The oldest fossil mushroom
Found. Actually, it’s one of the very few fossil mushrooms we have. But all mushrooms, fossilized or otherwise, look pretty ancient to me. Here’s the fossil:
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Trump and the Climate Accord
President Trump has announced that the US is withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord. That CNN article I just linked to says in the first sentence that his withdrawal will “seriously dampen global efforts to curb global warming.” But do … Continue reading →
Seeing through walls
To tell you the truth, I assumed they could already do this sort of thing: Routers scatter and bounce their signal off objects, illuminating our homes and offices like invisible light bulbs. Now, German scientists have found a way to … Continue reading →
The fossil that looked like a statue
Wow. Just wow: At first glance the reassembled gray blocks look like a nine-foot-long sculpture of a dinosaur. A bony mosaic of armor coats its neck and back, and gray circles outline individual scales. Its neck gracefully curves to the … Continue reading →
Could we bring back the passenger pigeon? Should we?
The answer is “maybe.” But not easily. And the results would be unpredictable. But it was the second paragraph here that especially caught my interest: Assuming that a living passenger pigeon embryo can be “resurrected” (or perhaps, some would prefer … Continue reading →
AGW: when a scientific theory becomes a religion…
…then those with an opposing view become apostates. That’s especially true if the topic is one with very high stakes, such as AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Think about it this way: if a person is—(a) convinced that AGW has been … Continue reading →
Dark energy may not exist
I try to follow the general outlines of the current theories of theoretical physics, but it goes without saying that I don’t understand the math, and that I miss a lot of the details. So although I’d never even heard … Continue reading →
This is your brain on satnavs
First, I learned a new word today: “satnavs,” for satellite-guided navigators. Next, this is exactly what I intuitively sense when I use my navigator to help with driving directions: ”˜Our results fit with models in which the hippocampus simulates journeys … Continue reading →
Cosmic inflation and settled science
In the most recent Scientific American, there’s an article on theories related to cosmic inflation: On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency held an international press conference to announce new results from a satellite called Planck. The spacecraft had … Continue reading →
Research on virtue-signaling
The researchers don’t call it that, but that’s what it appears to be. And they found something very interesting: Why do people express moral outrage? While this sentiment often stems from a perceived violation of some moral principle, we test … Continue reading →
Well, I misplace my keys sometimes, too
Apparently there’s an eighth continent in the southwest Pacific. A huge landmass, mostly submerged beneath the ocean, bears all the hallmarks of a continent, according to a new study published by the Geological Society of America. You may have heard … Continue reading →
Nepenthe
Wordsworth wrote: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting…” Now researchers indicate that sleep itself is a forgetting: In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during … Continue reading →