Henrietta Swan Leavitt: An ignored and forgotten scientist

In recent times, there has been greater awareness of the major but overlooked contributions that women have played in the sciences, and attempts to lift them out of the obscurity to which they had been consigned. The recent film Hidden Figures told of the women mathematicians, African-American women in particular, who worked in the US space program in the 1960s doing critical complex calculations despite the Jim Crow laws that heaped all manner of indignities on them.
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Big step towards open-access science publishing

When it comes to science, the coin of the realm, the measure by which ideas and scientists are evaluated, is by being published in peer-reviewed journals. The journals are run either by professional organizations of scientists as a non-profit arm, such as all the journals run by the American Institute of Physics or the American Physical Society or are purely commercial private operations, such as the prestigious journal Nature. Journals subscriptions are then sold to individuals and libraries. But over time, a combination of rapidly rising subscription costs, shrinking library budgets, and the rise of the internet has created both a crisis and an opportunity for radical changes.
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Myths about human sperm

I suppose I am like most people who have a model of conception as a great race, involving a male emitting a vast number of sperm that then race towards the egg waiting for them in the female and one of the sperm, the victor, gets to fertilize the egg. Robert D. Martin, emeritus curator of biological anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago and a member of the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago, writes about the history of studies into sperm and that this idea of ‘macho sperm’ is one of the many myths that surround conception.
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The environmental impact of animal farming

Two arguments are advanced in favor of veganism and vegetarianism. One is the moral one, that the animals we eat are sentient beings that are similar to humans and that it is wrong for us to kill and eat them, even if we eliminate the cruelty of factory farming. The second is an economic and environmental argument, that animals are a highly inefficient source of protein, requiring the expenditure of a vast amount of resources. The rough rule of thumb is that as we go up the food chain, we lose 90% of the energy at each stage. In other words, by feeding grain to animals for the meat, we get only 10% of the energy that was initially stored in the grain. If the animals are fed a diet of animal protein, then we lose another 90%, leaving us with only 1% of the initial energy. This is highly wasteful.
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Correcting false assertions about the history of science

As a scientist interested in the history of science, I have become acutely aware that much of the science ‘history’ we picked up in the course of our scientific training is largely folklore (what Richard Feynman referred to as ‘myth-stories’) and highly unreliable. Hence it is advisable not to make sweeping conclusions based on them. Via PZ Myers over at Pharyngula I came across an interesting article that looks at a recent discussion between Sam Harris and Ben Shapiro, where they use history to draw conclusions about the relationship of science to religion. You could not pay me enough to listen to these two people but Tim O’Neill, an Australian atheist who writes the blog History for Atheists: New Atheists Getting History Wrong did, and he has done a thorough analysis of the historical assertions made by both and finds them, especially those of Harris, utterly wanting.
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Why did hell go from being hot to cold to hot again?

In response to the Satanists installing a statue of Baphomet on the grounds of the state capital in Little Rock, Arkansas in response to the installation of a Ten Commandments monument, Republican state senator Jason Rapert, a minister and lead sponsor of the law allowing the Ten Commandments monument, promised to have the Satanist statue removed, saying that it will be a “very cold day in hell” before a statue of Baphomet would be installed.
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Fact-checking The Galaxy Song

This song from the Monty Python film The Meaning of Life is an extraordinarily good one, inviting us to marvel at the wonder and vastness of the universe and putting into perspective our place in it.

I knew that the facts in the song were roughly correct but Bill Andrews has done a detailed, line-by-line, fact check and finds that it is remarkably accurate except for two or three items. Pretty good, Eric!

The relationship between thoughts and words

Frans de Waal is a well-known primatologist who has written many books on the behaviors of apes and what we have learned about them and from them. In an excerpt from his 2016 book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, he discusses the relationship between thought and words. He does not share the enthusiasm of many of his fellow scientists to talk with animals to find out what the think, largely because what even humans say may not be accurate reflections of what they are thinking, so why would we place any more credence on what other animal species may tell us?
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Red light cameras

Running a red light is a very dangerous thing to do. Red light cameras that photograph cars that do this are proliferating in many areas. They take a photo of offenders who are then cited and fined. But one study done in Houston finds that while they do reduce the number of people running red lights, they do not necessarily reduce the number of accidents.

During the past decade, over 438 U.S. municipalities, including 36 of the 50 most populous cities, have employed electronic monitoring programs in order to reduce the number of accidents. Red light camera programs specifically target drivers that run red lights.
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Evidence clearly shows that camera programs are effective at decreasing the number of vehicles running red lights. In one study in Virginia, red light cameras reduced the number of total drivers running red lights by 67 percent.
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The overlooked danger of overhydration

I grew up in Sri Lanka, a tropical country where it was pretty hot during the day and we perspired a lot. But we did not pay too much attention to staying hydrated by drinking water all the time. Furthermore, in middle class homes like mine, there was the belief that tap water was not pure enough to drink and could contain dangerous bacteria and so in our home water was first boiled and then cooled in the refrigerator. We did not drink water outside the home unless we were in another middle-class home that followed the same practice. We drank water with meals and two or three cups of tea and/or coffee during the day. As younger schoolboys we would take a little canteen of water with us to school but as we got older, we stopped doing that and simply did not drink water until we got home. If we got thirsty drank hot tea or coffee or bought a bottled drink, bottled water not being a thing then. When we played sports as children during the blazing hot days, we would of course get thirsty and would drink water when we felt the need.
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