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It’s World Water Day! What are you doing to help?

Is staggering population growth and intensifying effects of climate change driving the oasis-based society of the American Southwest close to the brink of a Dust-Bowl-scale catastrophe? Today is International World Water Day. Held annually on 22 March, it focuses attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. We sat down with William deBuys, author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, to discuss what lies ahead for Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah.

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Three Conversations with Computers

By Peter J Bentley
What better way to spend an afternoon than having a friendly chat? My three friends are online chatbots – Artificial Intelligence software designed to analyse my sentences and respond accordingly. All I do is visit a specific webpage, then type into a box in my Internet browser and they reply, just like chatting online to a human. These three (jabberwacky, iGod and ALICE) are some of the more advanced chatbots out there, the result of decades of research by computer scientists to try and achieve intelligence in a computer.

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Why spring is the season of hope

By Anthony Scioli
Spring and hope are intertwined in the mind, body, and soul. In spring, nature conspires with biology and psychology to spark the basic needs that underlie hope: attachment, mastery, survival, and spirituality. It is true that hope does not melt away in the summer; it is not rendered fallow in autumn nor does it perish in the deep freeze of winter. But none of these other seasons can match the bounty of hope that greets us in the spring. My reflections on hope and the spring season are cast in terms of metaphors.

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When we walked on the Moon

At 5:14 am GMT on March 20th the sun will cross the celestial equator going from south to north, signalling the beginning of spring in the planet’s northern hemisphere and autumn in the southern. We’re celebrating this astronomical event with Ian Ridpath and newly released NASA photos of the Moon.

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A short history of computer science

We challenged author Peter Bentley to name the most important and unknown people in the history of computer science in under three minutes. Which famous computer scientist had a passion for unicycles and juggling?

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The Ides of March and the enduring romance of prophecy

By Stuart Vyse
“Beware the Ides of March,” warns the soothsayer in Act 1, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and by the end of the play, the Roman dictator, having ignored the soothsayer’s prophecy, is dead at the hands of a conspiracy of foes. The 15th of March was made famous by this single historical event, described in Plutarch’s history of Caesar’s life and made part of our contemporary Western vocabulary by Shakespeare’s tragedy and, more recently, by last summer’s political drama starring Ryan Gosling and George Clooney.

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David Marsden: The Father of Movement Disorders

The final monumental work of the late Professor David Marsden – Marsden’s Book of Movement Disorders – is due for publication this month, almost thirty years on from when the project was initially conceived. In homage to the ‘father of movement disorders’, his friend and colleague, Ivan Donaldson, has written a personal reflection on great contribution and influence David had on the field of movement disorders.

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Climate change: causing volcanoes to go pop

By Bill McGuire
When I first mention to someone that a changing climate is capable of causing volcanoes to go pop or the ground to shake, they think that I am either mad or having them on. Usually, this is just because they have not given the idea much thought, so that when I am given the opportunity to explain how this works they often become quite keen on the notion. Of course, the dyed-in-the-wool climate denier ideologues are already attacking the whole thesis; not on the basis of arguments rooted in science, but because it does not fit with their blinkered world view.

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Will climate change cause earthquakes?

In Waking the Giant, Bill McGuire argues that now that human activities are driving climate change as rapidly as anything seen in post-glacial times, the sleeping giant beneath our feet is stirring once again. The close of the last Ice Age saw not only a huge temperature hike but also the Earth’s crust bouncing and bending in response to the melting of the great ice sheets and the filling of the ocean basins — dramatic geophysical events that triggered earthquakes, spawned tsunamis, and provoked a series of eruptions from the world’s volcanoes.

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The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster: A look back 100 years

By Marjorie C. Malley
This weekend we remember a tragic, terrifying accident that potentially affected not only Japanese citizens, but the entire planet. Dangerous radioactive substances were released into the atmosphere, making the region around the plant uninhabitable, and contaminating the drinking water and the food chain.

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Alexander Graham Bell makes world’s first telephone call

This Day in World History
“Mr. Watson,” Alexander Graham Bell said into the mouthpiece, “come here — I want to see you.” Thomas Watson, Bell’s collaborator, heard the words in another room over the receiver. And the world’s first telephone call was complete.

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Sudoku and the Pace of Mathematics

Among mathematicians, it is always a happy moment when a long-standing problem is suddenly solved. The year 2012 started with such a moment, when an Irish mathematician named Gary McGuire announced a solution to the minimal-clue problem for Sudoku puzzles.

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Mendeleev’s Periodic Table presented in public

This Day in World History
On March 6, 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev’s breakthrough discovery was presented to the Russian Chemical Society. The chemist had determined that the known elements—70 at the time—could be arranged by their atomic weights into a table that revealed that their physical properties followed regular patterns. He had invented the periodic table of elements.

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SciWhys: a cure for Carys? Part Two

By Jonathan Crowe
Using science to understand our world can help to improve our lives. In my last post and in this one, I want to illustrate this point with an example of how progress in science is providing hope for the future for one family, and many others like them.

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A post-quantum world

By Vlatko Vedral
Most of you science buffs out there will, of course, know that science progresses in abrupt jumps, and every once in a while a new theory gets discovered that forces a radical departure from previously held views. I indeed viewed the evolution of science, through what the philosopher Karl Popper called the process of “conjectures and refutations”, as another instance of information processing. But if it’s not unlikely that quantum physics will one day be surpassed, then what confidence should you have in my main thesis? Could it be that the new theory will claim that some other entity – and not a bit of information – is yet more fundamental? In other words, will the post-quantum reality be made up of some other stuff?

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SciWhys: a cure for Carys?

By Jonathan Crowe
Using science to understand our world can help to improve our lives. In this post and the next, I want to illustrate this point with an example of how progress in science is providing hope for the future for one family, and many others like them.