Our reader The Big Henry has been sending along some engaging science-related links lately, and he’s just sent me another. This one has to do with the possibility that “biophotons” — light quanta emitted within living cells — may be a channel for some sort of information transfer. I’ve never heard anything about this until [...]
Coffee Drinkers Have Lower Risk of Death, Study Suggests
Here’s an interesting item: “Good” Cholesterol Not So Good After All, New Study Shows The revelation that high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, is the “good cholesterol” has suffered a major blow. A meta-study involving over a hundred thousand participants used two different strategies to see if genetic mutations that increased levels of HDL also decreased risk [...]
Attention, teens: if you need some help answering the call of the wild, then make your way to Sex: A Tell-All Exhibition, now running at Ottawa’s Museum of Science and Technology. The exhibit includes floor-to-ceiling photos of nude toddlers, children, teens and adults, and an array of heated, flavoured and textured condoms rolled over wooden [...]
Our reader Henry has sent along a thought-provoking item about a mechanism by which complex systems can bootstrap themselves into existence: autocatalytic sets. The idea is particularly intriguing in its metaphorical generality, and its applicability may well extend beyond chemistry to social and political domains as well. Have a look. An explanatory article is here, [...]
March 27, 2012 – 10:44 pm
Here’s Richard Feynman explaining, with trademark clarity and simplicity, how science works. (Would that the video clip were as clear, but it’s worth watching anyway.)
January 24, 2012 – 1:02 am
It seems old Sol has just launched a gigantic flare our way — the biggest in seven years — and we will notice its effects on Tuesday. While you’re waiting, here’s a fantastic gallery of solar images. My favorites: numbers 15 and 16.
January 12, 2012 – 4:17 pm
In Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson, the magnum opus of the extraordinary Greek/Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the central character, Beelzebub refers to the unfortunate inhabitants of Earth — us — as “three-brained beings”. This is in alignment with Gurdjieff’s division of the human organism into three parts: the intellectual center, emotional center, and ‘moving’ or [...]
January 10, 2012 – 9:12 pm
With thanks to our reader Pete K., here’s a heartening item from the frontiers of science. What’s more, the story introduces a new and important fundamental unit of measurement, which I think should be called the ‘marley’. And here’s a related video.
January 6, 2012 – 9:29 pm
New tests of the extract of Japanese raisin-tree seeds (hovenia dulcis) appear to have confirmed that their “active ingredient” is highly effective at blocking the effects of alcohol. Big Think reports: Scientists at UCLA gave a group of rats the “human equivalent” of 15 to 20 beers during a two-hour binge. We’ll call this group [...]
January 5, 2012 – 11:27 pm
From the frontiers of science, here’s some breaking news – Men, Women Really Do Have Big Personality Differences – that any human being, plucked from anywhere on Earth at any time between the invention of language and the 1960s or so, and not in a persistent vegetative state, could have told you. I’m “on the [...]
December 20, 2011 – 10:44 pm
Here’s the latest from the Kepler planetary probe: Earth-sized exoplanets. Not in the temperate, ‘habitable’ zone, but we’ve found some of those too. All this after only a couple of years of looking, with a technology that is still in its infancy. Can anyone really imagine anymore that the galaxy isn’t teeming with Earth-like, watery [...]
December 7, 2011 – 9:26 pm
There’s a buzz going round that the boffins at LHC may have found the Higgs boson.
December 6, 2011 – 11:30 am
Following on our recent post about race and intelligence: one question that often comes up is where brain size fits in. Brain size does seem to vary among human populations in the same way that the distribution of intelligence does — with East Asians, for example, having bigger brains on average than whites — so [...]
December 3, 2011 – 1:40 pm
The wall of ideological taboo around frank discussion of race and intelligence is beginning to crack. So far we’re used to hearing about it mostly from beyond-the-pale HBD bloggers, or rare damn-the-torpedoes authors like Charles Murray — but truth, when buried, has a way of patiently seeking daylight. (Or, as Churchill put it, “you must [...]
November 21, 2011 – 6:24 pm
Here’s one that’s been making the rounds: it’s an Op-Ed from yesterday’s Times making a point that in a less Orwellian world would come as no surprise to anyone, namely that innate qualities make a significant difference in the statistical distribution of life outcomes. We read: Exhibit A is a landmark study of intellectually precocious [...]
