Articles in Reuters and the BBC, reporting on a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describe how the pace of human evolution has increased in the last 5000 years. However, the changes discussed have taken the form of adaptations specific to certain regions, with the result that the human species […]
Read more...Never mind global warming. Human observation of the universe may have accelerated its demise. An article in New Scientist discusses the theory developed by cosmologists Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and James Dent of Vanderbilt University. They believe that the observation of dark energy made in 1998 may have caused the universe to […]
Read more...No, the headline is not a variant on the now tired joke, “What does a guru order at a McDonalds? ‘Make me one with everything.’” It instead refers to a different sort of messianic endeavor, the quest in physics to come up with a unified theory that integrates all known types of matter and forces. […]
Read more...Cultural myths die hard. Even though a study in Science earlier this year found that men and women uttered nearly the same number of words in a day, yet women are widely perceived to be more chatty. My pet theory is that men see themselves as talking about things that are necessary and important, like […]
Read more...Folks, it’s a slow day in the media and blogland, not even a sighting of Ben Stein to liven things up. So I will pass along this story (warning: gross at points) from the Times of London, which recaps an article from Science Magazine on the ten “wackiest” experiments of all time. Unfortunately, this falls […]
Read more...PhysOrg.com reports on the results of a study funded by the National Science Foundation which looked into why people decide to live in homes in risky places, like coastal Florida and areas where wildfires are common. Answer: “the emotional benefits interfere with their ability to assess the risks.” What is surprising it that this finding […]
Read more...The article below, from the 12 Angry Men Blog, mourns the dumbing down of home chemistry kits. One has to wonder at these heavy-handed efforts to contain threats, particularly in a society that lacks gun controls. Are we next going to make styrofoam a controlled substance, since mixed with gas, it produces a decent napalm […]
Read more...One of my pet peeves is lousy research, and even worse is lousy-with-intent pseudo-research. The airwaves are filled with fake factoids crowding out real information. I was once tempted to write a post on what it takes to do good survey research, simply because surveys are widely cited and most people probably mistakenly think they […]
Read more...Human activity has led to a considerable loss of species, and more is in the offing. But what is particularly alarming is that the scientists quoted in the Associated Press and on the BBC today see it coming in mere decades. The discovery is that hotter, wetter periods on this planet are associated with a […]
Read more...The Ig Nobel Prize is given annually by the Journal of Improbable Research to “celebrate the unusual, honour the imaginative – and spur people’s interest in science, medicine and technology”. From the BBC, whose favorite award was for the “gay bomb”: 2007 Ig Nobel Winners Medicine – Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, […]
Read more...The headline above, from Russia Today (“the first 24/7 English-language news channel to present the Russian point of view”) sound like cold fusion to me, but the story is too skeletal to ascertain whether there might be some truth to it: Russian scientists in the Khibinsky Mountains in the Arctic Circle have made an important […]
Read more...You may have heard the saying, “Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.” There ought to be a similar formulations for other forms of distress, such as, “Just because you are neurotic doesn’t mean there aren’t good reasons to be worried.” Today the neurotics got affirmation that widely held […]
Read more...I am reading a very useful primer, “Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks,” by Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the contributors to the blog Overcoming Bias (we made use of one of his posts yesterday). He focuses on existential risk, meaning risks to human existence. Since many people would regard an economic collapse as […]
Read more...In case you haven’t come across it yet, I highly recommend the blog Overcoming Bias, where a number of academics write about epistemology. Given how we are bombarded with new factoids, studies, and commentary on a daily basis, it’s helpful to consider the views of those who think about the nature of knowledge and the […]
Read more...As someone with an elderly parent who takes a huge amount of costly medication to treat risk factors like high blood pressure rather than real diseases, I’ve been suspicious that this approach is less effective than claimed. And I have been particularly leery of the enthusiasm for statins (which lower cholesterol) which some cardiologists have […]
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