Amphibian populations have been declining sharply for years now, around the world. An item in today’s Science Daily suggests that the cause may be a enormously popular weed-killer, atrazine, which apparently “chemically castrates” most of the males that come into contact with it, and turns the rest into females. You can learn more here. (I [...]
February 28, 2010 – 6:52 pm
As you all know, the global-warming community has been under a great deal of pressure lately. Its Pontifex Maximus, Albert A. Gore, published a lengthy riposte in the Times today. You can read it here. It is about what you would expect: a reminder that even if the scientific claims of the global-warming industry are [...]
February 10, 2010 – 10:31 pm
Many years ago I read a haunting short story (I believe it was called As Never Was, by P. Schuyler Miller), about a curious possible aspect of time-travel. In the story, which I recall only vaguely, there was a museum that sheltered a celebrated artifact: a strange and marvelous knife that had been brought back [...]
January 26, 2010 – 10:24 pm
It is remarkable how well natural systems can find minimal solutions to mathematical problems. Years ago I was shown, in a simple demonstration, an impressive example. The problem was this: given several cities on a map, how can one lay out a minimal network of roads connecting them all? To give a simple example, if [...]
January 15, 2010 – 3:32 pm
In an electrifying news item, we learn that Dutch scientists have announced a breakthrough that should remove any lingering Congressional resistance to US funding for stem-cell research. Here.
December 14, 2009 – 9:38 pm
It is Spring in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, and the gas giant’s north pole, which has been hidden in shadow for years, is visible again. NASA’s Cassini orbiter has now sent along some dramatic new images of the strange hexagon that girdles the planet’s upper latitudes — a curious meteorological feature that seems to be as [...]
November 24, 2009 – 11:34 pm
There’s all sorts of interesting scientific news today, including several stories from recent Science Daily newsletters. First up: there is further supporting evidence that the Toba volcano, which I have written about before, indeed caused far-flung devastation when it blew a gigantic hole in the island of Sumatra 73,000 years ago. The explosion is believed [...]
November 24, 2009 – 12:29 am
David Duff is having a nice gloat over the Climategate kerfuffle — which I must say is unfolding rather gratifyingly, for those of us who thought we already had enough religions in the world and didn’t see the need for any expensive new ones. Here.
November 23, 2009 – 12:31 am
While I was away this weekend, paying scant attention to the news, a serious brouhaha seems to have erupted in the global-warming community. Apparently a hacker got hold of, and made public, emails and internal documents from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia — a major center for AGW study — [...]
November 6, 2009 – 7:16 pm
In a recent post we mentioned that some of the boffins at CERN had begun to suggest, apparently seriously, that the problems that have dogged the development of the latest generation of high-energy particle colliders — first the Superconducting Supercollider here in the US, and more recently CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — might actually be [...]
October 26, 2009 – 12:09 am
It’s been a busy weekend, and I’ve had no time for writing. For tonight, then, a curiosity: the effect of visual contrast on gender recognition. Here.
October 23, 2009 – 10:48 pm
An item in today’s Physorg newsletter describes some remarkable neurological research: scientists at CalTech, by showing pictures to test subjects while monitoring brain activity, have managed to associate individual neurons in the medial temporal lobe with specific perceptions. We read: Dr. Moran Cerf of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and colleagues conducted their [...]
October 21, 2009 – 12:32 pm
Over at Mangan’s today, Dennis reports on pressure being applied to the journal Medical Hypotheses (and its editor Bruce Charlton) in an attempt to suppress a controversial paper on AIDS. Here.
October 19, 2009 – 10:57 pm
Time travel is a persistently tantalizing idea, and has been a recurring theme in literature and other cultural media since at least as far back as the Mahabarata. Today it lives at the very edge of scientific plausibility: never entirely ruled out, but subject to persuasive objections. One of the most problematic is the “grandfather [...]
October 15, 2009 – 11:20 pm
We’ve been traveling all evening, so just a brief item for tonight: a giant, glowing ribbon at the outer limits of our solar system. Here.
October 7, 2009 – 4:40 pm
If you’re like me, you’ve spent a lot of time wondering why Saturn’s moon Iapetus is dark on one side. Well, here’s your answer.
September 24, 2009 – 5:47 pm
I’m off to a concert tonight, and traveling tomorrow, so I may not have much time for blogging over the next couple of days. For tonight, then, here’s an engaging biographical sketch, from Tuesday’s New York Times of one of my favorite scientists: astronomer Dr. Carolyn Porco, who is best known for her long association [...]
