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New Dover Documents

The NCSE has posted several new post-trial documents in the Dover case. Essentially, since the testimony phase of the trial ended both sides have been filing briefs with the court making formal arguments for their position and responses to the other side's position. Both sides filed long briefs called "Findings of Fact", and then filed responses to each other's briefs. You can find these briefs in this directory, with those filed by the defense indicated with a "Ds" in the title, and those filed by the plaintiffs with a "Ps" in the title. In particular, there is the plaintiff's response to…

Robert Bork and the 9th Amendment

Another book I've just finished rereading is People Rising: The Campaign Against the Bork Nomination, by Michael Pertshuk and Wendy Schaetzel. I was in college when Bork was nominated for the US Supreme Court in 1987, and at the time I was taking a course in judicial history. We ended up using the Bork nomination as a pretext for studying the issue for most of the course, so I did a great deal of research on Bork's judicial philosophy, his law review articles, speeches and decisions as an appeals court judge. The primary thing that sticks out in my memory about the entire affair was how…

Does Your Genealogy Reveal Amazing Anthropological Stories?

I gave a talk at the Brookdale Public Library last night as part of the celebration of DNA day. DNA Day, or DNAD for short, was created about the time of the "completion" (more or less) of the Human Genome in 2003, and is set to be on the date of the publication of the famous research on the structure of DNA. The point of the talk was to link behavioral biology and the anthropological study of kinship with the practice of conducting personal genealogy. There was a time when I did a fair amount of genealogical research, in connection with historic archaeology, which in turn was part of…

The Particle at the End of the Universe by Sean Carroll

Several thousand scientists at a handful of different research centers spent a gazillion hours and a huge pile of money searching for the Higgs Boson. But, nobody really cares that much about the Higgs Boson. The important thing is the Higgs Field. The Higgs Field is this thing that is everywhere, as these spooky quantum fields tend to be, but that has a strange characteristic that makes it different from other fields; at rest the Higgs field has a non zero energy level. This means that its effect on particles is asymmetric. What that means is that when you write a mathematical formula of…

The Kiss

Valentine’s Day is coming up, so it is time to think about kissing. Pursuant to this, Sheril Kirshenbaum, author of “The Science of Kissing,” has made the Kindle version of her excellent book available at a discounted price through February 18th. The book is here: The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us. (Sheril is also the co-author of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future.) The Science of Kissing Further details as well as a video (don’t worry, it’s work safe) are here, on Sheril’s site. Also pursuant to Valentine’s Day, I thought it…

Happy Gun Appreciation Day!

Happy Gun Appreciation Day! Let's spend a little time to appreciate guns. Because this is the very first Gun Appreciation Day! I'm not sure why we've never had a Gun Appreciation Day before, but now that we have one let's celebrate with a review of the last month's interesting stories about guns! Yay! For completeness, because I'm sure Gun Appreciation Day was generated in response to the massacre of 20 six year olds and their teachers and other school personnel in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, we'll go back to the day before that event, to something sort of local to me, and review events over…

Settling Conflicts: Guns and Homeschooling

There was a time when I blogged regularly about homeschooling, though I have not done so in a long time. A while back I started to blog about gun ownership. I engaged in each of these topics for similar reasons. I have a political and professional interest in homeschooling (as a science educator) and a complex culinario-political interested in guns (as a political progressive who likes to eat wild animal but does not like people shooting each other). But the reason I blogged about these issues was more narrowly defined. I wanted to see if it was possible to achieve détente among people…

We Need Sharon Sund in Minnesota's Third District

I support and endorse Sharon Sund for US Congress. Sharon will represent the Third District in Minnesota. For years, the Third District, in which I live, was represented by a moderate Republican, Jim Ramstad. Though I never voted for him, it was not all that annoying that he was in Congress because, as I say, he was moderate. Ramstad was pro choice, suppored stem cell research, he was not anti science and he was pro gay rights (but did not support gay marriage). I mention all this because it should reflect the electorate of the 3rd District which he represented. Around the time of his…

Why Human Brains Vary

Many people assume human brains vary genetically and genetic variation maps to races. But the races are not real and genetic variation can't explain brain differences. Because, dear reader, brains don't work that way. Let's look just at the brain part of this problem. A Repost There are between 50 and 100 billion neurons in the human brain, and every one is connected to a minimum of one other neuron to produce about 100 trillion connections. So when we are thinking about how the brain is wired up, we have to explain how so many connections can be specified to make the brain work. There…

