This is going to be a precious link for those who have a lot of time and are in search of inspiration right now: 100…
Leave a CommentCategory: Science
Waking Up To Sleep is a complete conference on sleep held for The Science Network in February 2007. List of speakers includes: Charles Czeisler, Luis…
Leave a CommentBig big fuzz about IDA, today. See here for a rather sensationalistic article on SkyNews or here for one slightly more critical on BBC. I…
Leave a CommentPerhaps what I am getting at is that scientific papers tend to be static. The best literature – of any kind – has a beginning,…
Leave a CommentThis is kind of old (goes back to 2005/7) but fascinating. This guy got 6 atomic clock. He left 3 at home and he took…
Leave a Comment![[image by fd]](http://static.flickr.com/8/15327066_4f66fd82f2_m.jpg "[image by fd]")
Everybody knows Wikipedia so no need for introduction. Let’s just say that of the many very different opinions I have heard about it – placeable everywhere in the range from most celebratory to destructive – there is a quote that I find very attractive:
Wikipedia should not work, but it does!
This quote, which I believe is attributable to one of the fathers of wikpedia, Larry Sanger, says much about the on-line encyclopedia:
- Wikipedia is an experiment. A crazy one. Most people would have thought that the wiki affair would have been a failure but in fact it is now after only few years the biggest encyclopedia available nowadays.
- Nobody really knows how and why wikipedia works.
X PRIZE Foundation is a non-profit foundation based in Santa Monica, CA. They gained popularity few years ago when they listed and subsequently awarded the Ansari X Prize. They offered US$10mln to the first private institution that would be able to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. The price was awarded in 2004 and had a lot of echo. After that success, the X-Prize fondation grew stronger so that now they can efford to offer a new batch of prizes, related to different disciplines. One of them is the Archon X Prize for Genomics that also happened to be the largest medical prize in history. The prize is described as
Leave a CommentA multi-million dollar incentive to create technology that can successfully map 100 human genomes in 10 days. The prize is designed to usher in a new era of personalized preventative medicine and stimulate new avenues of research and development of medical sciences.
I just saw something on the weekly edition of Nature Jobs that made me very happy. It is something that I was waiting to see since a long time. In May 2006 Georgia Chenevix-Trench felt like sharing some of her wisdom with the youngest public of the journal Nature. In the (often embarrassing) portion of the journal called Nature Jobs, she published a Decalogue with “tips for students”; goal of the letter was to provide prospective PhD students with rules of thumbs that would help out having a successful career. Sadly enough most of them were embracing the concept of hard work and only marginally important skills such as creativity, imagination, collaborative science.