Hallmarks of Cancer 3: Evading Apoptosis
The Hallmarks of Cancer are ten underlying principles shared by all cancers. The first and second Hallmark of Cancer articles can be found here and here.
Guest Blog
Commentary invited by editors of Scientific American
Are Antarctica’s Southern Ocean Ecosystems Doomed to Death by Diplomatic Paralysis?
The story of Antarctic marine conservation efforts often feels like the myth of Sisyphus, the Greek king who was condemned to spend eternity struggling to roll a boulder up a hill.
Is Breaking Bad Darwinian?
“Darwin was no Darwinian.” Martin Luther King Jr said that before me. He was correct historically, scientifically, and morally. It’s a bad break for Darwin, and us, that his name is used to distort his ideas...
Is 196 a Lychrel Number?
Mathematical revelation is often manifested in the emergence of imagination inspired by simple truths. From cups of coffee and the clacking of chalk, generalizations leap from eraser-smudged boards into the fabric of physical reality. The legendary mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss once said, “Mathematics is concerned only with the enumeration and comparison of relations.” This notion [...]..
Dealing with the unexpected: William Kahan and the need for graceful exits
In a previous post, I took a trip down read-only memory lane with William Kahan. On the same trip, Kahan told me about his first commercial programming job.
Voevodsky’s Mathematical Revolution
On last Thursday at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum, Vladimir Voevodsky gave perhaps the most revolutionary scientific talk I’ve ever heard. I doubt if it generated much buzz among the young scientists in advance, though, because it had the inscrutable title “Univalent Foundations of Mathematics,” and the abstract contained sentences like this one: “Set-theoretic approach to foundations [...]..
A trip down read-only memory lane with William Kahan
I’ve already written here about the weirdness of certain floating point operations – the case of the misbehaving Excel spreadsheet in particular – taking my cues, and my examples, from floating point pioneer William Kahan (notably this set of slides [PDF])...
Crowdfunding: What’s in It for Scientists?
It seemed like no one was willing to take a chance on Louisa Edgerly. She had been working for months to get funding for her research trip to the Republic of Congo—nothing came.
Balance – How to develop a research career and a growing family?
How to find a balance? How to deal with career and kids? Matthias Hagen from Weimar University, Germany, had the idea for this workshop: “Balance – How to develop a research career and a growing family”...
TV So Good It Hurts: The Psychology of Watching Breaking Bad
After a five season run, tonight marks the conclusion of the critically acclaimed Breaking Bad — one of the most tragic, stressful, gut-wrenching television experiences I have ever endured...
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