When I first saw this beautiful remote sensing image, I couldn't help but feel that I was looking at a painting by an abstract expressionist.
Starting in the 1940s, abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollack and Clyfford Still "valued spontaneity and improvisation, and they accorded the highest importance to process," writes Stella Paul of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
These artists placed "an emphasis on dynamic, energetic gesture," she notes. Their works also were p ...read more
Fight the flu, monitor mouth microbes, and prepare for Citizen Science Day!
Flu Near You
How are you feeling? If you can answer that question, you can answer a very quick weekly survey to tell researchers if you're feeling sick or not. This effort helps inform scientists on where the flu is around the world, check out the results on the map to see if the flu is, in fact, near you!
Get started!
Location: Online Only ...read more
Is it better to be lucky or good? Well, it's a trick question — you actually need both if you want to be successful.
In an admittedly simplistic model, researchers from Italy's University of Catania, looked at whether talented individuals or those blessed with luck rose to the top. Though they found it took a bit of both, the distribution wasn't even. The most successful people weren't the most talented — they were simply the luckiest.
Keep That Rabbit's Foot
Their work was inspired ...read more
Thanks in large measure to warming temperatures, the average snowpack in U.S. western states has dropped by 15 to 30 percent since 1915.
The water in that lost snowpack is comparable in volume to Lake Mead. With a maximum capacity of 9.3 trillion gallons, Mead is the West’s largest manmade reservoir.
The new data on snowpack declines are among the striking results of a study led by Philip Mote, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oreg ...read more
"Salami slicing" refers to the practice of breaking scientific studies down into small chunks and publishing each part as a seperate paper.
Given that scientists are judged in large part by the number of peer-reviewed papers they produce, it's easy to understand the temptation to engage in salami publication. It's officialy discouraged, but it's still very common to see researchers writing perhaps 3 or 4 papers based on a single project that could, realistically, have been one big paper. ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine