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 […]
Online journalist and all-around gadfly Scott Ott (a Nittany Lion himself) focused his attention recently upon Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann, of “hockey stick” fame. His account begins: Shortly after climate scientist Michael “Hockey Stick’ Mann got word that a panel of his Penn State colleagues had cleared him of misconduct in the so-called […]
An opinion piece by Nicholas Kristof in today’s Times looks at whether, as some have suggested, the modern workplace is better suited to women than men. Mr. Kristof quotes from a “provocative” article: With women making far-reaching gains, there’s a larger question. Are women simply better-suited than men to today’s jobs? The Atlantic raised this […]
I’ve written in the past about the idea, popularized by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, of an impending “Technological Singularity”: a convergence of accelerating progress in computer science, neuroscience, and biotechnology that will, in a few decades, lead to a kind of critical mass in all these fields, with historically discontinuous effects. (If, as […]
April 14, 2010 – 10:36 pm
In Tuesday’s post about the puzzle of consciousness (I was off duty last night, celebrating my 54th at an Argentine steakhouse on the Lower East Side), I mentioned having seen an item in the paper that day that I thought seemed timely. It was a piece in the Times about growing interest in the use […]
Small changes in the relative timing and rates of growth of an animal’s parts — a concept called heterochrony — can make an enormous difference in the adult animal’s morphology. For instance, crabs and lobsters are built of essentially the same parts, but in the development of a crab the carapace broadens quickly, while the […]
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.