“This is a list of lists of unsolved problems in various subjects” (Wikipedia). Just choose your discipline, devote the major part of your creative years to one of these questions, and retire on your Nobel Prize proceeds.
Daily Archives: 5 Feb 07
How to report scientific research to a general audience
Lab disaster may lead to new cancer drug
“Her carefully cultured cells were dead and Katherine Schaefer was annoyed, but just a few minutes later, the researcher realized she had stumbled onto a potential new cancer treatment.” (Yahoo! News)
Mysterious Wis. Wonder Spot soon to go
Date with a bulldozer: “In a wooded ravine tucked away from the water parks, restaurants and mega-resorts that dominate this tourist town, a piece of history is quietly dying. After more than half a century of wowing tourists (and causing probably more than a few cases of nausea), the Wonder Spot, a mysterious cabin where people can’t stand up straight, water runs uphill and chairs balance on two legs, is no more.
Owner Bill Carney has sold the iconic attraction to the village of Lake Delton for $300,000. The village wants to build a road through the crevice where the Wonder Spot has stood since the 1950s.
Now, the Wonder Spot, one of more than a dozen sites around the nation dubbed ‘gravity vortexes’ and a throwback to postwar, family-oriented tourist attractions, has a date with a bulldozer.” (Yahoo! News)
My family and I never tire of these, having visited a number of such sites (Roadside America ) in the US (as well as abroad). I always detour if one is within reach of our road trip route. (By the way, I subscribe to the theory that these are not-very-mysterious optical illusions.)
U.S. Set to Begin a Vast Expansion of DNA Sampling
“The goal, justice officials said, is to make the practice of DNA sampling as routine as fingerprinting for anyone detained by federal agents, including illegal immigrants. Until now, federal authorities have taken DNA samples only from convicted felons.
…Peter Neufeld, a lawyer who is a co-director of the Innocence Project, which has exonerated dozens of prison inmates using DNA evidence, said the government was overreaching by seeking to apply DNA sampling as universally as fingerprinting.
“Whereas fingerprints merely identify the person who left them,” Mr. Neufeld said, “DNA profiles have the potential to reveal our physical diseases and mental disorders. It becomes intrusive when the government begins to mine our most intimate matters.”
…Immigration lawyers noted that most immigration violations, including those committed when people enter the country illegally, are civil, not criminal, offenses. They warned that the new law would make it difficult for immigrants to remove their DNA profiles from the federal database, even if they were never found to have committed any serious violation or crime. (New York Times )“
