The late Carl Sagan was much sought after by the popular press to comment on science issues and he would rightly be cautious about expressing opinions about things that were unknown. He would sometimes be pressed to provide a more definitive response, being asked what his ‘gut feeling’ was, to which he replied “But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.” [Read more…]
A different research group called ICARUS has repeated the earlier experiment done by the OPERA group and found that neutrino speeds do not exceed the speed of light after all. You can read the paper here. [Read more…]
I have noticed that when I make calls on Skype, I sometimes hear a small echo of my voice. This has a remarkably discombobulating effect, making it almost impossible to continue speaking.
I learned that a Japanese company has used this effect to create a speech jamming gun that you can use to silence speakers whom you find annoying. [Read more…]
The commonly accepted theory for the original human settlers in the US is that 15,000 years ago they crossed over from Asia to America near the Bering Sea that had a land bridge then or at most required a short boat ride.
Hence I was intrigued by this news article (via Machines Like Us) that there is some evidence that the first humans here may consist of a people known as Solutreans who came from Europe 20,000 years ago by [Read more…]
When we think of social science studies that use surveys to look at features of the general population, we tend to assume that they go out and find a randomized sample of people, either by mail or phone or in person, and that each such study finds its own sample, so that any person [Read more…]
Scholarly articles tend to follow pretty much a four-step formula.
In order to make the case that their research is important, [Read more…]
2012 being a leap year, today is the extra day. Some of us are aware of the rule that says that we add a leap day for years that are divisible by 4 but not if it is divisible by 100 unless that year is also divisible by 400.
The reason for these complicated leap day rules is [Read more…]
Most scientists know how to fight for acceptance of their ideas within the community of scientists. The rules of the game are fairly well understood. But when it comes to politically charged issues, they tend to be at a loss because they work as individuals and hence do not know how to respond to massive organized attacks, of the kind that they have been under from climate change deniers. The attacks have ranged from explicit and [Read more…]
If there is one thing that people can agree on as a universal good in education, it is that we should seek to increase the critical thinking abilities in people. Actually, that is not quite true. During the days when the debate over intelligent design was raging in Ohio in 2003, one letter to the editor by an ID advocate dismissed [Read more…]
With the exploratory glamor being hogged by the space program, it is good to remind ourselves of the vast unexplored regions of the Earth.
Here is a nice graphic that shows what happens as we go down deep into the ocean. Of course, we don’t really know for sure since going deep is a formidable challenge. The deep ocean is largely an unexplored frontier. [Read more…]