November 5, 2011 – 1:26 pm
Here’s an important breakthrough: Boys do better on tests of technical aptitude (for example, mechanical aptitude tests) than girls. The same is true for adults. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes a theory explaining how the difference comes about: the root cause is [...]
November 3, 2011 – 10:31 pm
Nice: for a limited time, free access to Scientific American archives from long ago. Have a look.
October 17, 2011 – 11:19 pm
Consciousness not mysterious enough for you? Well, NASA’s got 600 other puzzles for you to chew on. Here.
October 10, 2011 – 10:09 am
Charles Krauthammer, of all people, shares a joke inspired by recent doings at CERN: “We don’t allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender. A neutrino walks into a bar.
September 22, 2011 – 2:16 pm
New results from CERN have the boffins scratching their heads. Story here.
September 15, 2011 – 10:42 am
Here’s an encouraging item from Science Daily: Older Musicians Experience Less Age-Related Decline in Hearing Abilities Than Non-Musicians ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2011) — A study led by Canadian researchers has found the first evidence that lifelong musicians experience less age-related hearing problems than non-musicians. While hearing studies have already shown that trained musicians have highly [...]
August 16, 2011 – 10:44 pm
If we infidels are going to go around insisting that life arose spontaneously without miraculous intervention, then we’re naturally going to have a keen interest providing an explanation of how that could have happened. To make the story hang together, what’s needed is for some sort of self-replicating molecules to have arisen, and a plausible [...]
As the markets begin to totter in anticipation of the coming global collapse, investors are naturally wondering where to put their money. According to the latest data from NASA, I’d say definitely not the beach-umbrella or swimwear sectors. Maybe coal-mining and hockey equipment.
Dear Mayor Bloomberg: According to Scientific American, a meta-analysis of seven studies of the effects of salt consumption finds little or no health benefit from reduced-sodium diets. Would you mind calling off the mutaween?
Here’s a happy item: More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA’s twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they’re still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a message that, to scientists, is both unsettling and thrilling. The message is, “Expect the [...]
April 22, 2011 – 11:15 am
A story that’s been making the rounds the past few days (thanks to the indefatigable JK for sending along this version of it) has to do with recent research that casts doubt on a cornerstone of contemporary thought about human language: namely that we all are born with a “language module” that constrains possible grammars [...]
From today’s Physorg newsletter: So much for drowning your sorrows Alcohol helps the brain remember, says new study They’re still kind of short and skinny First galaxies were born much earlier than expected This is news? Europe may be slowly disappearing under Africa Enough with the fracking leaks! Fracking leaks may make gas ‘dirtier’ than [...]
Here’s the latest stab at a neurological explanation of political attitudes: a study that associates conservatism with larger amygdalas, and liberalism with larger anterior cingulate gyruses. We read: Based on what is known about the functions of those two brain regions, the structural differences are consistent with reports showing a greater ability of liberals to [...]
March 30, 2011 – 10:30 pm
In a recent study of psychological “priming”, boffins at two universities have turned up an unsurprising result: anxiety about death can incline people more favorably toward belief in supernatural agency and purpose, in particular “intelligent design”. (The study might have been somewhat slanted, however; one of the metrics used for confidence in naturalism was “liking [...]
Today, 3/14, is Pi Day. What we really ought to celebrate, however, is Tau Day. The delightfully engaging vlogress and “recreational mathemusician” Vi Hart explains why, here. And for all the details, have a look here.
February 15, 2011 – 8:39 pm
We’ve heard a lot for quite a while now about America’s stubborn Achievement Gaps. The stubbornest and most notorious of these is the gap between the races in primary-school education (as mentioned again in yesterday’s Times, where it is fully explained), but another lingering blot on our escutcheon has been the scandalous underrepresentation of women [...]
February 9, 2011 – 8:35 pm
I’m swamped again at work, with no time to write. So for this evening, just a provocative little tid-bit. I had coffee very briefly today with my friend Salim Ismail, a remarkable fellow who was most recently the director of the Singularity University. I don’t get to see Salim very often, because he is always [...]
