When I first saw it, I thought it was chivalry. That is funny. Chirality relates to the way molecules are organized: The technique the team has developed for detecting life elsewhere in the universe will not spot aliens directly. Rather, it could allow spaceborne instruments to see a telltale sign that life may have influenced [...]
ADHD is in the news again. I have never understood the benefit of giving kids diagnosed with ADHD drugs like Ritalin, which is like speed, but some doctors and parents are okay with it. But a new study has been done and the researchers who did the work are split on the results. One researcher [...]
Nova had a show about rats; it is available on line. It was on the Tivo and I watched it with JMan and Bookzilla before going to school. There is a place in northeast India, where the bamboo blooms and seeds on a 48 year cycle. A rat plague accompanies the cycle and, after the [...]
Via PZ Myers, to mark the birthday of Charles Darwin, the Daily Show has put together a collection of video clips from their show about evolution. Check it out. The Daily Show’s Best Evolution Moments
Wired has a good article about scientists who challenged the current wisdom and paid a high price for it, only to be vindicated later. No one doubted Marie Curie’s scientific chops. It was just her bad luck to be a woman, and a forceful one, at a time when science was a decidedly male fraternity. [...]
I have a thesis about dreaming and film making. I think that the rhythm of film editing that works best is one that approximates the way our brains generate images while dreaming. This thesis could only be tested by working with aboriginal people who have never seen composited or edited image streams. It seems that [...]
My kids got Spore, the new game from Will Wright. I wondered how long it would take before the main line press started to run articles about evolution and intelligent design with regard to Spore. Slate: Would Spore take a scientific approach to evolution? Would it celebrate the tenets of intelligent design? Knowing Wright’s history, [...]
I and my children read the story of the Tower of Babel last week and I had a perception corrected. I thought the text said something to the effect, “We can be as gods.” But it doesn’t. It says: And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top [...]
Prion, I hardly knew ye. Researchers have shown that they can create entirely new strains of infectious proteins known as prions in the laboratory by simply mixing infectious prions from one species with the normal prion proteins of another species. The researchers now find that prion strains produced by combining normal hamster proteins with infectious [...]
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 [...]