September 21, 2009 – 11:19 pm
Today marks the 143rd anniversary of the birth of H.G. Wells, and Google has marked the occasion with one of those curious UFO banners they’ve been featuring lately. Wells is best known today for his immortal contributions to science-fiction — such classics as The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man [...]
September 14, 2009 – 10:32 pm
Lawrence Auster is a very smart fellow, and I admire his formidable presence on the ramparts of Western culture. But he has curious blind spots, for one so intelligent, and one of them has to do with Darwinism. Have a look at this exchange with a reader, one who patiently tries to explain, as I [...]
August 26, 2009 – 2:53 pm
While everyone else is moping about the death of Ted Kennedy (well, maybe not everybody; Mary Jo Kopechne, for one, could not be reached for comment), here at waka waka waka we are enjoying some good news, courtesy of our friend and esteemed colleague The Stiletto. We all know, of course, that binge drinking is [...]
August 17, 2009 – 11:56 pm
Now and then a blip appears on the screen that just might be something awfully big headed our way; on reading about this just now, I’m wondering if the name “Tim Palmer” mightn’t be a lot more familiar ere long.
Dennis Mangan calls our attention to an article in Newsweek, by Sharon Begley, that takes aim at the burgeoning science of evolutionary psychology. Begley effectively pronounces the field dead, which will certainly be news to its practitioners. Anthropologist Dan Sperber writes that the evo-psych community knew this broadside was coming, and that its publication in [...]
In the news lately has been a New Zealand climatologist who has been looking askance at received opinions regarding anthropogenic global warming. His name is Chris de Freitas, and he is a member of the faculty of the University of Auckland. I recently ran across an article of his, in which I read the following: [...]
Recently President Obama, in what he must have known would be a controversial choice, selected the geneticist Francis Collins to be the next director of the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Collins is an eminent scientist, and a capable administrator — indeed, his professional qualifications for the post are unimpeachable — but he has also [...]
A few days ago we remarked on a CNN item about the differences between men and women. Might some of these differences be innate (as I think is almost certainly the case), or are they all just the result of cultural conditioning? This has has been an enormously contentious issue of late, so it would [...]
At CNN today is a pop-science puff piece that breezily summarizes some of the natural underpinnings of what we all know to be true: men and women are different. The article touches, blithely and matter-of-factly, on differences in body chemistry, brain anatomy, emotions, and cognition. You’ll certainly get no argument from me; I’ve always thought [...]
An engaging item in today’s Physorg Newsletter reported on a recent study, published in Nature Geoscience, that examined the Earth’s carbon chemistry during a period known as the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM. During this torrid interval, which took place about 55 million years ago, the Earth’s average temperature shot up by 7° C. over [...]
There’s an item in the news today about “neurosecurity”: the need to protect “neural devices” — computerized electronic machinery designed to interact directly with the human brain — from unauthorized manipulation. The creation of technology to provide direct interfaces betweens computers and brains is a rapidly evolving field, but the effort so far has concentrated, [...]
Today we offer a heaping helping of heresy, cooked up by some of our hardest-hitting, highest-profile heathens. First, as a little amuse-bouche, we have a recent editorial by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, in which the author argues that, despite conciliatory efforts to get “militant” atheists to stop being such party-poopers, the fact is that religion [...]
Readers will have noticed that output has fallen off drastically here lately; the demands of the workplace have continued to press heavily upon me. There seems to be light at the end of the tunnel, however, and in fact I am actually spending this weekend doing things other than writing and debugging program code — [...]
I am working late once again, and have as yet been unable to return to normal operations around here. So for tonight here’s a little item about physicsists and mysticism.
Some years ago, anthropologist Donald Brown compiled a list of “Human Universals”: cultural traits that seem to be instantiated by all human societies. The list is broad, and contains almost all the things you’d expect to see: the collection includes belief in supernatural/religion, for example, as well as sucking wounds and language employed to misinform [...]
In what may be an enormously important piece of scientific work, chemist John D. Sutherland of the University of Manchester has discovered a reaction path by which RNA nucleotides can have been assembled from molecules likely to have been present in the Earth’s early environment.
There was a brief item in the Times today about a court ruling against one James Corbett, a California schoolteacher who, it was ruled, violated the Establishment Clause by dismissing creationism in class as “religious, superstitious nonsense”. This offended the sensibilities of a student of his, Chad Farnan, who sought legal remedy, and got it [...]