Weather Whiplash Is Like My Old Broken Sprinkler

There is a strong argument to be made that the recent flooding in Colorado is the result of global warming. Here are three things one could say about the flooding. Think of these as alternative hypotheses to explain that event: 1) Weather has extremes. Sometimes, instead of raining just a bit, it rains a hella lot and you get a big giant flood. 2) Weather has extremes etc. etc. but global warming tends to make some of the extremes more extremes, so instead of getting just a big flood, you get a big giant flood. 3) The storm that brought well over a foot of rain to one mountainous area was…

Science, Statistics and the Supernatural

Josh Rosenau has a post about the supernatural, spinning off recent posts about a recent Calamities of Nature webcomic. Josh makes a point that I think is valid but subtle: The issue with the supernatural is not whether it's part of the universe, but whether it is bound by the same laws as all the other elements of the universe. The bizarre claim about ghosts is that they somehow obey some laws but not others, for no obvious reasons. Something supernatural could, in principle, interact with the universe sometimes but not at others. If it is operating outside of natural laws, that doesn't…

Trump’s Plan to Eliminate NASA Climate Research Is Ill-Informed and Dangerous?

Ah, excellent. I was looking for a post to hang my musings off, and Phil Plait's rant is a splendid peg. Not only that, but via fb I find this charming astronomer fox in Discarding Images; it is clear that the stars have aligned so I'll proceed. PP is not just sad but outraged that In an interview with the Guardian, Bob Walker, a senior Trump adviser, said that Trump will eliminate NASA’s Earth science research. This is the mission directorate of NASA that, among other important issues, studies climate change and so on. And if you read the Graun's headline Trump to scrap Nasa climate…

The Bottleneck Years by H.E.Taylor, Chapter 61

The Bottleneck Years by H.E. Taylor Chapter 60 Table of Contents Chapter 62 Chapter 61 Crystal Jellies, March 19, 2058 The first time I saw a telescopic view of the L1 sunshades, I remembered standing in an aquarium watching crystal jellyfish. These tiny, delicate creatures were so beautiful I could scarce believe such miracles existed. I was transported. For a second, I was back watching those fluttering pink mauve miracles, but I wasn't. It was a swarm of sunshades illuminated by brilliant sunlight. Here and there, the deep blue of an ion drive could be seen. I thought of the…

Another Old Friend Reunion

I got a phone call a little while ago from one of my comedian buddies, Don Reese. Don is a very funny stand up comic and he's coming to perform here in Michigan for the next couple weeks. Tomorrow night he's going to be about 40 minutes from where I live, so I'm gonna go see him, but he was calling to tell me that another old friend of ours, Ted Norkey, is going to be there as well. Now I doubt any of you have heard of Ted Norkey, but I assure you that Ted is the funniest comedian you've never heard of. A genius, and I don't throw that term around lightly when it comes to comedians. The bad…

Reprint: Intelligent Design as Roman Mythology

Given the conversation lately over the question of whether ID is creationism, I thought it would be a good idea to reprint an earlier post from January on the subject of the prevarications of ID: It is appropriate that in the month of January, I have made so many entries about the Intelligent Design movement. January is named for Janus, the Roman god of gates, often depicted as having two faces. The more I study the ID movement, the more convinced I am that Janus is the perfect symbol for it. Indeed, the two-faced nature of the ID movement is, ironically, by design. This was the nature of the…

Quantum Reality

“I asked the Zebra, are you black with white stripes? Or white with black stripes? And the zebra asked me, Are you good with bad habits? Or are you bad with good habits? Are you noisy with quiet times? Or are you quiet with noisy times? Are you happy with some sad days? Or are you sad with some happy days? Are you neat with some sloppy ways? Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? And on and on and on and on and on and on he went. I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.” -Shel Silverstein When it comes to the classical world -- the world on a macroscopic scale -- we all feel comfortable…

Atheist Church Socials?

