DR. GRAY'S FAMILIAR TALKS ON SCIENCE

On Talks

What I have to say may be regarded as provocative or even insulting, but I think it needs to be said. In the history of medicine, a substantial number of lectures, seminars, and papers given at conferences and symposia-let's call them talks-are very difficult to follow, and a few are utterly incomprehensible. Very rarely is this because speakers have failed to master their subject. It is simply...

Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Atomic: beauty vs. horror in science.

Sometimes it seems as if horror is the only story that science has to tell, or the only one we want to hear. Somebody has a gadget they have to build, an experiment too sweet to resist. .. The tug of war between beauty and horror is the theme of " Doctor Atomic. When I was a boy, I looked out into the star-filled sky one night and was awestruck by its beauty. .. A few days later, I happened on ...

Nonuniform Sediment Transport Modeling at Grays Harbor

A depth-averaged two-dimensional nonuniform sediment transport model is applied to the beaches adjacent to Grays Harbor, WA, USA to test the model skill in predicting nearshore morphology change. The model considers bed material hiding, exposure, sorting, stratification, bed-slope effects, avalanching, non-erodible bed surfaces, and transport due to asymmetrical waves, Stokes drift, roller and ...

Practical Talks on Kidney Disease

Climate change talks stumble on

At the twelfth hour of the UN climate change meeting in Cancún last month, negotiators from more than 200 countries managed to prevent the collapse of the 20-year-old climatechange-negotiating process but otherwise achieved little in concrete new moves to build on the Kyoto protocol, a legal commitment to reduce carbon emissions by some industrialised countries, which expires next year. But the...