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The Future of Visual Computing
At the newly launched UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing – or VisComp – researchers are building a future when photograph-quality images can be rendered instantly on mobile devices; a future in which computers and wearable devices have the ability to see and understand the physical world just as humans do; and a future…
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Understand Climate Change – and What You Can Do About It
Learn more about climate change with new programs that examine its impact from a variety of perspectives. Discover how humans and climate interact and affect one another, learn what you can do to reduce greenhouse emissions, and get a behind-the-scenes look at the Pope’s call to protect the environment. Climate Change, Consumerism and the Pope…
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The Amazing Diversity of Fishes!
The aquatic world presents the widest diversity of habitats, so it’s no surprise that fishes have come to present the widest diversity of vertebrate species. From the darkest depths to tropical shores, there are more than 33,000 species of living fishes, accounting for more than half of the extant vertebrate diversity on Earth. For years,…
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CARTA: Human-Climate Interactions and Evolution – Past and Future
The existence of Beringia had a great impact on the spread of the human species only 16,000 years ago – and not long after, climatic periods like the Medieval megadroughts extending into the second millennium moved Vikings to Greenland, vineyards to England and played a role in the collapse of the Inca and Anasazi cultures.…
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Atmospheric Rivers: California Rainmakers
“If we went straight up from here to space, took every water vapor molecule, and condensed it into liquid, anybody hazard to guess how deep it might be?” So queried Marty Ralph, atmospheric scientist and director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes early on in his fascinating exploration of the newest understanding…
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You’ve been invaded – by your Microbiome!
“If you like science fiction, I’m going to open with this,” begins David Granet. “You have been invaded. And the invaders are 10 times more than the number of cells in your body. They affect your health, they affect much about what your life does, and about who you are, and what you look like.…
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The Mind and Methods of V.S. Ramachandran
“A lot of the time when you think the patient is crazy, it means you’re not smart enough to figure it out.” – V.S. Ramachandran Seeing numbers as colors. Feeling the pain from a phantom limb. Sensing shadowy figures around your bed. V.S. Ramachandran, PhD studies these seeming anomalies of the mind to discover the…
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How did language evolve? New CARTA series explores the evolution of language.
Language. In all its forms. We use it everyday, all the time, without thinking, as innately (we might think) as a bird sings… But the acquisition of this human capacity is a long and complex process, aided by neuro- and physiological specialization born out of the forge of evolution. So when you stop and think…
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Critical Thinking and Imagination in Science, with Ryan Shenvi
“…how do you know that you know?” With this, The Scripps Research Institute’s Ryan Shenvi delivers a captivating exposition of why the most important function of science is not to provide answers, but to ask more and better questions in order to advance our knowledge – and what is critical to this process. From CS…
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Irwin Jacobs: Research Universities, Industry and Innovation
Irwin Jacobs – hotel magnate? Had he listened to a high school counselor who said there was no future in science and that he should pursue the hotel business at Cornell, Irwin Jacobs’ career could have taken a whole other track. Fortunately for the world of technology, Jacobs was drawn back to engineering. In this…