CERN has begun webcasting a public seminar in which there may or may not be some announcement regarding the significance or otherwise of recent observations regarding the possible existence of something that might be the Higgs boson. I am not a nuclear physicist, so I will try and keep up but will mainly be trying to catch the significance of the observations they have collected so far. In case these are talked about in terms of sigmas (there's scuttlebutt going around that this is a 3.5 sigma event),
here's a table of sigma and probability.
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posted by carter
on Dec 13, 2011 -
85 comments
In the late Sixties and early Seventies several experiments were begun to test whether or not a non-human primate could construct a sentence. Several species were involved in these various experiments including the chimpanzees
Washoe and
Nim, a gorilla named
Koko, and later in the Eighties work began with a bonobo named
Kanzi. While great progress was made in teaching these primates a vocabulary, it would be difficult to see any of these experiments as a success. And all of these projects raised important questions about the
ethics of such experiments.
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posted by Toekneesan
on Aug 20, 2011 -
39 comments
PossessedHand is ostensibly a training system for students of stringed musical instruments. It teaches fingering positions by means of electrodes that stimulate muscles in the forearm, forcing the hand into the correct configuration.
posted by contraption
on Jun 27, 2011 -
31 comments
The three
longest-running scientific experiments are all located in the foyers of physics buildings. The oldest is the
Oxford Electric Bell, which has been ringing continuously (over ten billion times!)
since at least 1840, powered by batteries of unknown composition. In Dunedin, New Zealand, the
Beverley clock has operated since 1864, without the need for winding, as it is
powered by atmospheric changes. The relative youngster in the group is
the Pitch Drop Experiment, which has been measuring the viscosity of pitch since 1927 by recording the time between drops of pitch from a funnel. The experiments has the world's most boring
webcam, though the eighth, and most recent, drop fell in 2000, so the next is due any day now! Atlas Obscura
has some additional candidates for long experiments, including the
Rothemstead Plots, which have been used in agricultural experiments for 300 years.
posted by blahblahblah
on Jun 6, 2011 -
33 comments
Shared social responsibility -
When customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof ... Gneezy describes the combination of charitable donations and paying what you like as 'shared social responsibility', where businesses and customers work together for the public good. (via
mr) [also see
1,
2,
3]
posted by kliuless
on Jul 28, 2010 -
19 comments
Ten days ago, Slate Magazine conducted
an experiment modeled on the
Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984: they asked readers to look at eight photographs of notable political moments from the past decade and share their memories about each. Over 5,000 people participated in the first three days, but what they didn’t know was that four of the pictures were significantly doctored, and one was totally fabricated.
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posted by mondaygreens
on May 28, 2010 -
67 comments
In the black. Maggie Anderson, and her family spent a year trying to patronize only black-owned businesses.
Featured in the
local papers, you can read about the project and their own views on their
website.
posted by Carillon
on Apr 30, 2010 -
131 comments
I'm on a mission - not to praise Jesus or ensure that every child in Namibia has a netbook, but to kill every single living vaguely human-like character in Fallout 3. ... everyone ... no matter how friendly, helpful, or beneficial to my completion of the game, must be put into the ground. "Natural Born Killer", an experiment in virtual genocide, parts
One,
Two and
Three.
posted by slimepuppy
on Mar 26, 2010 -
45 comments
A French, state-run TV channel appears to be stirring controversy by airing a documentary about a fake game show in which contestants torture eachother, called
"Game of Death." Based on the well-known
Stanley Milgram experiments of the 1960's that, in the wake of Nazi Germany, sought out to measure man's willingness to obey orders.
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posted by phaedon
on Mar 17, 2010 -
33 comments
The Real Good Chair Experiment - What happens if you leave 25 chairs around New York and watch to see where they go? The short film then continues with an interview with a few of the people who brought them home.
posted by flatluigi
on Jan 8, 2010 -
27 comments
The Signtific Lab invites people to develop cutting-edge ideas through experiments of imagination and discussion.
Experiment One: what would happen if outer space becomes as accessible as the Web today?
posted by divabat
on Feb 18, 2009 -
12 comments
Many of us have seen or read
The Wave, but how many of us have seen
A Class Divided? It depicts
one third-grade teacher's attempts to teach Midwestern children about the civil rights movement, many of whom had never met a black person before. As part of a daring experiment, she split the class between brown-eyed children and blue-eyed children, and gave the "browneyes" special privileges. The children were told, in no uncertain terms, that the "blueyes" were inferior. What followed was a lesson in discrimination that the kids would remember for the rest of their lives.
posted by Afroblanco
on Dec 28, 2008 -
53 comments
Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is the first video journal for biological research accepted in
PubMed, featuring hundreds of peer-reviewed video-protocols demonstrating experimental techniques in the fields of neuroscience, cellular biology, developmental biology, immunology, bioengineering, microbiology and plant biology, free of charge.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Nov 26, 2008 -
6 comments
Caleb Charland's photographs artistically demonstrate the laws of physics. In "Solid, Liquid, Gas,"
for example, three similar glass-tumbler shapes are positioned on a film of water. One glass is filled with a separation of water, oil and alcohol. Another, overturned, contains an extinguished candle which, having burned up the oxygen inside the vessel, created a vacuum that sucked the water inside. The third vessel and the other pictures are just cool.
posted by Surfin' Bird
on Oct 25, 2008 -
26 comments
