08 FEB 2012 by ideonexus

 The Earliest Account of Newton and the Apple

In the year 1666 he retired again from Cambridge... to his mother in Lincolnshire & whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (wch brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much farther than was usually thought. Why not as high as the moon said he to himself & if so that must influence her motion & perhaps retain her in her orbit, whereupon he fell a c...
Folksonomies: gravity newton moon apple
Folksonomies: gravity newton moon apple
  1  notes

Includes the fact that he extended the force pulling the apple to the ground up to the moon.

20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus

 Caenorhabditis elegans

Caenorhabditis elegans was chosen in the 1960s as an ideal experimental animal by the formidably brilliant South African biologist Sydney Brenner. He had recently completed his work, with Francis Crick and others at Cambridge, on cracking the genetic code, and was looking around for a new big problem to solve. His inspired choice, and his own pioneering research on its genetics and neuro-anatomy, has led to a worldwide community of Caenorhabditis researchers that has grown into the thousands....
Folksonomies: biology experiments
Folksonomies: biology experiments
  1  notes

A species in which we know every cell in its body, making it an excellent experimental specimen.

01 JAN 2010 by ideonexus

 Obama Describes the World Wide Web

The image was mesmerizing, more organic than mechanical, as if I were glimpsing the early stages of some accelerating evolutionary process, in which all the boundaries between men--nationality, race, religion, wealth--were rendered invisible and irrelevant, so that the physicist in Cambridge, the bond trader in Tokyo, the student in a remote Indian village, and the manager of a Mexico City department store were drawn into a single constant, thrumming conversation, time and space giving way to...
  1  notes
A beautiful, insightful description of a monitor showing World Wide Web traffic patterns.