Spiritualists used to be quite the rage back in Charles Darwin’s day and even he was persuaded to attend a séance with one of the leading practitioners of his time. He was not impressed with the obvious theatricality and trickery involved in producing the noises and movement, but many people were duped into thinking that spirits existed. [Read more…]
Last evening I watched the PBS Frontline program League of Denial that I wrote about yesterday. (You can watch the program here.) It showed how playing football can cause traumatic brain injury that can occur from the normal give and take of playing football, even without any concussions. Autopsies of players as young as 18 have shown them having a particular form of brain damage called chronic trauma encephalopathy (CTE). [Read more…]
As expected, this year’s Nobel prize in physics, announced today, was awarded for the discovery of the Higgs boson. The prize was awarded to two people, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs. As I said in one of my series of posts on the Higgs boson, the award of the prize was bound to raise hackles because five theorists had some claim to the discovery (there were six but Robert Brout died in 2011), as well the experimental groups that found the particle last year, not to mention CERN, the laboratory where the experiment was done. [Read more…]
It turns out that in March this year, congressman Frank Wolf, chair of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee initiated a bill that incredibly was allowed to become a law that prohibited Chinese nationals, even those who are already in the US and working at US universities and other institutions, from even setting foot in a NASA building. The reason given was the risk of espionage. [Read more…]
We know how the extinction of the dinosaurs completely changed the balance in nature and led to the emergence of large mammals.
But they are not the only large animals to play such a significant role. In this clip from Ted Radio Hour, George explains how returning wolves to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 after a 70-year absence affected so many aspects of the ecology there, transforming it. [Read more…]
Everyone has seen M. C. Escher’s famous lithograph Ascending and Descending of the perpetually ascending and descending staircase. Of course, we all know that this is an optical illusion and that such a thing could not be made in real life.
Or could it? [Read more…]
Although I am a strong supporter of solar energy, I had not been following developments in that area so I was pleasantly surprised at this news report that a new solar cell had broken a new efficiency record with 44.7%. What this means is that 44.7% of the light from the sun, from ultraviolet through to the infrared part of the spectrum, is converted into electrical energy. [Read more…]
GPS navigation systems are undoubtedly helpful. But at the same time, having those devices and following the instructions obviates the need for having a mental image of where you are and where you want to go, the way that a paper map gives you. A study finds that as a result you may be less efficient at getting to your destination. [Read more…]
By ‘habitable’ I mean planets that are neither too cold nor too hot but occupy a sweet spot that would be conducive to life as we know it existing. By combining actual data, from the Kepler space observatory launched by NASA in 2009 to look for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, with statistical analysis, scientists have come up with an estimate of 15-30 billion habitable planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. That seems like a lot, even if that number is tiny compared to the estimated 1011 stars in the galaxy. [Read more…]