I recently saw some comments under a YouTube video asking why we don’t postpone going into space until we’ve solved our problems on Earth (which would be a pretty long postponement). This is a question people have asked for decades, … Continue reading
Alex Berenson’s book Tell Your Children has provoked a lot of discussion concerning the potential dangers of marijuana. (See this favorable review from Stephanie Mencimer in The Washington Monthly here.) I haven’t read it, but I gather a Berenson has … Continue reading
During the last glacial maximum, for a period of about 7000 years ending roughly 10,000 years ago, glaciers formed ice dams across large rivers in North America. Water blocked by dams naturally spreads out to form lakes, and some of … Continue reading
An article by Damian Carrington in today’s issue of The Guardian summarizes some of the the problems created by warming oceans. I recommend the whole article, but here are a few extracts: The number of heatwaves affecting the planet’s oceans … Continue reading
This probably doesn’t surprise you, but while mail-in DNA tests to determine ancestry have some validity, they aren’t terribly reliable. In some cases identical twins (who by definition share the same DNA) show somewhat different results even when tested by … Continue reading
A February 23 article by Caroline Criado-Perez in The Guardian points out that across a vast range of things, from medical research to the design of tools, vehicles, and buildings, the implicit assumption has long been that the average person … Continue reading
The most massive living thing on Earth (that we know of anyway) is a huge tree with multiple trunks. It’s also described as a group of trees that are clones of each other. (Things in the real world don’t always … Continue reading
According to a news item in the January 18 issue of Science, organizers of a scientific conference to take place in Hong Kong next June discovered evidence of apparent plagiarism in a dozen submitted papers. In only two cases did the … Continue reading
Last June 16 a mysterious very bright spot appeared in a small, otherwise not very remarkable galaxy 200 light years (60 megaparsecs) distant from us. In a matter of days it had become about 10 times brighter than the brightest … Continue reading
Here are a couple of videos from a visual effects artist at the YouTube channel Corridor (formerly Corridor Digital), which features a series of frequently excellent short films. This comes from their secondary channel Corridor Crew, with behind-the-scenes making-of stuff … Continue reading