograph of our own institute

see also:
http://www.nature.com/news/synthetic-double-helix-faithfully-stores-shakespeare-s-sonnets-1.12279

E-Readers Track How We Read, But Is The Data Useful To Authors? (audio)

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E-Readers Track How We Read, But Is The Data Useful To Authors? (audio)
by Lynn Neary
January 28, 2013
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/01/28/170296373/e-readers-track-how-we-read-but-is-the-data-useful-to-authors
Would I love to hitch the equivalent of a polygraph to my readers and know how they are responding word by word? That would be quite interesting.”

Have We Met Before? Doppelgangers Caught On Camera

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Have We Met Before? Doppelgangers Caught On Camera
by Serri Graslie
January 29, 2013
http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2013/01/29/170279625/have-we-met-before-doppelgangers-caught-on-camera

a symptom of the modern world we live in — where, despite our connections through social media, we can feel more alone than ever.

BRUNELLE: you would be surprised how many people on this planet are looking for their doppelganger. And the most interesting example, would be the Chinese people. I’ve got many emails over the years from Chinese people who are asking me, could you please find my lookalike, please, so I can have something to relate to? And some of them write from Beijing, China. So…

BLOCK: What do you think that says?

BRUNELLE: Well, I think that we live in a world where people are more alone than ever because we’re more in contact with people with Facebook and the smartphones and everything. But at the end of the day, you’re alone in your room and you’re thinking about your life, and it’s – you would like to have someone, to relate to, that could be your partner or your best friend. So someone who looks like you, at least you can share some of your misery

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PUBMED papers on doppelgängers:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=doppelg%C3%A4nger

Dung beetles guided by Milky Way (audio)

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Dung beetles guided by Milky Way
24 January 2013
By Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent, BBC News
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21150721

“These beetles have compound eyes,” she told the BBC. “It’s known that crabs,
which also have compound eyes, can see a few of the brightest stars in the sky.
Maybe the beetles can do this as well, but we don’t know that yet; it’s
something we’re looking at. However, when we show them just the bright stars in
the sky, they get lost. So it’s not them that the beetles are using to orientate
themselves.”

also:

Swiss Scientists Discover Dung Beetles Use The Milky Way For GPS  (audio)
January 29, 2013
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/29/170588505/swiss-scientists-discover-dung-beetles-use-the-milky-way-for-gps