For more Last Look, watch GPS, Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN
Good science sometimes takes a very long time. It was 11 years after NASA was founded that we landed on the moon. The human genome project took 13 years. It's been almost 50 years since the Higgs Boson particle was first proposed...and it still hasn't been conclusively proven.
But Australia is home to the world's longest running lab experiment...it's on the verge of a breakthrough of sorts. Eighty-six years ago, a professor at the University of Queensland initiated this "pitch drop" experiment, wanting to show that some things that look solid can actually be a little bit fluid.
Pitch, you see, is a derivative of tar. And it's so solid, you can crack it with a hammer. But it can also drip and drop.
Over the past 86 years, 8 drops have fallen. And the current custodian of the experiment thinks the ninth drop is coming soon. They've set up a webcam so you can watch here.
The webcam is only a little less exciting than watching grass grow. But there is an upside to watching: nobody has ever seen a drop actually fall. You could be the first!
By Paul J. Zak, Special to CNN
Editor’s note: Paul J. Zak is a professor at Claremont Graduate University in California and author of 'The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity.' The views expressed are his own.
Be humble. Maybe your mother told you that when you were a child, but it has no place in our “look at me” culture. Nor does it fit into the elbows-out world of business.
Yet, humility is a core value of one of the fastest growing companies of the last decade, Zappos.com. Ten years after its inception, Zappos.com annual sales exceeded one billion dollars, in part by being nice to customers. Can being nice actually cause you to win in life (and business)?
A decade ago, I began running experiments to see if the neurochemical oxytocin (ox-ee-TOE-sin), not to be confused with the prescription pain reliever Oxycontin, did anything more in humans than contract the uterus during birth, the dogma at the time. Intriguing research in social mammals showed that oxytocin allowed for the toleration of burrow-mates. Maybe, I thought, in humans toleration might scale up to trust, compassion, and humility – the most laudable human behaviors.
From the Mayan calendar and a runaway planet called "Nibiru," from killer asteroids and theories about galactic alignments: The internet is full of talk about the world ending on December 21.
NASA scientists recently addressed some of the most pervasive of these rumors around the dubious date. Take a look:
Mayan calendar
The Mayan calendar began somewhere around 3,114 years before the current era, and is set to end on December 21 or 23 (depending on the translation). NASA scientist Mitzi Adams describes what the Mayans would have done had their civilization lasted and why there is no cause for alarm.
Coming up on Fareed Zakaria GPS on Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET: the truth about private equity; what a “Grexit” would look like; and the unlikely case FOR municipal bankruptcies.
First, what really goes on at a private equity firm, and what does that say about U.S. presidential contender Mitt Romney? Fareed speaks to private equity insider and former Obama “car czar” Steven Rattner.
Then, historian Niall Ferguson runs through the likely chain of events that would take place if Greece exited the euro. How would it happen and what would the ramifications be?
In What in the World – there’s been a spate of bankruptcies of American cities. They’re gut-wrenching. But in reality, they may also have a crucial silver lining…
Also on the show, the ousted president of the Maldives on his country’s unrest. And a fun look at the tricks our brain plays on us, with scientist V.S. Ramachandran.
By Fareed Zakaria
It’s hard to find any good economic news these days. Europe is teetering on the brink; emerging markets such as China, Brazil and India are slowing down; and the United States is in a slump.
There is one bright spot on the American landscape: technology, particularly biotechnology. The cost of sequencing a human genome is down to $1,000, and the process now takes two hours — a pace that is much faster than “Moore’s Law,” which says that computing power doubles while its costs drop by half every 18 months. This technology revolution is already transforming whole industries. It is a reminder that, as we confront difficulties across the economic landscape, the one area where the United States can still move from strength to strength is science and technology — if we make the right decisions.
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Only a small minority of conservatives now say they place a “great deal” of trust in science, according to a survey published yesterday.
The new result represents a drop of almost 30 percent since the 1970s, according to the study published in the American Sociological Review.
