From Andrew Revkin’s story in yesterday’s Times: The Big Bang is “not proven fact; it is opinion,” Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, “It is not NASA’s place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.” It continued: “This is more …
I say this with the greatest affection. Jeff Bingaman is a wonk. From Cornelia Dean’s story in yesterday’s New York Times on a briefing on Capitol Hill attempting to explain what science is: (T)he briefing’s subject apparently struck a chord. More than 100 committee staff members, Congressional aides and at least one senator, Jeff Bingaman, …
Well down in a tortuous thread, a commenter asks why a new and different explanation for surface warming of our planet is not being considered in our ongoing global discussion of climate change. I won’t begin to try to detail the explanation, but at the risk of being unfairly pejorative in my description of it, …
Roger Pielke Jr. links to a report on a study that identified a remarkable ability of our brains to ignore inconvenient facts: The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say. Then, with their minds made …
Reading Jennifer Couzin’s article in Science magazine on the Woo Suk Hwang stem cell debacle at the gym this morning, I felt some sympathy for the journalist stuck in the difficult spot Couzin is in. In writing about the peer review process of the fraudulent stem cell paper at her own magazine, Couzin had no …
Kevin Vranes at his new scienceblogs home (note to self – update many links in various places to all the people what just moved there) has a couple of posts that circle around a favorite topic of mine: being afraid of the things that will really kill a lot of people, and not about the …
Wouldn’t you love to live in a place where this is news? The red phalarope, a small bird rarely seen on land in these parts, has been spotted in groups of up to 1,000 from Pescadero to Moss Beach. There were also reports of the birds making it as far from the coast as Millbrae …
Over lunch today, Nora and I were trying to solve the world’s problems, and the conversation drifted to feed conversion ratios – how much food you have to feed to a chicken, pig or cow relative to the amount of food you get out as a result. If you’re going to eat meat, chicken seems …
Chris Mooney has a piece in Seed about heeding the Cassandras – the scientists who saw trouble coming and tried to warm people. In this case, it’s Al Naomi, who works for the Corps of Engineers: Pre-Katrina, he was pushing for a study of how to bring the city’s hurricane protections up to Category 5 …
From the “50 and 100 years ago” feature in this week’s Nature (sub. req): A recent survey shows that the study of physics in American public high schools has been declining for more than half a century… why [does our youth] turn away from a career in science? We can only grope for the answer. …