That headline slays me. Can you imagine how one person’s life could get any worse than that? First, you contract HIV. Bummer. Then you get a tapeworm. Super bummer. Then your tapeworm gets cancer. Yay! Wait. Not so fast. The tapeworm somehow transfers its cancer to you. Then you die. Wow. With all of that […]
Continue reading →Few things are more important for the scientific method than verifiability. Scientific models need to be verifiable in order to be scientific, which means that evidence to confirm a theory must be possible (you’d think this was obvious … it’s not). And usually evidence must be plentiful before a theory can reach a state of […]
Continue reading →According to the Ministry of Labels over at the Associated Press, I am now officially a climate change “doubter.” Choosing to avoid the inflammatory “denier” label, but not willing to crown me with the honored laurel of “skeptic,” the AP style guide recommends that I be called a climate change doubter instead. Not everyone is […]
Continue reading →An ornithologist named Chris Filardi is coming under fire for “collecting” a rare specimen of moustached kingfisher during a scientific expedition to the Solomon Islands. “Collecting” in this case meant killing. And people were not very happy about it: “Killing ‘in the name of conservation’ or ‘in the name of education’ or ‘in the name […]
Continue reading →A recent study attempted to replicate the findings of one hundred journal-published, peer-reviewed psychology experiments. The results were overwhelmingly underwhelming: All of the experiments the scientists repeated appeared in top ranking journals in 2008 and fell into two broad categories, namely cognitive and social psychology. Cognitive psychology is concerned with basic operations of the mind, […]
Continue reading →I know we’re not supposed to make comparisons between the Nazis and anyone else. Godwin’s Law and all that. I get it. But in this case, I think the comparison needs to be made because the ethical dilemma is quite similar. To the point, if we are squeamish utilizing the (possibly life-saving!) medical research accumulated […]
Continue reading →I know it’s not a planet anymore, but Pluto is still worth checking out. At least NASA thinks so. The New Horizons probe launched in January of 2006, with the goal of collecting photos and data from Pluto and beyond. New Horizons will continue to fly out into the Kuiper Belt into the 2030s, when […]
Continue reading →Brace yourself: Winter is coming. According to climate scientists, who apparently have just recently started looking at the sun, a quiet sun is going to cause a severe dip in global temperatures—possibly resulting in another “Little Ice Age”: Climate experts warn the amount of light and warmth released by the sun is nosediving to levels […]
Continue reading →Six astronauts spent about 8 months in a simulated Mars mission in an airtight dome on a Hawaii volcano. They just felt the fresh air again for the first time in nearly a year: “When we first walked out the door, it was scary not to have a suit on,” said Dunn, 27, a doctoral […]
Continue reading →A new wearable device called Thync will allow users to zap their brains into whatever general state the user desires, excitement or drowsiness: Thync costs $299 and has just been released to the public. It provides “calm or energy on demand”, the company says, by using “neurosignalling” to activate nerves and change people’s state of […]
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