The study says data indicate that the public’s trust in science is largely unchanged since 1974 except among people identifying themselves as conservatives.
Whereas in 1974, 48 percent of conservatives trusted science — about the same share as liberals — the number is now down to 35 percent, a decline of nearly a third in 38 years. FULL POST
Editor's Note: The following text is from GlobalPost, which provides excellent coverage of world news – important, moving and just odd.
A statue of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, complete with trademark turtleneck jumper, jeans and sneakers, has been unveiled in a science park in Budapest, Hungary, two months after his death. FULL POST
Editor's Note: The following text is from GlobalPost, which provides excellent coverage of world news – important, moving and just odd.
Zhu Jianqiang the "Strong-Willed Pig," hailed as a hero after surviving for more than a month trapped in the rubble of the 2008 earthquake, now has six identical piglet clones. Chinese scientists have cloned a pig hailed as a national hero after surviving for 36 days buried beneath rubble after the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province.
Zhu Jianqiang ("Strong-Willed Pig") reportedly survived in the debris by chewing charcoal and drinking rainwater, and was "as thin as a goat" when he was rescued, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported at the time.
The pig became a symbol for national resilience. More than 90,000 people died or went missing in the devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake, which affected Sichuan and parts of neighboring Shaanxi and Gansu provinces. FULL POST
Nathan Myhrvold is a polymath inventor and avid chef. But his kitchen isn't your normal operation. It has "centrifuges and freeze driers and spray driers and rotary evaporators" that he uses to cook and analyze what he cooks. Myhrvold studies the science behind cooking, and has written a 2,438 page, $600 book called Modernist Cuisine that is the touchtone for what is known as molecular gastronomy, which melds science and cooking to create incredible concoctions. In the video above, Myhrvold describes his unique publication.
Also from the Global Public Square, check out Nathan on how to create the perfect French fry, how to zap mosquitos with lasers and how to solve global warming.
Editor's Note: The following piece comes from Global Post, which provides excellent coverage of world news – important, moving and odd.
Binge drinking can harm the brains of teenage girls, affecting them more than it does teenage boys, according to new research.
A study from the University of California, San Diego and Stanford University found that teen girls who binge drink experienced negative effects on their brains, including less activity in brain regions linked to memory compared to non-drinking teenagers.
The study, published in "Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research," says nearly three in 10 American teens in their final year of high school had reported binge drinking in the past month. FULL POST
Saudi Arabia—“Science diplomacy” is a key to strengthening U.S.-Saudi relations writes the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia in the Arab News. “The exchange of ideas and expansion of collaboration between peoples and countries break down barriers to the spread of knowledge and correct misconceptions. Science diplomacy provides a practical avenue for forming partnerships and forging the international cooperation that facilitates exchanges of ideas.”
Editor's Note: Vaughan Bell is a research psychologist working for Médecins sans Frontières as mental health coordinator. This piece is republished from Mindhacks.com with the permission of the author.
By Vaughan Bell
‘Is pornography driving men crazy?’ asks campaigner Naomi Wolf in an article that contains a spectacular misunderstanding of neuroscience applied to a shaky moral conclusion.
Wolf asks suggests that the widespread availability and consumption of pornography is “rewiring the male brain” and “causing them to have more difficulty controlling their impulses”.
According to her article, pornography causes “rapid desensitization” to sexual stimulation which is “desensitizing healthy young men to the erotic appeal of their own partners” and means “ordinary sexual images eventually lose their power, leading consumers to need images that break other taboos in other kinds of ways, in order to feel as good.”
Moreover, she says “some men (and women) have a “dopamine hole” – their brains’ reward systems are less efficient – making them more likely to become addicted to more extreme porn more easily.”
Wolf cites the function of dopamine to back up her argument and says this provides “an increasing body of scientific evidence” to support her ideas.
It does not, and unfortunately, Wolf clearly does not understand either the function or the relevance of the dopamine system to this process, but we’ll get onto that in the moment. FULL POST
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