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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Week in Science goes to TED

This week's science stories provided a heavy dose of TED, along with some …

This week, some of Ars' top science stories came from our Editor-in-Chief Ken Fisher, who was attending the TED talks in California. TED typically features people with big ideas that have the potential to either change the world or how we see it, so science provides a constant flow of inspiration for both the speakers and the attendees. We've put these stories on top of this list, but we also had a steady flow of compelling stories from elsewhere in the world of science, too.

Getting ready for the end of growth on Earth: We've based our entire economy on the mistaken belief that a finite planet can provide infinite resources, according to sustainability expert Paul Gilding. To him, the only way we'll break out of this false belief is if we start to fear being wrong.

How the US can stop the largest wealth transfer in history by building a bridge: At TED, T. Boone Pickens was back with yet another alternative energy plan, one that has a renewed focus on fossil fuels. Can we, as Pickens suggests, build a bridge using natural gas?

A brief history of the Multiverse: Today's round of TED talks featured Brian Greene, who talked confidently about how our Universe is just one occupant of a multiverse—and suggested we might some day see evidence of one of its siblings.

Could fixing healthcare be as simple as a checklist?: We tend to believe that when it comes to medicine, specialization, individual brilliance, and high tech solutions are the way forward. But Atul Gawande used his TED talk to argue that simple checklists might do more for our health care than anything else.

Nature Editorial: If you want reproducible science, the software needs to be open source: According to an editorial in Nature, all scientific code should be released open source so that independent researchers can reproduce the results of a paper.

Does being wealthy make you unethical? New research suggests it does: High socioeconomic status individuals are significantly more likely to engage in unethical behavior, according to a study from UC Berkeley and the University of Toronto, published in the current PNAS.

Americans listening to politicians, ignoring climate scientists: Public opinion about climate change in the U.S. has been riding a roller coaster over the past decade. What's driving public opinion? A new study says it's not the science.

Forcing an electron to orbit like a planet: Researchers show that they can push an electron around a Rydberg atom in a controlled way using microwave fields.

Finding the Universe's cosmological constant using something we can create in the lab: A trio of physicists play with the math that describes Bose Einstein condensates. Hidden down behind the BEC's couch, they found a fake cosmological constant that they could use to show why our current calculations for the real cosmological constant may be so very badly wrong.

Astronomers find hints of life on Earth by looking at the Moon: Could we detect indications of life on any of the multitude of exoplanets we're now discovering? To find out, researchers tried to detect the faint signal of life on Earth that appears in sunlight that is bounced off Earth and the surface of the Moon.

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