February 8, 2013 – 10:35 pm
Here’s an clever idea: crowdsourcing of malaria diagnosis, using a simple video game. Have a look.
January 28, 2013 – 12:38 pm
If you’re like me (of course you are!), you’ve been lying awake at night, asking yourself: “How the hell do South African dung beetles roll their balls in a straight line? Sure, polarized light from the Sun works fine during the day (duh!), but what about at night, when many of them do their best […]
January 14, 2013 – 5:17 pm
Here’s another shocker from the frontiers of medical research: Slimmer Women’s Waist is Associated with Better Erectile Function in Men Independent of Age IIEF scores don’t lie, folks. Story here.
January 2, 2013 – 11:56 pm
On February 15th, the asteroid 2012 DA14 will be passing by at the rather intimate distance of 21,500 miles. That’s mighty close: it’s actually within the Clarke orbit used by geosynchronous communication satellites, which circle the planet 22,300 miles up. It definitely will not hit us, say the boffins, and when it comes to this […]
December 16, 2012 – 2:04 pm
From a fascinating interview with physicist David Deutsch: There’s a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to […]
December 13, 2012 – 10:37 pm
If you’re like me, you’ve been asking yourself lately: when did people first make cheese? Here’s your answer.
December 11, 2012 – 2:13 pm
Writing at The Thinking Housewife, Laura Wood examines an article, by one Alice Dreger, about the sexuality of two African tribes, the Aka and the Ngandu, in which both masturbation and homosexuality are absent. Mrs. Wood writes: Dreger says that the absence of homosexuality does not conflict with the prevailing belief in the West that […]
December 6, 2012 – 4:53 pm
Here’s a website that will appeal, I think, to at least a few of our readers, for various reasons: Retraction Watch.
December 6, 2012 – 12:29 pm
It’s been known for a while that extraversion — one of the “Big Five” personality traits — is positively correlated with longevity in humans. (Pessimism, on the other hand, is negatively correlated, so I’ll take this opportunity to say that it’s been nice knowing you, readers.) It now appears, perhaps unsurprisingly, that this extraversion-longevity relation […]
December 3, 2012 – 12:46 pm
I haven’t much time for writing today, so for now, here’s Steven Pinker on the genetic basis of the high IQ of Ashkenazi Jews. Pinker is one academic who, despite being a fairly high-echelon member of the Cathedral staff, apparently has an office with a window, and flirts openly with apostasy. Among the apostatic asseverations […]
November 5, 2012 – 3:23 pm
An interesting item from Dan Foster. Here.
October 17, 2012 – 3:03 pm
From Edge.org, here’s a fascinating article about human athleticism, and how it compares to that of other mammals.
October 12, 2012 – 10:30 pm
Some house-guests arrived sometime after midnight Thursday night  —  the night of the bizarre VP debate  —  and of course before anyone could go to bed we had to spend an hour or so arguing about politics. (They’re liberal sorts.) Healthcare came up. So did the alleged “fact” that the healthcare system of the  U.S.A. […]
October 6, 2012 – 9:55 pm
Last year I wrote a little post about visiting Google’s lavish offices in Manhattan to see my friend Greg, who had recently joined their engineering staff. Here’s a longish excerpt: It being a mild day, Greg and I dined al fresco on a high terrace with a sweeping view of Midtown. (I had a delightful […]
September 18, 2012 – 5:43 pm
Here’s another edgy little item: warp drives might be feasible after all. Sharpens up the Fermi paradox even more, if so.
September 2, 2012 – 2:11 pm
If you’re a “reactionary” like me, then you’re sure to enjoy this.
Here’s a stunning 360-degree panorama from Mars, courtesy of the rover Opportunity.
With a hat tip to reader JK: In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on […]
August 5, 2012 – 11:03 pm
All eyes on Mars tonight! I’ll bet the thing lands on a cat. More here.
Here’s an interesting item from the New England Journal of Medicine on the “changing task of medicine”. It looks back at NEJM’s pages from a century ago and more to see how both the technical and social aspects of medicine have changed. (The article cites hopeful remarks, for example, about how eugenics would someday supersede […]
Scientist James Lovelock, best known for his development (with Lynn Margulis) of the “Gaia hypothesis” and for his ardent advocacy of radical measures to prevent global warming, surprised us all a little while back when he told MSNBC that in retrospect he thought he had been too “alarmist” about climate change. (It is no small […]
Today’s Times reported that it is now possible to read almost all of a fetus’s genome simply by taking blood from the mother and saliva from the father. Lurking behind the headlines is an idea, once heartily embraced by Progressive intellectuals: eugenics. Thanks to certain mid-20th-century events, eugenics nowadays is generally thought of as entirely […]
Here’s Gary Taubes in Sunday’s New York Times, writing about the flimsy case for restricting dietary salt. (Mayor Bloomberg, take note.)
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 in 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 […]
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 […]