SEMCIÊNCIA

A CONVERSATION WITH JEREMY NIVEN Insects as Model Animals Steve Forrest for The New York Times Dr. Jeremy Niven in his lab at the zoology department at Cambridge University. By  CLAUDIA DREIFUS Published: July 12, 2010 FACEBOOK TWITTER RECOMMEND SIGN IN TO E-MAIL PRINT REPRINTS SHARE Jeremy Niven spends his days at Cambridge University running locusts across ladders and through mazes, trying to figure out how bugs think. Dr. Niven, 34, studies the evolution of brains and neurons in insects and other animals, like humans. We spoke during a break in last month's World Science Festival in New York, where he was a guest presenter, and then again later via telephone. An edited version of the two conversations follows: RSS Feed  Get Science News From The New York Times » Q. YOUR RESEARCH SUBJECTS ARE LOCUSTS. SOME PEOPLE MIGHT SAY, “LOCUSTS, YUCK!” WHY STUDY THEM? A.  I think locusts are sweet. When you get used to them, they are actually quite nice. Actually, I find that working with in...

John Bell And The Nature Of Reality Posted:  13 Jul 2010 09:10 PM PDT Why have so few heard of one of the great heroes of modern physics? In 1935, Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen outlined an extraordinary paradox associated with the then emerging science of quantum mechanics. They pointed out that quantum mechanics allows two objects to be described by the same single wave function. In effect, these separate objects somehow share the same existence so that a measurement on one immediately influences the other, regardless of the distance between them. To Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen this clearly violated special relativity which prevents the transmission of signals at superluminal speed. Something had to give. Despite the seriousness of this situation, the EPR paradox, as it became known, was more or less ignored by physicists until relatively recently. Today, we call the relationship between objects that share the same existence entanglement. And it is the f...

Science explains, not describes The experience of consciousness seems incommunicable and ineffable. Yet science can hope to explain how it arises   (2) Tweet this  (27) Comments ( 31 ) Sue Blackmore guardian.co.uk , Monday 12 July 2010 10.25 BST Article history The question:  Can science explain everything? When Andrew Brown first posed this week's question to me he asked "Can science describe everything?". My instant, unreflective reply was "No". He implied that this might be a less restrictive question than "Can science explain everything" and yet my instant reaction to this one was "Yes". I'd like to explore this curious difference. Science can (potentially at least) explain everything because its ways of trying to understand the universe by asking questions of it should not leave any areas off-limits. The methods of openness, inquiry, curiosity, theory building, hypothesis testing and so on can be adapted and developed to explore and ...

HOW-TO Read Research Papers MITT ROMNEY Firing at the Foreign Policy Mandarins GLOBALIZATION Cause for Optimism on Africa How to read research papers Posted By  Daniel W. Drezner     Friday, July 9, 2010 - 5:37 PM      Share Ezra Klein made an interesting observation  a few days ago about how opinion journalists read papers by experts: [T]his is one of the difficulties with analysis. Fairly few political commentators know enough to decide which research papers are methodologically convincing and which aren't. So we often end up touting the papers that sound right, and the papers that sound right are, unsurprisingly, the ones that accord most closely with our view of the world. To which Will Wilkinson said " Amen ":  This is one of the reasons I tend not to blog as much I’d like about a lot of debates in economic policy. I just don’t know who to trust, and I don’t trust myself enough to not just tout work that confirms my biases. This is also why I tend to worry a lot abou...