The word ‘scientist’ is so common and seems so appropriate now that it seems hard to imagine that it is not only of relatively recent coinage but that its introduction was controversial for almost a century. I came across an interesting article that outlined the history of a disputed term that has now become a coveted title.
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One of the many objections given by opponents of same –sex marriage is that children need a mother and a father and that the children of gay parents will suffer from psychological harm. This argument was never properly substantiated and in court case after court case judges have rejected the claim.
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Most people would think that the existence of the Higgs boson has been established. After all, the reports of its detection were announced with great fanfare in 2102 and two of the theorists involved in predicting its existence were awarded the Nobel prize in 2013.
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In addition to studying questions like what causes diseases and what is the origin or life and the universe, science also on occasion investigates important questions like why is it that the cord of your earphones get tangled up if you lay them down for even a second? It is easy to dismiss this as just one’s imagination but physicists find that this is a real effect and that the spontaneous formation of knots has an explanation.
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The trouble with research in the medical sciences is that much initial work is based on correlations and it is often hard to pin down definitively the causal relations between them. This can lead to health recommendations that later get nullified or even reversed when some hitherto unsuspected third factor is discovered to play a role in creating the correlation. This problem is especially prevalent when it comes to preventive health treatments designed to head off some future problem, where reversals of recommendations can happen frequently. This can be very disconcerting for health-conscious people who may well feel confused by the conflicting advice.
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Most people have likely heard of Google Glass, a device that looks like a pair of glasses that apparently enables the wearer to be connected to the internet all the time. It also allows them to record what is going on around them but because the glasses are unobtrusive, the people in their vicinity may not know they are being recorded and this has apparently led to angry confrontations with those who feel their privacy is being invaded.
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New research suggests domesticated camels arrived in the region now known as Israel between 930 and 900 BCE. What interested me about this result were two things: how the researchers narrowed the range of dates to just 30 years and the implications of this finding for people who treat the Bible as history book.
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I don’t recall much of my high school chemistry classes back in Sri Lanka. Our teacher was a nice old man who enjoyed telling us the history of chemistry and stories about the chemists of long ago rather than about modern chemistry. But he was a believer in experimentation and demonstrations and one that I remember was when he would cut a small piece of solid sodium and drop it into a beaker. It was fun to see the piece foaming and rushing around the container.
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