A long time ago, I wrote a script about the Earth being on a collision course with a very large asteroid. In the first draft of the script, civilization broke down because the certainty of the collision was known far in advance of the projected impact. That makes for a boring movie, or for a […]
May 31, 2010. The last shuttle mission.
NASA has 10 missions remaining for the shuttle fleet, which President Bush ordered to retire by Sept. 30, 2010. The schedule announced Monday includes five flights this year, five in 2009 and three in 2010.
The space agency has already begun work on developing a new spacecraft to send astronauts […]
Autism is scary in large part because we don’t understand it. As a parent, it’s the kind of thing that we all fear. This is a great article about new ideas in autism study. It focuses on Amanda Baggs.
This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological researchers […]
Lottolab.org is a pretty fun site. R. Beau Lotto is a researcher at the University College London and has created some interesting illusions, among other things. The illusions can be found via a link on the front page.
See the website for the version that works.
This isn’t exactly like yelling ‘FIRE’ in a crowded theater. Actually, it’s nothing like that.
A man in Sweden who was angry with his daughter’s husband has been charged with libel for telling the FBI that the son-in-law had links to al-Qaeda, Swedish media reported on Friday.
The man, who admitted sending the email, said he […]
I stopped writing last night and turned on the telly and surfed until I found a documentary about The Who. They have been making documentaries about The Who since there were four of them. Now there are only two. One of them died at 32, one at 54.
I was thinking about that while reading this […]
The availability of fuel has been the telling mark of man’s existence. In our time, most fuel has a petroleum source. At Princeton and other universities, researchers are working to better understand jet fuel.
While current guidelines specify some overall properties of jet fuels, they do not spell out the actual chemical composition. Depending on the […]
This story about ethylene glycol poisoning sent me to the wiki.
Australian doctors said they plugged a poisoned Italian tourist into a vodka drip after running out of the medicinal alcohol they would normally have used to save his life.
The 24-year-old Italian, who was not further identified, was diagnosed as having ingested a large quantity of […]
160 million years ago, a smallish asteroid, about 60 km in diameter impacted a larger asteroid, 170 km diameter, out in the main asteroid belt of our system. This collision formed about 300 bodies larger than 10 km diameter and about 140,000 bodies 1 km diameter and larger. One of the larger […]
DNA is being used to study evolution. Amen.
Unlike teeth and skulls and other bones, hair is no match for the pitiless ravages of weather, geologic upheaval and time. So although skulls from millions of years ago testify to the increase in brain size as one species of human ancestor evolved into the next, and although […]