Slim Pickens for energy alternatives?
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 →Category Archives: Science
The multitudinous world inside your elbow
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 →
Now, here’s a novel idea for legislators: how about some domestic oil development?
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 →
Mind and matter: psychological brain changes
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 →
Harry Harlow and his monkeys: being cruel in order to be kind?
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 →
The demon-haunted world (Part II: autism)
[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 →
Vaccinations and the demon-haunted world
[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 →
Environmentalists have an Emily Litella moment
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 →
The Tuskegee experiment and truth
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’s not nice to change Mother Nature
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 →
Cultural and moral relativism (Part I)
It used to be that virtually every society on earth had its own moral and social code and believed it was the best on earth—and not just the best for that particular society but the best, period. The only question … Continue reading →
Science and casualty figures in Iraq: lancing the Lancet boil
The famous 2006 Lancet study indicating there had been more than ten times the previous estimates of Iraqi deaths in the war and postwar period engendered a storm of controversy right from the outset. How could such a huge number … Continue reading →