The passion this man has for what he does is intoxicating. In every one of his talks you are amazing, laughing, and intrigued by the statistical information he is dishing out. He takes something so dry like health stats and makes a truly compelling case for it and then gets you wrapped up in the excitement that comes from being able to take these dry stats and put them in a format that the average person can manipulate and appreciate. Something which he spearheaded with gapminder.org.
Even the most worldly and well-traveled among us will have their perspectives shifted by Hans Rosling. A professor of global health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, his current work focuses on dispelling common myths about the so-called developing world, which (he points out) is no longer worlds away from the west. In fact, most of the third world is on the same trajectory toward health and prosperity, and many countries are moving twice as fast as the west did.
What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.
Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful. During his legendary presentations, Rosling takes this one step farther, narrating the animations with a sportscaster’s flair.
There is concern about how to pay for this vaccine when it is finally developed. At a 98% rate of success at stopping the virus governments and aid groups around the world should be lining up to pay for this. There is talk that this could eradicate Malaria which would be the single larger contributor to Africa’s success in human history, greater exponentially than all efforts before it combined.
To create the vaccine, Kumar’s group used genetically modified bacteria to make proteins identical to some of those involved in the parasite’s sexual development. They injected the proteins into mice and baboons, which generated antibodies. When the team added Plasmodium gametes to blood samples from these animals, the antibodies bound to and blocked the proteins. If a mosquito sucked up some of this blood it would still get a bellyful of the gametes, but they would be unable to combine and spawn new adult parasites.
One shot of the vaccine led to a 93 per cent reduction in malaria transmission, and the figure went up to 98 per cent after a booster shot (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006352).
Scientists have discovered the amino acid glycine, a critical component of all living things, hiding in samples from the comet Wild 2.
It’s the first time an amino acid has been found inside a comet, and NASA scientists say the discovery supports the theory that some of the ingredients necessary for life originated in space and traveled to Earth by comet or meteorite.
“If you’re seeing amino acids in comets, then that really gives credence to the idea that the basic componenets of life are going to be widespread throughout the universe,” said planetary biologist Max Bernstein of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, who was not involved in the research. “It’s one thing for me to do it in the lab and say it should be so, but it’s another thing for somebody to actually measure it.”
An exoplanet that orbits its star backwards has been found for the first time. The planet is also the most bloated found to date, and some astronomers suspect that both properties can be traced back to an earlier close encounter with a planetary sibling.
The solar system generally rotates like a record album, with most objects orbiting the sun in the same direction as the sun itself spins. This is thought to result from the fact that everything formed from the same natal cloud of gas and dust.
However, some objects, including a number of comets and asteroids, move in orbits that are so tilted with respect to the orbital plane of the planets that they end up travelling in the opposite direction. Astronomers think they were gravitationally thrown out of their original orbits by passing objects.”
I found the appearance of this discovery especially coincidental for me as 3 days ago I had a discussion with an ex girlfriend who had just started to devoutly believe in the Lord and creationism. Funny enough one of her supporting claims for a god-created universe was that planets spin and orbit always in the same direction. In a random universe why would they always be the same as if designed? The wonderful thing about my belief in science was that I had theories but my ego also had no problems saying ‘I don’t know, but because we haven’t discovered it yet that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist’ , that being that science is malleable and can change when new evidence presents itself whereas religion for the most part is written in stone(pun intended).
Well here we have it, a planet spinning backwards, with only 5-10% of the universe even visible to us, let alone known or understood, and countless new sciences waiting to be discovered, we have a long path of debunking religious mysteries ahead of us.
I finally got around to registering ryanwiancko.com and decided that it would be the home of my personal blog. I’ll be keeping all tech and science related stuff here and post the more personal opinionated stuff over there. So keep an eye on www.ryanwiancko.com
The passion this man has for what he does is intoxicating. In every one of his talks you are amazing, laughing, and intrigued by the statistical information he is dishing out. He takes something so dry like health stats and makes a truly compelling case for it and then gets you wrapped up in the excitement that comes from being able to take these dry stats and put them in a format that the average person can manipulate and appreciate. Something which he spearheaded with gapminder.org.
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