The SmartS Club

I am not the person who get's to go places. Usually I am sitting in a damp office somewhere one or two floors below the basement of an unbelievably ugly office-building. So I don't have to think whom I could ask to water my plants. Which is good, because I neither have plants to water nor friends to ask. But you might. And you certainly solved that problem. But you know what? Your plant also needs light - sunlight if possible. Will you ask your neighbours to move the Hibiscus around your apartment while the sunlight wooshes through? No, you say, watering will have to do it.  But there are people thinking seriously about that problem - and thinking hard they solved it.  I bumped into those guys when I rediscovered the treehuggers. I had almost forgotten them. Treehuggers, you say? I know. Me too. BUT. There is this one website, that I once ran into, when I read about the carnivorous robots that get their energy from digesting anything from fruitflies to your favo...

A friend of mine dated a girl who was an identical twin. She and her sister suffered from multi personality disorder. He finally left them - all seven. And led a happy life with the remaining four. They married when she found a doctor who freed her from her demons. Some of them. And he died. Widowing two. They tried to console eachother and never married again.

The number of publications and citations, possibly rescaled into more complex relations like the Hirsch-index or fashionable derivatives thereof, are widely accepted parameters to quantify scientific quality.  In times of scarce financial resources, it is argued, transparency is imperative for allocating funds, and substantial investments in science are best legitimized by ,excellent and useful‘ research results. This is lead by the perception that scientific quality can somehow be objectively measured and the whole process of 'doing science' can ultimately be subjected to some sort of controlling.  While the drive for excellence and usefulness is agreed upon - their definition and measurability, however, is at the center of many a heated debate. At first sight, benchmarking usefulness translates into a short time-to-market of the research results, general application-orientation and product-driven applied research (a term coined by the german philosopher Juergen Mittels...

(it's ferragosto. Everyone is at the beaches. The cities are deserted. The espresso-machine is operated by some students from Australia. It is too hot to think, let alone write. Period.) What do you think when you see such a twitter-profile "Researcher, therapist, artist, writer..." - decorated with a lascivous-looking long-haired chick? Well: You believe because you doodled some almond-eyed fairies on a piece of paper that you are an artist? Your "dear diary..." makes you a writer? Endless chatter with your girlfriends about their messed-up relationships made you a therapist? And clicking through wikipedia warrants the title "researcher"? The net is full of those characters. People seem to want to label themselves. We all want to stand for something. We want to brand ourselves:"Researcher, therapist, artist, writer...". But even if it looks like it: life, even life on twitter, is no computer-game. No matter how much energy is put in...

A neuroscientist I was talking to recently complained that the Higgs-research,even the Neutrino-fluke at CERN is getting humungous funding while neuroscience is struggling for support at a much more modest level. This, despite the undisputed fact that understanding our brain, and ultimately ourselves, is the most exciting challenge around. Henry Markram of EPFL in Switzerland   is one of the guys aiming for big, big funding to simulate the complete brain. After founding the brain institute and developing methods to analyze and then reconstruct elements of the brain in a supercomputer he now applies for 1.5 Billion Euro in EU-funding for the 'flagship-projects' of Blue Brain -and many believe his project is simply too big to fail. Some call the project daring, others audacious. It is one of the so very few really expensive life-science endeavours. Why aren't there more like that around? Why do we seem to accept the bills for monstrous physics experiments more easily? Is...

In a talk on innovation at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften Juergen Mittelstrass , one of Germanys great living philosophers, added one more slot to the well-known classification of science, leaving us with:  'fundamental research', 'application-oriented research' and 'product-driven application-oriented research'. While he was obviously trying to grant some innovative-potential to research formerly known as 'applied', it soon became clear that innovation would be found rather in the first than in the last box and the terrain for the unexpected was shrinking as it is obvious that innovation by nature is nothing you can plan for and the application-pull would lead to optimizations, inventions, solutions but not to surprises. His critique of todays ever-growing emphasis on applicability in research-funding was massively amplified by Harald zur Hausen (Nobel-prize in medicine 2008), who reminded everybody that his ground-breaking r...

The neat thing with consciousness is: it is so undefined that everybody can speculate wildly about it. You could locate your conscious self in the paw of your dog, your aquarium, your pinky... anywhere - and write books about it, sell books about it - thousands! It is just so heartwarming to chat about consciousness, to bash science on the way and to patronize. And who does it best? Right, the aggregators at bigthink.com. Megan Erickson asserts us (by quoting Alva Noë ) "just as love does not live inside the heart, consciousness is not contained in a finite space". We should not look for it inside our brain, or even our body - but in some intricate interwovenness of our cells and the outer world. What is the proof? None. Just pure sci-fi, touchy-feely chatter. Nice and maybe right or maybe wrong... Do you remember the first step for explaining, for proving or disproving something? Yep: have a hypothesis. Write something down. And then write how you (or anybod...