Tag: science
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The Scientific Virtue of Being Wrong
Every year Green Sea Turtles travel 1,300 miles across the Atlantic Ocean from their nesting grounds in the middle of the South Atlantic to their feeding grounds on the Brazilian Coast. Why do the turtles undertake this incredibly taxing journey each year? 135 million years ago, South America and Africa were a single super-continent called…
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North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences: Nature’s Explorers
Fish Specimens in Jars I have a morbid fascination with animals preserved in jars, and that’s what drew me into the Natures Explorers exhibit; however, it was not the Cabinet of Curiosities I expected to find. Instead, I met with an exhibit about the lives of those who assemble such cabinets and the history behind…
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Response to a PLoS One Article
My father, former head of the Microbiology Department at ODU, responded to an e-mail my hippie brother sent out about the recent Prozac debunking: I seriously doubt that the PLOS Journal of Medicine, which I’ve never heard of in all my 35 years in the field, has any merit. If it even does exist, then…
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Movie You Should See: Quest for Fire
Rae Dawn Chong in Quest for Fire While 10,000 BC was an over-hyped, glamorized, film that simultaneously gave too much credit to primitive humans and, at the same time, not enough, Quest for Fire takes place in 80,000 BC, at a time when there are scattered tribes of humans all at different levels of cultural…
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Movies You Can Skip: 10,000 B.C.
10,000 B.C. tells the story of a tribe of people living in what is, to my mother’s best guess, the Himalayas. All year long, the tribe looks forward to when the mammoths come migrating through their land, so they can hold their great hunt. This is actually right about the time Mammoths went extinct due…
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Future Wonder of the World: Three Gorges Dam
Three Gorges Dam Before Filling Reservoir Image Courtesy Wikimedia Click for a Larger Image When Three Gorges Dam goes fully online in China in 2009, after 17 years of construction, it will be 607 feet high and 1.4 miles long. Its reservoir will be 410 miles in length and 3,700 feet in width. It will…
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Hey Everybody! It’s Another Global Cooling Report!
I’m sure this one, unlike the last one and the one before that is for really real this time. Really. This one even made Digg, Drudge, Faux Noise, etc, etc… meaning it’s totally got legs for absolutely certain this time. Right? The article in question openly admits that they’ve had nothing but anecdotal evidence to…
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Ant Farm Woes
Not My Ant Farm Photo by jurvetson (Who has a lot of cool Science Flickr Sets) Last year I finally bought myself an Ant Farm, one of those new, hip gel ant farms, this one from Uncle Milton Industries. I’ve always procrastinated about buying one of these because I’m an instant-gratification kind of person, and…
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Off-World Environmentalism: Fighting Space Pollution
Tracked Debris Orbiting Earth Photo by NASA All the politicians and military strategists were buzzing about China’s missile test in January 2007, where the country blew up one of its old satellites in orbit. After the debates about the diplomatic and militaristic implications of this demonstration had settled down, scientists took the opportunity to get…
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The Digital Big-Bang
One Gigabyte 20 Years Ago (left) One Gigabyte Today (Right) source Bill Gates is often misquoted as having said, “no one will ever need more than 640K of memory,” in the 1980s. 24 years ago, my Commodore 64 personal computer ran games like “Mail-Order Monsters” and “Archon” on a mere 64 kilobytes of memory. This…
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Naomi Oreskes: The American Denial of Global Warming
“This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through… a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” – Lyndon Johnson, 1965 This extremely well-researched talk given by Naomi Oreskes and posted to Scientific American is generating some discussion online, and should generate much more. It reveals…