February 6, 2011 – 6:06 pm
A while back I noted that Sam Harris has a new book out (The Moral Landscape), in which he argues that it is possible to develop an objective, entirely naturalistic science of human morality that would be not just descriptive, but prescriptive as well. From a philosophical perspective this is a hugely audacious assertion, because [...]
January 26, 2011 – 3:03 pm
Here’s another item from today’s Science Daily, for you math weenies out there (Derb, are you reading this?): a historic breakthrough in the theory of partitions.
January 21, 2011 – 5:47 pm
“Yellowstone Has Bulged as Magma Pocket Swells” — headline, National Geographic, January 19
January 9, 2011 – 7:26 pm
Given all the bickering going on between Left and Right, it seems apt to mention an item in today’s Science Daily newsletter: a story about new results in the study of biological molecular chirality, something I’ve been curious about for a while. A brief explanatory preface: Molecules with identical chemical structure can come in mirror-image [...]
December 14, 2010 – 12:33 am
In the December 13th edition of The New Yorker is a feature article by Jonah Lehrer titled The Truth Wears Off, about what’s known as the “Decline Effect” in experimental research. If you have a subscription to the New Yorker, you can read the article here. The magazine’s website does not allow selecting and pasting [...]
December 12, 2010 – 11:00 pm
Here’s an item that’s been going around just now — sent to me independently by two readers shortly after I had noticed it myself in the science newsletters. Prior to the warmest part of the current interglacial period, large areas of what is now the western Persian Gulf were above sea level — constituting a [...]
December 10, 2010 – 11:00 pm
Once again it’s almost eleven P.M., I’m still at work, and once again I have no time to write. (This is getting old fast, as am I.) I do have another interesting item for you, though. This time it’s about a little experiment, one that has picked out a curious difference between liberals and conservatives. [...]
November 17, 2010 – 10:14 pm
Astronomy lost one of its most luminous stars on Saturday with the death of Allan Sandage, protégé of Edwin Hubble, and one of the greatest observers of all time. From Dennis Overbye’s obituary in the Times: Over more than six decades, Dr. Sandage was like one of those giant galaxies that sit at the center [...]
November 9, 2010 – 10:15 pm
In today’s science news, a huge pair of melon-shaped objects has the boffins goggling in amazement. “They’re big,” said Doug Finkbeiner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who has been studying them intently. “Wow,” said Princeton’s David Spergel. Story here.
October 22, 2010 – 4:10 pm
A while back we took a look at physicist Craig Hogan’s curious idea that the Universe might actually be a kind of hologram. (For an explanation, and a very strange comment, have a look at the original post.) Now Dr. Hogan is getting closer to putting his theory to the test. Learn more here, and [...]
October 5, 2010 – 11:38 pm
As a generally conservative sort of blogger, I write a lot about how important it is to defend our traditional American culture against its many foes, foreign and domestic. But in case you’ve forgotten just what it is we’re fighting for, have a look at this inspiring clip, courtesy of the indefatigable JK.
October 3, 2010 – 9:08 pm
Sam Harris is about to release a new book, called The Moral Landscape. Dr. Harris has been working for a while now to try to put morality on an objective footing (something I think can’t be done). His premise, if I may sum it up with extreme brevity, is that there are some moral systems [...]
September 30, 2010 – 10:22 pm
Here’s an item that I am trying to get my head around: According to Raphael Bousso at the University of California, there are physical constraints that make an eternally expanding universe impermissible. Cosmologists have been bickering over the fate of the universe since its expansion was confirmed by Edwin Hubble back in 1929. On the [...]
Yet another study confirms that low-carb diets, long ridiculed as an unhealthy fad, are effective for weight loss and an improved lipid profile. Here.
Through a process unimaginatively named “sonification”, engineers at CERN have converted the vibrations of the long-sought Higgs boson into audio. It’s not bad, actually; too bad Richard Wright isn’t around to hear it. Here.
Paul Krugman has been awfully lathered up lately. His fulminating resentment of conservatives for causing all the world’s ills (and worse, for disregarding his Olympian sagacity) has gotten downright pyretic, and in his twice-weekly tirades he seems — due, no doubt, to the July heat — increasingly indifferent to the need to clothe his recriminations [...]