August 3, 2011
I'll bet you can't explain dark matter in less than one minute.
Whoa. Pretty good
Visit the Minute Physics channel for more.
August 3, 2011
In case you've been living in a well insulated cave, you need to know about Freethought Blogs Dot Com at http://freethoughtblogs.com/, which is where PZ Myers, Ed Brayton Digital Cuttlefish and some others are blogging.
Also, Sheril Kirshenbaum has departed from Wired and has started her own blog…
August 1, 2011
The Herschel Space Observatory's large telescope and state-of-the-art infrared detectors have provided the first confirmed finding of oxygen molecules in space. The molecules were discovered in the Orion star-forming complex.
Individual atoms of oxygen are common in space, particularly around…
August 1, 2011
I have thought about writing a post on this topic, and I may well still do that, but so many have covered it so well already that I probably needn't bother. And needn't is not a word I use lightly. Anyway, this is an urgent issue and you can help resolve it but adding to some of the pressure to…
July 31, 2011
I've updated the Skeptical Search Engine (on the left side bar of this site, as well as below in this blog post) to include more sites dealing with climate change.
Enjoy!
July 31, 2011
Here's the talk.
Huh.
I love this talk. Spread it around!
July 31, 2011
The podcast is here
July 31, 2011
In the old days, canals, roads, train tracks, etc. were almost all privately owned in many countries. Some airports too, but not many. Now, most of these elements of our infrastructure are publicly owned or so regulated that they may as well be. Same with utilities.
I wrote a while ago about how…
July 30, 2011
Falsehood!!!
Sometimes people say this because it seems reasonable to them ... what, with life originating so long ago and so much geological mushing-around happening since then. But sometimes people say this, and sound quite innocent saying it, because they want to throw the average person off…
July 29, 2011
...Louis Agassiz, the most famous scientist of his time, eclipsing Darwin in his stature and influence (up to a point) addressed this diversity across the landscape in one way. Darwin addressed it in another way. Today, most people don't even know what Agassiz said, even though it is a perfectly…
July 29, 2011
Sunday's radio show is going to be a very special treat for all of us. Mike Haubrich and I are going to be speaking with Kevin Zelnio and John Abraham about climate change, global warming, and science vs. denialism.
John Abraham is an expert on Heat Transfer and Fluid Mechanics and stirred up a…
July 29, 2011
Relying heavily on the excellent resource known as Dr. Jeff Master's Wunderblog and a few other sources, I've compiled a quick list of a few of the highlights of weather events related to global warming in the news these days, in preparation for this weekend's radio show "The Science of Global…
July 29, 2011
According to a newly published paper in the journal "Remote Sensing" the Earth's atmosphere releases into space more heat than climate scientists had previously estimated in a way that effectively removes concern about fossil CO2 being released into the atmosphere.
The reason scientists have this…
July 28, 2011
I know, I know, PZ Myers at Pharyngula does a Friday Cephalopod thing, and I'm totally ripping him off here and it's not even friday yet, but still ..
(Below the fold. Not work safe if you work, say, in a Japanese resturant.)
Click here if you want to know the science behind this neat trick.…
July 28, 2011
Have you been keeping up with my posts at Birdingblogs.com?
If Darwin was alive today he would be a bird watcher. But he would do his bird watching differently, using a nice set of binoculars rather than a shotgun. In his autobiography, Darwin reminisces ...
Read more
July 28, 2011
In the old days this was easy. The power plants were melting down but no one knew what was going on inside them; Water was being poured in and cooking off as steam, and every now and then the way they were getting the water in or the way they were powering the pumps would change, or one of the…
July 28, 2011
A proposal has been made to remove beloved Archaeopteryx from the bird family tree and push it over to some non-avian dinosaur subtree. This is not the first time that the ancient species has had its position on the tree of bird life threatened, but this time it may be for real. The proposal is…
July 28, 2011
Atheists are trolls it turns out!!!! Jason has it covered.
Hey look, I won an award!
Some bad news from the Death from the Skies front:
a half dozen meteors all seemed to come from the same spot in the sky, indicating they all had a common origin. ... they probably come from a parent comet…
July 28, 2011
You have probably heard about the cougar which was just killed in Connecticut but which is thought to have wandered there from the Dakotas. Well, I have a couple of stories to bookend that story. One of them has to do with the lion in this photograph, and the other with something I saw in the…
July 28, 2011
Speaking of shrews, some new ones just got discovered. Pics and details here. They are said to be cute. I dunno.
July 28, 2011
PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers studying observations taken by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission have discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun along with Earth.
Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or…
July 27, 2011
With Julia spending the summer and most of the fall in The Republic of Georgia, I've been thinking about various political and historical aspects of that country, and one of the things that is claimed to be true is that wine was first invented there.
Recently, someone asked me (always ask the…
July 27, 2011
It has been said that our most distant primate ancestors, the mammal that gave rise to early primates but itself wasn't quite a primate, was most like the Asian tree shrew, which is neither a shrew nor does it live in trees. This is, of course, untrue. When the average American sees a shrew…
July 27, 2011
MN 350 is planning an event for September 24th, and would like you to help get it off the ground, or at least, show up!
This September, people all around the world are joining together for Moving Planet--a worldwide rally to demand solutions to the climate crisis. In Minnesota we'll gather on the…
July 27, 2011
Two things have been known for some time now: Human brains get bigger as you go north, and the volume of the primate eye and the primate brain are correlated.
This COULD mean, and this may not be true, that as you go north in human populations you'll get larger brains (for thermoregulatory reasons…
July 26, 2011
Somewhere around 1990 I wrote an article for a monthly paper on global warming. My intention was to explain the idea behind it (the greenhouse phenomenon) and to make clear the distinction between depletion of the ozone layer and greenhouse effects (the two were getting confused on a regular basis…
July 26, 2011
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- NASA's Juno spacecraft is set to launch toward Jupiter aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Aug. 5. The launch window extends from 11:34 a.m. to 12:33 p.m. EDT (8:34 to 9:33 a.m. PDT), and the launch period extends through Aug. 26.
The spacecraft is expected to…
