This is a repository for all cool scientific discussion and fascination. Scientific facts, theories, and overall cool scientific stuff that you'd like to share with others. Stuff that makes you smile and wonder at the amazing shit going on around us, that most people don't notice.
Post pictures, vidoes, stories, or links. Ask questions. Share science.
Medicine is amazing but sometimes it can look like the darkest corners of Stephen King's brain. This is exactly the case: Chinese doctors saved a man's severed hand by attaching it to his ankle, creating some impossible anatomy in the process.
Xiao Wei—an industrial worker in Changde, China—suffered a dramatic accident in which his hand was severed. It took seven hours to get him to the hospital along with his hand, recovered by his co-workers. Doctors thought it would be impossible to reattach the hand at the time, so they did what they thought it was the best option: attach it to the ankle so it could survive.
It works. After spending an entire month with his hand living attached to his ankle while his injured healed, the doctors successfully re-attached the hand to his arm.
The irony is that they cut off his foot so they could attach the hand to it. [Reply]
Originally Posted by mike_b_284:
in reference to the rapid evolution of domestics:
Early Canid Domestication: The Farm-Fox Experiment
Foxes bred for tamability in a 40-year experiment exhibit remarkable transformations that suggest an interplay between behavioral genetics and development Lyudmila Trut
At an experimental farm in Novosibirsk, Siberia, geneticists have been working for four decades to turn foxes into dogs. They are not trying to create the next pet craze. Instead, author Trut and her predecessors hope to explain why domesticated animals such as pigs, cattle and dogs are so different from their wild ancestors. Selective breeding alone cannot explain all the differences. Trut's mentor, the eminent Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev, thought that the answers lay in the process of domestication itself, which might have dramatically changed wolves' appearance and behavior even in the absence of selective breeding. To test his hypothesis, Belyaev and his successors at the Institute have been breeding another canine species, silver foxes, for a single trait: friendliness toward people. Although no one would mistake them for dogs, the Siberian foxes appear to be on the same overall evolutionary path—a route that other domesticated animals also may have followed while coming in from the wild.
A little boy who dreams of becoming an astronaut one day is on a mission to save NASA. He has started an online petition on the White House website.
Connor Johnson is 6 years old and fixated on space. Not just because it’s pretty cool, but because Connor is quite sure space will be his future.
“The whole reason I want to be an astronaut so I can discover, like, new worlds,” he says.
Connor says, since he was three, he’s been inspired by NASA.
“To discover like asteroids or stuff that I could build stuff out of.”
NASA has given countless kids like Connor reason to believe they too can land in space. But recently, over Thanksgiving, Connor learned Congress is cutting funding to the space program.
“He was disappointed to hear that they were decreasing funding,” said Connor’s mother.
Connor knew he had to do something. He chipped in his allowance – just over $10. Then, he decided to give his whole piggy bank to NASA.
But then, after talking with his family, he decided to create an online petition. They put it out there, posting it on Facebook and emailing friends and family. That got him about 40 signatures.
A Denver news station shared it, helping bring in more signatures. To get a response from the White House, it needs 100,000 signatures.
Which means Connor needs roughly 99,000 more.
“While I would be very sad, NASA is mostly the only space station, like space company, I’ve known for a very long time.”
A young boy inspired to take on a huge challenge to help save the very place that taught him to think big. Just think of all the significant moments that started with someone’s little dream.
Johnson must get 100,000 signatures by December 29. As of Monday morning, his petition had nearly 4,000 signatures.
This is a nice thread that mostly contains studies published in the peer reviewed literature or has progressed to commercial applications. Please keep wacko shit out of this nice thread. [Reply]
Originally Posted by cdcox:
This is a nice thread that mostly contains studies published in the peer reviewed literature or has progressed to commercial applications. Please keep wacko shit out of this nice thread.
Its my opinion that science and the supernatural go hand in hand, you in particular should spend the 25 minutes with Boyd Bushman, as a math guy yourself, i know you'd love him for sure.
Calling it wacko without watching it all... it just blows my mind, there are realms of science that are being studied at the highest level yet most people never hear about it and thus its "wacko" to them. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
Well at least you didn't call it a theory. I really like Scott Free even though I think he hates me.
No hate at all, but what does chap my ass and crack me the hell up at the same time, is when people who claim to love science want to sit here and call a man like Boyd Bushman, senior research scientist for Lockheed Martin skunkworks, a "wacko".
Guys like him work feverishly every single day on science that some of you, very arrogantly, want to call "wacko" or even say doesn't even exist at all as a research field, i dunno... guess i'll take one of our nations top scientists word, over a few Chiefsplanet know it alls.
How about ufo's, its ever so popular to nail anyone mentioning the subject to the wall around here... well, watch the last ten minutes of that interview as Boyd tells the camera that one of his dearest friends shot a ufo down over New Mexico.
Is he just making it up? yep, he's gotta be, why WOULDNT such an accomplished man lie about such a fantastic thing? [Reply]
Originally Posted by scott free:
Its my opinion that science and the supernatural go hand in hand, you in particular should spend the 25 minutes with Boyd Bushman, as a math guy yourself, i know you'd love him for sure.
Calling it wacko without watching it all... it just blows my mind, there are realms of science that are being studied at the highest level yet most people never hear about it and thus its "wacko" to them.
Dude, no offense, but the video is BS. He's not talking about anything that isn't known. The problem is that it's not feasible in the slightest in actual application. He's claiming we had alien reverse-engineered (yet) nuclear powered flying saucers in 1969. He claims that Lazar's claims were all true, which has been debunked to hell and back. He hints around the Hutchinson Effect, which is just bad physics. Explained: http://www.skepdic.com/hutchisonhoax.html
Just because he once worked for a reputable firm, that doesn't mean he's incapable of being full of shit. If you look into some of his claims, you see quite a bit of ridiculous bullshit.
Someday in the future, we will have the capability to easily overcome gravity with negligible energy requirements. But it's absurd to think that we've already secretly developed these technologies and kept them hidden from the public, and nobody else has managed to figure it out. It just doesn't work that way.
I want nothing more than for other life to be discovered in the universe, and for use to travel the stars. One day both will happen. But there is zero proof that it's happened yet, despite the crazy number of people who've been actively seeking it for over hundreds of years. [Reply]
Originally Posted by scott free:
Its my opinion that science and the supernatural go hand in hand, you in particular should spend the 25 minutes with Boyd Bushman, as a math guy yourself, i know you'd love him for sure.
Calling it wacko without watching it all... it just blows my mind, there are realms of science that are being studied at the highest level yet most people never hear about it and thus its "wacko" to them.
There are two problems with this argument:
1) It is basically an appeal to authority which is a basic logical fallacy taught in a freshman level class and not how science operates. Science operates on evidence. Bring your evidence present it in front of the community and your argumment with stand or fall on its merits.
2) As far as authorities go, he isn't a particularly strong one. His claim to fame appears to be as one of the a patent holders on the stinger missile. A fine accomplishment but doesn't really make him an expert on UFOs and such. He is a technologist, but not really a scientist. I couldn't find any scientific publications in the peer reviewed literature by him.
In summary, he has not presented sufficient evidence to enter his claim as part of the scientific discourse. [Reply]
