Insights into Science from Richard Feynman

Hardly anyone captures the essence and ethos of science more eloquently than The Great Explainer. In 1966, the National Science Teachers Association asked the great Richard Feynman to give an address that answers the question, "What is science?" The answer comes true to character:

And so what science is, is not what the philosophers have said it is, and certainly not what the teacher editions say it is. What it is, is a problem which I set for myself after I said I would give this talk.
After some time, I was reminded of a little poem:
A centipede was happy quite, until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg comes after which?"
This raised his doubts to such a pitch
He fell distracted in the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
All my life, I have been doing science and known what it was, but what I have come to tell you--which foot comes after which--I am unable to do, and furthermore, I am worried by the analogy in the poem that when I go home I will no longer be able to do any research.

Later in the speech, Feynman hones a more answer-like answer:

[I]f you are going to teach people to make observations, you should show that something wonderful can come from them. I learned then what science was about: it was patience. If you looked, and you watched, and you paid attention, you got a great reward from it -- although possibly not every time.

Later:

[Science] teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true.

He closes with a keen point for his audience of professional science educators:

Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

Why do we remember bad things? A single chemical may make all the

Why do we remember bad things? A single chemical may make all the difference

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Briefing: Cannabis compounds fight prostate cancer - health - 19 August 2009 - New Scientist

Briefing: Cannabis compounds fight prostate cancer - New Scientist

But I'm sorry to say that smoking the stuff doesn't help at all.

So you can't use that as an excuse guys!

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3 Growth Areas for the Automotive Industry

What does the future hold? A Firey Red Ferrari 458 for all?

Millions of people around the world take part in the daily commute. Making their weary way into cities and using automobiles as a means to sustain a better more comfortable life.

That momentum may have slowed in 2008 and 2009, but it hasn’t vanished and can only grow. Recent research conducted by Booz & Company shows that the global customer base for automobiles over the next 10 years falls into three broad categories, based primarily on which countries customers live in.

1. The rapidly emerging economies (REEs) consist of the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and a group of other relatively wealthy developing nations, such as Malaysia, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, Thailand, Iran, and Indonesia. Millions of families in these countries are making or contemplating the purchase of their first automobile.
2. The lower-growth economies (compared to the REEs) consist of about 100 nations with relatively impoverished populations and poor economic prospects. However, their political leaders are interested in building up the middle class and see personal mobility as a major stepping stone. These countries may become markets for motorised transportation after 2020.
3. The mature economies include the established industrialised nations in North America, Europe, and Japan. Population growth and vehicle replacement, rather than economic growth, will determine the market for automobiles there.

These three groups add up to an enormous amount of market potential: Booz & Company estimates suggest that more than 370 million additional vehicles could be sold by 2013 and more than 715 million by 2018, but business models in the auto industry are not currently equipped to capture these increases.

H5N1 Pandemic Flu - breakthrough research

From my previous article on the H5N1 Pandemic flu virus, you will know that the flu virus constantly alters its surface proteins and constantly mutates into variant forms. This means that we can be infected many times over a lifetime and a flu vaccine made last year has but a short period of effectiveness.

Now studies show that this behaviour is just a decoy to guard the virus's more vulnerable parts; a fact that might enable us to make drugs, or a vaccine, that will work on all kinds of flu, year after year.

Flu's main surface protein, haemagglutinin, looks like a lollipop. Our immune systems mostly produce antibodies to its rounded head, and it is this part that changes every year, making immunity short-lived. But in a large library of human antibodies, Wayne Marasco at Harvard University and colleagues found very few that bind its "stalk", which barely changes at all, either through time or between different flu viruses.

To see if this might provide a way to attack the virus, they produced large amounts of the antibodies that home in on the stalk and found that they cured and protected mice from two kinds of H5N1 bird flu, as well as many other flu families including H1N1 pandemic and ordinary flu. The researchers now want to develop the antibodies as a flu drug, possibly to stockpile for pandemics.

The team also plans to test the stalk antibody as a vaccine, so that people produce more of these antibodies themselves. They suspect haemagglutinin's big head is a decoy aimed to attract the immune system's attention and to stop us making many antibodies to the stalk – a delicate bit of molecular machinery that not be so easy to change to evade our immune attacks. In tests on mice, they found that the flu viruses did not evolve to escape the treatment.

Another benefit is that such antibodies stay effective for more than three weeks when injected into people, and in a pandemic could keep people alive long enough to produce their own antibodies to the virus.

Navigating in the Credit Crisis - Top 6 Lessons Learned

Recent Ernst & Young Financial Institutions report on the credit crisis reveals that the top 6 lessons learned are as follows;

1. Liquidity (cash) is King - 90% agreement in financial institutions (100% agreement in the real world)
   
2. Risk needs to be examined across the organisation - 73% (Co-operation means no more secrets, fewer surprises and the avoidance of expense rescue efforts)
3. Stay tuned to industry trends, dynamics and cycles - 60% (Look outside & Listen! Use the radar, dashboards and the crow's nest if you have to. There are icebergs about and they will do more than freeze your assets)
4. The people factor - 40% (You have professional, intelligent staff on board, so use them appropriately. You pay them for their knowledge! They know stuff! Talk to them!)
5. Prepare for the unexpected - 35% (Analyse, Assess and Mitigate against risk. Think the unthinkable. Develop Backup, Contingency and Business Continuity plans. Jumping onto the iceberg at the last moment is not a good option)
6. Don't believe 3rd Party rating agencies or your own marketing hype - 23% (Simplify! The devil is in the complexity. Find the true facts and stick to them. Do your research and check in to reality occasionally, between those long business lunches)

Day 1, Lessons 1 - 6 in the Business school 101 course.