The news has been chock-full of exciting and interesting items lately. Today we learn that Harvard researchers, after careful study of video clips of Snowball the Cockatoo, have concluded that we humans are not the only species capable of rhythmic movement. (Indeed, this precious gift does not even extend to all members of our own [...]
April 20, 2009 – 12:22 pm
We note with alarm that Dr. Stephen Hawking is, apparently, gravely ill, and has been taken to a Cambridge hospital. Dr. Hawking, the extraordinarily gifted mathematician, physicist and cosmologist who holds the same Lucasian Chair of Mathematics previously occupied by such luminaries as Isaac Newton and Charles Babbage, has battled motor neuron disease for decades, [...]
I’ve written a few posts lately about Ray Kurzweil’s notion of an impending technological “Singularity“, a sort of “omega point” at which exponentially accelerating technological trends will converge, with world-changing effect. Now Dr. Kurzweil and several others have founded, at NASA’s Ames Research Center, an institution called the Singularity University (modeled on the International Space [...]
March 30, 2009 – 11:47 pm
It is a truism these days that any claims relating the statistically varying abilities and aptitudes of human beings to, say, skin color, or “gender”, is a shocking and benighted atavism, a pernicious throwback to the bad old days of racism and sexism. If such correlations emerge, as they occasionally do, from a “scientific” study [...]
March 10, 2009 – 10:52 pm
You may have heard of a physicist and mathematician by the name of Stephen Wolfram, a man of remarkable gifts who was doing important work in particle physics by age 17, had his doctorate from Caltech by 20, and who went on to build an enormously successful business venture around a software product called Mathematica.
In the wake (perhaps too ominous a word) of my little medical adventure last summer, a highly regarded New York cardiologist, noting that my total cholesterol was, at 248 (with a cholesterol/HDL ratio of 3.4), too high for his liking, put me on a low dose (7.5 mg/week) of the statin drug Crestor. I was [...]
February 21, 2009 – 4:04 pm
Every now and then I am reminded of just how exotic the most ordinary scientific notions seem even to the average “educated” American. For example: in Thursday’s New York Times, there was a story about some feeble little earthquakes along the Ramapo Fault.
February 2, 2009 – 10:46 pm
We’ve all heard of spelling bees. Now it turns out they can count, too.
January 16, 2009 – 11:31 pm
There is a fascinating item making the rounds today. It seems that mysterious noise in an exquisitely sensitive gravity-wave detector may in fact be an indication that our instruments are now sensitive enough to detect the granularity of spacetime itself — and the argument is a very interesting one. The last time physicists announced that [...]
January 13, 2009 – 10:53 pm
We’ve been hearing for years how dangerous it is to talk on cell phones while driving, and many states have made doing so illegal. While I can easily see how distracting it can be to fumble with the device itself behind the wheel, I’ve always thought that merely talking on a cell phone, particularly a [...]
January 8, 2009 – 11:31 am
From reader JK, who never wearies of sending our way nourishing morsels he has plucked from the Web, comes this intriguing item: a new cosmic mystery.
January 4, 2009 – 11:20 pm
I have said often in these pages that it seems likely that the human propensity for religion is a cognitive adaptation that has flourished because it tends to improve the cohesion of social groups, thereby increasing the fitness of those groups in competition against others. As David Sloan Wilson argues in his book Darwin’s Cathedral: [...]
December 7, 2008 – 8:41 pm
Reader JK, who has his ear to the ground at all times, alerts us to some worrisome news. Apparently the prevalence in the environment of certain chemical pollutants has reached such high levels that a broad assortment of vertebrate species are producing increasingly “feminized” males.
November 19, 2008 – 11:56 pm
It has been a long day: it is almost midnight, and I’ve only just got home from the Manhattan hospital where my frail and elderly mother-in-law was admitted for tests. She is not so well. My lovely wife Nina is still there with her. So, nothing long-winded tonight, I’m afraid. Although there are in fact [...]
November 8, 2008 – 7:20 pm
Last night we had friends over for dinner, a lovely couple we know from Wellfleet. They are both academics: she is a sociologist and associate professor at Harvard. Naturally we were discussing the recently transformed political landscape, and the conversation turned to Mr. Obama’s possible choices for the composition of his cabinet. Among the names [...]
October 23, 2008 – 11:24 pm
A while back we offered a link to videos of a conference called Beyond Belief. It featured talks by an outstanding panel of thinkers — most of them Godless heathens — about the growing scientific understanding of religion as a biological and anthropological phenomenon, and about the alarming role still played by faith and superstition [...]