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6 votes
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One town, four elements – Ytterby in Sweden is famous for being the single richest source of elemental discoveries in the world
5 votes -
Korean fusion project sets the new world record of twenty second long operation at 100 million degrees
14 votes -
The ethical challenges of connecting our brains to computers
9 votes -
The biology of mistletoe: Best known as a holiday trimming, the parasitic plant is a botanical luminary in its own right
12 votes -
Extracting explosive, radioactive metal (potassium) from bananas
5 votes -
New study links psychopathic tendencies to racial prejudice and right-wing authoritarianism
3 votes -
What did the past smell like?
5 votes -
Turning plastic gloves into grape soda
7 votes -
'The platypuses were glowing': The secret light of Australia's marsupials
7 votes -
Why do Biden's votes not follow Benford's Law? Debunking an election fraud claim
24 votes -
Scenes from the wide variety of volcanic activity on Earth in 2020
5 votes -
Plasticenta: First evidence of microplastics in human placenta
21 votes -
Calculus explained and illustrated
6 votes -
Five things worth knowing about empathy
4 votes -
Survey Chicken
9 votes -
Cameras and lenses
6 votes -
Is it possible to make a laser out of wood?
9 votes -
Understanding hyperbolic geometry by illuminating it
3 votes -
Gene therapy, absolutely and for real
4 votes -
What is an individual? Biology seeks clues in information theory.
5 votes -
The Stable Marriage Problem
12 votes -
Team behind Oxford Covid jab start final stage of malaria vaccine trials
7 votes -
The social life of forests: Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?
5 votes -
Researchers restore lost sight in mice, offering clues to reversing aging
6 votes -
Scientists restore age-related vision loss in mice through epigenetic reprogramming
9 votes -
‘It will change everything’: DeepMind’s AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures
22 votes -
AlphaFold: A solution to a fifty-year-old grand challenge in biology
7 votes -
BOTI Science: Best of interval compilations, suggestions? Supporting trends identification
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and...
Discussions of progress or collapse often get mired in the question of significant discoveries and inventions. After wrestling with several organisational cencepts for various catalogues, and running into the Ever Growing List dilemma, I hit on what I call BOTI, or Best of the Interval (day, week, month, year, decade, century, etc.). It's similar to the tickler file 43 folder perpetual filing system of GTD. For technical types, a round-robin database or circular buffer.
(As with my bullet journal experiments, the effort is uneven but recoverable, which is its core strength.)
By setting up a cascade of buffers --- day of month, (optionally week or weekdays), month of year, year of decade, decade of century, century of millennium, millennium of 10kyr, a progressively larger scale record (roughly order-of-magnitude based), with a resolution of day but a maximum retention of (here) 10,000 years but only 83 record bins. How much you choose to put in each bin is up to you, but the idea is that only to most significant information is carried forward. Yes, some information is lost but total data storage requirements are known once the bin size and count are established.
Another problem BOTI addresses is finite attention. If you limit yourself to a finite set of items per year, say ten to one hundred (about what a moderately motivated individual could be aware of), BOTI is a form of noise-filtering. Items which seemed urgent or captivating in the moment often fade in significance with time, and often overlooked element rise in significance with time and context. 'Let it settle with time" is a good cure to FOMO.
There's the question of revisiting context. I'd argue that significance might be substantially revised years, decades, possibly centuries after a discovery or inventiion. So an end-of-period purge of all but the top items isn't what we're looking for. Gut a gradual forgetting / pruning seems the general idea.
Back to science and technology: It's hard to assess significance in the moment, and day-to-day reports of science and technology advances are noisy. I've been looking for possible sources to use and am finding little that's satisfactory. I'd like suggestions.
- Many newspapers and magazines run annual "best of" features. These typically include books, but not science (or at least not regularly). Some of the books are science- or technonolgy-related, though.
- There are the Nobel prizes, notably in physics, chemistry, and medicine, with lists at Wikipedia (linked). The Fields Medal in maths. Other fields have their awards, of which lists might prove useful...
- I'm having trouble finding something like a yearbook of science or technology, though some titles match, e.g., McGraw-Hill yearbook of science and technology. On closer look, this might answer my question, at least for yearbooks.
- Wikipedia has some promising but either inconsistent or untidily organised pages or collections, including the List of years in science, Timeline of historic inventions, Timeline of scientific discoveries, Timeline of scientific thought, among numerous other timelines. Compilations are useful but aren't themselves rankings. See also "never ending list" above.
There is a goal here: trends over time. I've a few senses of directions of research and progress, possibly also of biases in awards. Looking at, for example, Nobels in physics, chemistry, and medicine from, say, 1901--1960 vs. 1961--2020, there seems to be a marked shift, though categorising that might be difficult. The breakpoint isn't necessarily 1960 either --- 1950 or 1940 might be argued for.
There is the question of how to measure significance of scientific discoveries or technological inventions. I'm not going to get into that though several standard measures (e.g., counting patents issued) strike me as highly problematic, despite being common in research. Discussion might be interesting.
Mostly, though, I'm looking for data sources.
5 votes -
Why China's largest volcano is so unusual
9 votes -
The universal geometry of geology
10 votes -
Scientists discover the first animal that doesn’t breathe oxygen to live
23 votes -
Proving that 1=2, Bob Ross style
6 votes -
Decoding the mathematical secrets of plants’ stunning leaf patterns
6 votes -
Does shaving make your hair thicker?
2 votes -
From your head to your... ass-crack. The truth about hair (Compilation)
2 votes -
Making toilet paper moonshine
12 votes -
Forensic reconstruction of the Beirut explosion
10 votes -
Why PVC cement spins like crazy in water
5 votes -
One couple’s tireless crusade to stop a genetic killer
7 votes -
Nine of the weirdest penises in the animal kingdom, from the echidna’s four-headed unit to the dolphin’s prehensile member
17 votes -
What is a particle?
4 votes -
The race to grow human breast milk in a lab
4 votes -
The woman who is allergic to water
8 votes -
What colour are your bits?
11 votes -
Scientists grow bigger monkey brains using human genes, replicating evolution
4 votes -
A single-step approach to nuclear reprocessing
8 votes -
It’s time to restore scientific integrity
11 votes -
Metagenomic sequencing can quickly identify pathogens in body fluids, new study finds
3 votes -
The search for what causes chronic itching
6 votes