CNN must be dreading to watch The Daily Show because, next to Fox News, Jon Stewart seems to enjoy taking shots at them for their descent into mindless coverage of non-news. It seems like he expects them to be better than they are while he has no hope for Fox.
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Science and religion share a long history of controversy and even hostility. Mathematics and religion, not so much. There could be many reasons for this, the primary one being that there is some similarity in the way that both mathematics and theology operate. Both seek to create self-contained systems based on axioms that are assumed to be true. In the case of mathematics, the axioms depend upon the field of mathematics being studied while in the case of theology, the fundamental axiom is that ‘god exists’.
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Animal intelligence is a fascinating topic and there have been many attempts at studying it. Many of the individual studies look at one or other specific trait that we associate with intelligence in one species and the traits studied can differ from species to species, making general conclusions hard to arrive at. Ed Yong reports on a massive multinational study that looked across many species at one aspect of intelligence (self control) as demonstrated by two specific tasks. (You can read the paper on which his article is based here.)
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In the Superman folklore, he turns a lump of coal into a diamond by compressing it in his fist, cementing the idea in popular culture that diamonds are compressed coal. But in reality, while both diamonds and coal are both made of carbon, they are formed differently and at different locations underground. Coal and other fossil fuels are formed in the Earth’s crust (see the comments to an earlier post for some excellent information from readers about how fossil fuels form) but diamonds are created at much greater depths within the Earth’s mantle.
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Another day, another depressing report about the level of ignorance of basic science in America. This one is based on a representative sample of 1,012 people over the age of 18. You can see the full survey results here, and the first set of items is the one that made the news.
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The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in a closed system the entropy will either stay the same (for reversible processes) or increase over time (for irreversible processes). The entropy of a closed system can never decrease, except for short-lived random fluctuations. But an open system that can interact with its environment can have its entropy decrease.
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While on a panel, Neil deGrasse Tyson gives an excellent answer to the question of whether there are any genetic reasons as to why there are so few women in science. (Thanks to reader John for the link.) The five minutes or so clip begins at the 1:01:30 mark.
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When I was quite young, someone told me that all the fuel that exists in the form of oil and coal came from long dead dinosaurs. What amazes me is that I never questioned this preposterous piece of information for a long time. I think the fact that they were referred to as ‘fossil fuels’ confirmed in my mind that dead animals were the source and dinosaurs, being the largest dead animals, seemed to fit the bill.
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Journals frequently send out pre-publication copies of what they think are important papers to science journalists under an embargo, where they are free to research the topic and gather material to write articles, but not publish them until the release date that the journal specifies. This enables journalists to write articles that put the research in context and provide alternative and critical views on the research in a timely manner. In the hands of good science journalists, this practice enables the general public to get a reasonable sense of what new research reveals.
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Many of us have heard of the ‘blue moon’. This is when a full moon appears twice in one calendar month. This is a perfectly predictable astronomical phenomenon that occurs once every two or three years, infrequent enough to serve as a metaphor for rarity, as in the phrase ‘once in a blue moon’.
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