Tuning in to a deep sea monster
“LONDON, England — Scientists have revealed a mysterious recording that they say could be the sound of a giant beast lurking in the depths of the ocean. “
Calling Peter Benchly
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Category Archives: science and technology
Created Equal?
Sex Differences in the Brain
Men and women display patterns of behavioral and cognitive differences that reflect varying hormonal influences on brain development
By Doreen Kimura
Men and women differ not only in their physical attributes and reproductive function but also in many other characteristics, including the way they solve intellectual problems. For the past few decades, it has been ideologically fashionable to insist that these behavioral differences are minimal and are the consequence of variations in experience during development before and after adolescence. Evidence accumulated more recently, however, suggests that the effects of sex hormones on brain organization occur so early in life that from the start the environment is acting on differently wired brains in boys and girls. Such effects make evaluating the role of experience, independent of physiological predisposition, a difficult if not dubious task. The biological bases of sex differences in brain and behavior have become much better known through increasing numbers of behavioral, neurological and endocrinological studies.
Sick Sense of Ethics
What?!? How is letting them be born stranger than chopping them up for science???
A Home for Their Embryos
By Ellen S. Glazer
Carla has both a close friend and a close family member who are struggling with infertility and she acknowledges that she thought about donating the embryos to one of them. As an infertile person with close friends who had adopted, Carla had many positive feelings about adoption. How wonderful, it briefly seemed, to have someone close to her “adopt†her embryos. However, like most others who give some thought to embryo adoption, Carla realized that giving her embryos to someone else was fundamentally different from adoption: adoption is a loving solution to a social problem. This, by contrast, would mean bringing children into the world whose fate had been sealed in an embryology lab. It was simply too strange — the idea that their full biological children would be raised in another family. The fact that that family would be close to them did not make the option any more appealing.
Not a New Problem
This article speaks of careless use of XML and of how the government wants a standard. This is not a new problem. Once upon a time, the Department of Defense wanted to standardize the way contract proposals were submitted. Thus VHDL (VHSIC Hardware Description Language – VHSIC means Very Speed Integrated Circuit) was born. Schematics were described using this standard. These days the reverse is true – hardware is "written" in VHDL first, then fabricated. Nowadays hardware can be synthesized much like how code is compiled. This is particularly useful when designing for FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). Do a search on Google for any of these terms to learn more.
Government seeks accord on XML
Margaret Kane
"The federal government isn't known as a pioneering early adopter. But growing support within U.S. agencies for the popular XML data exchange format has raised concerns that, for once, things might be moving too fast."
Confirming Intuitions
This article doesn't say anything revolutionary, but it does confirm some intuitions about how men and women differ emotionally.
Men: Breaking Up Is Bad Only if Women Do It First
By Alison McCook
"When rating previous breakups, women view the process of ending of the relationship no differently if they are the dumper or the dumpee–but the same is not true with men, new research shows."
"According to researchers at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina, men believe there was much more scheming on the part of their partners, less finality in the relationship and less working together during the breakup if they were dumped than if they ended the relationship themselves."