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POPSUnintelligent Design At this point, 30 years after the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman and his late collaborator Amos Tversky started documenting a rash of fallacies in human reasoning, the idea that the human mind would be "perfect in His image" is as outdated (and narcissistic) as the idea that the solar system would revolve around the planet earth. The only theory that can really make sense of these needless imperfections is Darwin's theory of natural selection, which holds that humans (and all other life forms) evolve through a blind process known as descent-with-modification, in which new life forms represent random modifications of earlier life forms -- with no central overseer to guide the process. Such a random process can, over time, lead populations of creatures to become more adapted to their environment, but it is also vulnerable to getting stuck, in the sort of good-enough-but-not-perfect solutions that mathematicians call local maxima.
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POPSWhales & Dolphins Inspire a Novel Design for Wind Turbines "Engineers have previously tried to ensure steady flow patterns on rigid and simple lifting surfaces, such as wings. The lesson from biomimicry is that unsteady flow and complex shapes can increase lift, reduce drag and delay 'stall', a dramatic and abrupt loss of lift, beyond what existing engineered systems can accomplish," Fish said. "There are even possibilities that this technology could be applied to aeronautical designs such as helicopter blades in the future."
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POPSProfessor Designs Plasma-propelled Flying Saucer The force created by passing an electrical current through this plasma pushes around the surrounding air, and that swirling air creates lift and momentum and provides stability against wind gusts. In order to maximize the area of contact between air and vehicle, Roy’s design is partially hollow and continuously curved, like an electromagnetic flying bundt pan. One of the most revolutionary aspects of Roy’s use of magnetohydrodynamics is that the vehicle will have no moving parts. The lack of traditional mechanical aircraft parts, such as propellers or jet engines, should provide tremendous reliability, Roy said. Such a design also will allow the WEAV to hover and take off vertically.
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POPS52 AMAZING Shots of Classic Cars Merging between both the art of photography and auto design can produce wonderful photography artwork that tell about the great classic cars design story through the history, no matter if these classic cars are shown in a gallery in a big city or parked on a far away deserted farm, but the beauty of the effect is the same and will never change.
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POPSCreationism, the New Virus of Education Look for new lies from Creationism/ID as it adapts to criticism and unveiling of its distortions and frauds. Make no mistake, these people at the Discovery Institute are ruthless in their quest to insinuate religion into the curriculum. They will use any method to accomplish this goal. These are not simply people gathered together to "give another perspective". They are organized to force their agenda to teach religious myths to our children. The last sentence of the clip is chilling considering High Priest Bush has used the same language. No one considers Bush to be versed in science, given his record. The dangerous part is that he does hold the power to cause real harm to education and that is a problem that will last long past his failed administration.
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POPSToon-like Hotel Room Using bright colors and hand drawn black lines around the furniture give this hotel room a very cool toon-like appearance.
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POPSRight and wrong lessons from biology The opposite view stresses that evolution is an extremely effective way of searching parameter space, and that in consequence is that we should assume that biological design solutions are likely to be close to optimal for the environment for which they’ve evolved. Where these design solutions seem odd from our point of view, their unfamiliarity is to be ascribed to the different ways in which physics works at the nanoscale. At its most extreme, this view regards biological nanotechnology, not just as the existence proof for nanotechnology, but as an upper limit on its capabilities.
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