Mark Griswold, a friend and colleague at my university who is a professor of radiology, gave a talk at the Microsoft builders’ event this week that highlighted the features of a new device called the HoloLens headset that overlays virtual 3D objects onto the physical environment around us and promises to revolutionize many fields of education by providing students with the ability to see complete systems that are hidden within an outer shell, like the skeletal structure or the cardiovascular system of a human body. See for yourself
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Most of this blog’s readers would have heard about the Golden Ratio, supposedly first derived by Euclid. If one takes a straight line segment and divides into two such that the ratio of the longer part to the shorter is the same as the ratio of the whole line to the longer part, some simple algebra shows that this ratio works out to be about 1.618 to one.
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PZ Myers had a post about a paper presented at the April meeting of the American Physical Society that made some outlandish claims about locating god’s throne. Some readers may be curious about how such a crazy paper made it into the program of a serious physics conference organized by the world’s largest professional organization of physicists and of which I am a member.
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If ever I feel the temptation to feel sorry for myself, I like to remind myself of the idea demonstrated in the cartoon below that shows how in order for us to be alive at all, every single one of the millions of our ancestors, all the way back to the first living organism, had to be survive long enough to reproduce. If, at an early stage of that sequence, one were to put odds on that happening, the chances against it are enormous. And yet here we are.
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Xeni Jardin is a journalist who was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago and is undergoing the difficult treatment that is called for. She has a fine piece where she says she has had it up to here with quacks promoting bogus cures that give false hope to people with the disease and endangers them by luring them away from real medicine.
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Next to heart disease, cancers are the leading cause of death in the US. But Richard Stevens writes that unlike with most other cancers where the major causes are known, identifying what primarily causes breast cancer remains stubbornly elusive.
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The Journal of the American Medical Association has published a major study today that once more shows that there is no link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism. You can read the paper here. As this news report on the study concludes:
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The SpaceX company successfully launched its cargo to the Space Station. But they had another goal in mind and that was to see if, once the cargo capsule had peeled away, they could land the Falcon 9 booster rocket onto a floating barge because that would enable them to reuse the booster and provide a huge savings.
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I tend to be swayed back and forth by the promise of self-driving cars. On the one hand, I read about how good they are and have advanced so much that one might expect them to be available for commercial use within the next decade. Then I read that that they are only as good as the latest map updates and cannot cope with the kinds of temporary changes in road conditions that are common and then I feel pessimistic that they will be a reality soon.
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