This is pretty fascinating. We've learned that blind people may be able to "see" with other organs wired into the brain.

Quoted: Blind people can now use their tongues to see, albeit crudely, thanks to prototype technology that involves licking arrays of electrodes attached to video cameras.

I'd never heard of this science site but it look interesting.

How much would you pay for an invisibility cloak? Interesting new math/science possibilities.

Quoted: Every child’s dream of invisibility made a giant leap toward becoming a reality last year. A cloaking device has set the mathematical community buzzing about how to make invisibility not just possible, but practical. “Who would have thought that people would be talking about invisibility in scientific terms?” said Gunther Uhlmann, the UW’s Walker Family endowed professor of mathematics. Uhlmann followed the news especially closely because he and his colleagues had discovered an invisibility cloak in 2003.

Quoted: Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.

Quoted: The Web fails to capture the nature of social relationships. We want the Web to be more responsive to the existing relationships people actually have [...]”

I really enjoy reading "Seed" and "New Scientist" for daily insights like this. The broader question to me is about motiviation and upbringing. I was brought up believing that certain people were just "gifted" in certain areas. I kind of always kept looking for what I was "gifted" in. How different would it have been if I had instead been told that to acheive mastery in anything just applies focus and practice (as all of the new research points to).

Tiger Woods is not necessarily a great golfer because he was gifted. He worked harder for it than anyone around him and had people help him understand how to work through his hurdles.

I'd love to move towards a culture of mentorship where you can explore all of your interests with mentors who help you get better in your chosen areas.

Quoted: New research shows that when women believe they are genetically bad at math, the belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

My favorite quote from this article is the second one below. Why can't Bush and co. let government scientists speak for themselves? Why do they have to stay "on message"? Isn't it our money being sent to probe further into scientific truth?

Quoted: The administration claims it wasn't trying to tell government scientists what to say about climate change, but e-mails obtained by Salon prove otherwise.

Quoted: When NOAA press officer Laborde was contacted to discuss the e-mails, he denied that interviews were subject to approval from White House officials. Confronted with his own e-mails, however, he said, "If you already knew the answer, why did you ask the question?"

You can now get the paper Benjamin Franklin wrote on his famous kite-flying experiment for free online at the linked archive.

Quoted: It was a celebrated experiment demonstrating the electrical nature of lightning - the 1752 research paper has just gone electronic