The ten most amazing Hubble photos—sent by a friend, and surpassingly beautiful. Here’s my favorite, perhaps because of its simplicity. But please look at them all; you’ll be glad you did. They might even put you in a holiday mood, … Continue reading →
I’ve long had a soft spot in my heart for Neanderthals. The ancient ones, that is, those early humans who’ve gotten a bad rap as powerful heavy-browed vulgarians, but about whose culture we really know very little, and who seem … Continue reading →
You’ve probably heard the radio ads. T. Boone Pickens, the man with the thickest Oklahoma/Texas accent any side of the Pecos, has a plan to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Pickens’ plan
Continue reading →One of the more formative experiences of my life was reading Theodor Rosebury’s book Life On Man back when it first came out in 1969. It revealed that our efforts to sanitize the world and rid it of those seemingly … Continue reading →
Last week a proposal to lift the moratorium on shale oil extraction was narrowly defeated in a Senate committee. The vote was along strictly party lines, Republicans for lifting the ban and Democrats against. What a surprise. All of this … Continue reading →
A Canadian study reports that brain changes involving ribosomal DNA have been detected on autopsy in victims of childhood abuse who ended up committing suicide. This finding somewhat complements animal studies showing that early neglect changes the dendrites of rats. … Continue reading →
While researching my recent series on questioning authority, I got the idea to write a post about the seminal Milgram experiments on obedience to authority. When I was a psych major back in college, part of our learning experience involved—as … Continue reading →
[Part I.] Science is certainly far from infallible. That’s especially true of studies related to human beings, on whom any sort of research is notoriously difficult to perform and evaluate. The variables are myriad and uncontrollable, and ethics ordinarily prevents … Continue reading →
[This is the first part of two.] So this is what it’s come to. Our largely successful struggle to eradicate the once-common infectious diseases of childhood through the mechanism of vaccines has been so successful that many parents voluntarily eschew … Continue reading →
First we had paper grocery bags. I liked them, not the least because they were versatile. Good for wrapping packages for mailing and, long ago, excellent as textbook covers. But then the news came that they were environmentally wasteful. Too … Continue reading →
In the aftermath of the Jeremiah Wright controversy, I keep reading that his assertion that the US government “lied about inventing the AIDS virus as a means of genocide against people of color” is understandable because, after all, the government … Continue reading →
It seems that a well-intentioned attempt to protect a certain kind of African acacia tree from the large beasts who would munch on it has had the opposite effect. In a complex interaction of insect, plant, and animal, the trees … Continue reading →