Todd Hoff

"Just as some of us are getting used to the idea of the multiverse, along comes MIT physicist Max Tegmark telling us we’re not thinking big enough. According to Max, there are actually multiple multiverses, containing endless copies of and variations on the “pocket universe” we’ve quaintly come to think of as everything. Lest you think he’s tripping, Max assures us that he’s only high on mathematics and logic. And if the conclusions sound farfetched, well, progress in physics has often meant taking leave of our senses, ditching everyday intuition and trusting the science instead." - Todd Hoff

"Although Google originally sought to demote all comparison shopping websites, after Google raters provided negative feedback to such a widespread demotion, Google implemented the current iteration of its so-called “diversity”algorithm …. Google claimed the goal of this algorithm was to “increase the diversity of Google’s search results for product related queries.”" - Todd Hoff

Case isn't clear to me. - Stephen Mack

"The analysis shows that despite the momentous historical impact on British civilisation of the Roman, Viking and Norman invasions, none of these events did much to alter the basic biological makeup of people living here. The findings support records suggesting that few high ranking Roman officials settled in Britain and that they and their families remained largely segregated from the local Celts." - Todd Hoff

"The Danish Vikings, who ruled over large swathes of Britain from 865AD, are known to have inter-married with locals, but the latest study shows that the conquering force, while powerful, must have comprised relatively few fighters. “There were very large numbers of people - hundreds of thousands - in those parts of Britain, so to have a substantial impact on genetics there would have to be very large numbers of them,” said Robinson. “The fact that we don’t see that reflects the numbers rather than the relative allure or lack thereof of Scandinavian men to British women.” - bentley

Well, the current ruling house are also Germans descended Sophia of Hanover! So, we've always had close relations throughout history with Germany, so no surprise. - Halil

Whoa! - Stephen Mack

The URL was messed up: http://www.amazon.com/Very-Sp... - Todd Hoff

But no version for Windows users? - Sean McBride

That one didn't work for me. I kept getting bounced from the site. Though for reasons I don't understand it seems to be variable. - Todd Hoff

A young man's love of rock and roll told through secretly recorded conversations with his parents. - Todd Hoff

"What gets me about this current paper, though, is the concept behind it. This has the potential to take a large part of organic synthesis into the realm now occupied by peptide and nucleotide synthesis. Those two are certainly easier problems - you have one kind of bond between every subunit, and a limited number of subunits themselves. But the advent of solid-phase iterative methods to synthesize these sorts of molecules was still a huge advance. It took making such things out of the realm of every-one-a-new-individual-challenge, and into the world of "Sure, we should be able to make that. Fire up the machine." That first category, we should note, is where total synthesis of natural products has traditionally been. And proudly so. I've had a lot to say about that over the years around here, going back to 2002, but I'll summarize: I think that total synthesis was, at one time, one of the most vital and important parts of organic chemistry. But that day is past. Modern analytical methods have largely (although not quite totally) eroded the structure determination reasons for doing it, and modern synthetic techniques have put a vast number of molecules within theoretical reach. "Theoretical", in this case, meaning "Given enough postdocs, enough grant money, and enough time". That certainly wasn't always the case. When Woodward, Stork, or (fill in your favorite here) started out to synthesize some complex molecule back fifty years ago, it was often not very clear at all how one might go about it. Just coming up with a semi-plausible synthetic route was a real intellectual accomplishment, and dealing with what happened when these ideas met the real world was another. Total synthesis took all the brainpower and all the skill that could be brought to bear on it." - Todd Hoff

"“We humans are now a geological power in our own right, as earth-changing as a meteorite strike. Historically, the collision of the old and new worlds marks the beginning of the modern world,”" - Todd Hoff

"“We humans are now a geological power in our own right, as earth-changing as a meteorite strike. Historically, the collision of the old and new worlds marks the beginning of the modern world,”" - Todd Hoff

"FLICKR, STEVE JURVETSON Using a modified scorpion neurotoxin or antibodies to target gold nanoparticles to the surface of neurons, researchers have created a new way to stimulate brain cells in culture. All it takes is a little bit of light to heat the particles, which changes the capacitance of the membrane, resulting in the depolarization of the cell and the firing of an action potential. “We call it optogenetics without the genetics,” said biophysicist Francisco “Pancho” Bezanilla of the University of Chicago, “exciting cells in the nervous system without going through all the difficulty of creating a transgenic animal. . . . It’s a shortcut.”" - Todd Hoff

That's the equation explaining the theory of general public works ;) - Eric Logan

One man's public works director is another's manager. *shrugs* - Jenny H.

Super un-cool. People are trying to backup THEIR OWN content and it's impossible. I guess FF could have just rotated the database, though. - Claudio Cicali

I keep getting the same here hmmm i see people downloading ok - Lorenzo R v rs

"Freeze a couple of your water bottles or anything else you can get cold before you pack your cooler; this helps keeps the cooler cold throughout the weekend. You can even freeze all your water in place of ice altogether. Place your water bottles and other upright items in first. Don't be tempted to lie them flat, because fishing them out of the ice can get difficult. Place other items that need to stay very cool between the water bottles. Pack the ice around the water bottles until the cooler is nearly full. This should create a 'shelf' in your cooler for your more fragile items - dairy, fruits, vegetables and condiments. The more tightly packed your cooler, the better you'll retain ice. Learn to shop for your groceries to fit the cooler as perfectly as possible. Pack food in leak-proof containers. Avoid packing raw meat in the same cooler as the rest of your food. Avoid packing paper and carboard packaging." - Todd Hoff

"“People generally assume that color change in chameleons is well understood, and I don’t think it is at all,” said Randall Morrison of McDaniel College in Maryland who was not involved with the study. “This whole notion of the tunable photonic crystals is a new way to look at physiological color change in animals.”" - Todd Hoff

"Like sunflowers and snail shells, the spiraled proboscis of a butterfly conforms to the Golden Ratio." - Todd Hoff

same here - هانیبال

it still suffers from a lot of deficiencies comparing to FF. definitely has a long path ahead to become like FF - هانیبال

FF puts a much stronger visual focus on individual posts than Google+ -- and they appear in a single clean LIFO (last-in, first-out) stream, with no distracting clutter. The key word is "focus." If Google+ offered the option for a FF-style layout, I might bite. - Sean McBride

"McLellan, along with Mitchell Sogin of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and their colleagues, gathered samples from sewage treatment plants in 71 different cities with varying obesity rates—from Steamboat Springs, Colorado, with an obesity rate of 13.5 percent to St. Joseph, Missouri, with a rate of 37.4 percent. Sure enough, bacteria such as Bacteroidaceae were found in greater abundance in the locales with the relatively high obesity rates. “If we had a city with a higher percentage of obese people, we would see a higher percentage of the kinds of bacteria associated with obesity,” McLellan told Inside Science. The correlation was even able to predict whether a city was lean or obese with 80- to 90-percent accuracy." - Todd Hoff

explains a lot ... more than we want to know, perhaps #junkfood #processedfood #foodlikeproducts - Gregory Lent

"Even in his darkest time, Van Gogh was able to capture — eerily accurately — one of nature’s most complex and confusing concepts … 100 years before scientists began to scratch the surface." - Todd Hoff