It's mildly ironic that the recent Dawkins discussion has centered around whether he does or does not do an adequate job of addressing the logical arguments for the existence of God, because that's one of the few areas where I probably agree with him. I don't find any of those arguments particularly convincing, either. There are two real problems I have with Dawkins (and most other militant atheists, for that matter, but we'll use him as emblematic of the whole crowd). One of those problems is a matter of tact and tactics-- I think his whole approach to the issue is obnoxious and counter-…

Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong

The two most talked-about books in physics this year are probably a pair of anti-sting-theory books, Lee Smolin's The Trouble With Physics, and Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, which shares a name with Jacques Distler's favorite weblog. I got review copies of both, but Not Even Wrong arrived first (thanks, Peter), and gets to be the first one reviewed. Of course, I'm coming to the game kind of late, as lots of other high-profile physics bloggers have already posted their reviews, and various magazine reviews have been out for months. Peter has collected a bunch of links in various posts. I don't…

Quantum Computing Candidates: Ion Traps

Some time back, I wrote about what you need to make a quantum computer. Given that it's election season, I thought I'd revisit the topic by looking in detail at the candidate technologies for quantum computing. The first up is Ion Trap Quantum Computing, probably the most well-established of any of the candidates. The field really starts with Dave Wineland's group at NIST, though there is outstanding stuff being done by Chris Monroe at Maryland, and a host of others. So, how do they stack up? Here are the facts about ion traps as a quantum computing system: What's the system? Ion traps are,…

Anatomy of a Conference: DAMOP Day 1

The conference I'm at this week is the annual meeting of the Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics of the American Physical Society (which this year is joint with the Canadian version, the Division of Atomic and Molecular Physics and Photon Interactions, or "DAMPΦ." The Greek letter is a recent addition-- as recently as 2001, they were just DAMP.). As the name suggests, this is a meeting covering a wide range of topics, and in some ways is like two or three meetings running in parallel in the same space. You can see the different threads very clearly if you look at the different…

Curiously incurious

While on the subject of being talked about, a columnist writing for Pajamas Media recently took a pot-shot at me and my How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic series. No publicity is bad publicity, right? Plus, a close second to imitation, mockery is another of the most sincere forms of flattery, at least in the blog world, so I'm not complaining. On to some substance in a moment, but one thing I found rather remarkable was that even though they get some 450,000 hits per day, my traffic barely registered a blip, despite a prominent link in the first paragraph! The main thrust of the article was…

Dawkins.... On Purpose

Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather non-Darwinian things to do. This idea has been explored and talked about in many ways by many people. Kurt Vonegut Jr.'s character in Galapagos repeatedly, in a state of lament, quips "Thanks, Big Brain..." as evidence accumulates that our inevitable march towards extinction is primarily a…

OJ Simpson will walk free once again, I reckon

"If it does not fit, you must acquit" Circumstances can create consequences. If Homer Simpson happens to be opening and closing his mouth in a chewing motion and happens to run into a lemon meringue pie, and thusly happens to eat said pie, it is not Homer Simpson's fault that the pie is eaten. If some black kid happens to be standing on the corner with his friends in South L.A. during a police sweep of the neighborhood, gets nervous and walks against the "Don't Walk Sign" and gets pulled in for jaywalking, it is not society's fault or the fault of the police that this kid who has never…

Benjamin Collard Speaks out on the Webster Cook Eucharist Ordeal

On June 29th, 2008, University of Central Florida student and student officer Webster Cook was involved in the incident that has since become known as Crackergate. Mr. Cook, while trying to leave the premises of the the school's Catholic Church with the un-swallowed bread that is believed by some Catholics to be Jesus Christ, was physically assaulted and restrained. Later, Cook filed charges against the Deacon of the church who had physically attacked him, and the Church, for hazing (the most relevant available campus regulation), which prohibits the forced consumption of food by a student…

“Vividness” in Mathematics

I am slowly working my way through the anthology Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative, edited by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur. The book includes an excellent essay by mathematician Timothy Gowers titled, “Vividness in Mathematics and Narrative.” It makes a point that has often bothered me about mathematical discourse. Gowers opens with two passages meant to describe the beginning of an academic year. Here's the first: It is September again, and the campus, which has been very quiet for the last couple of months, is suddenly full of cars bringing students…

Bad form, Rebecca Watson.

Note from ERV-- Like all posts on ERV, I wrote this one the night before (Thurs) and scheduled it for the next day (Fri). But with this post, I wrote it, but then just saved it, intending to completely alter the tone of the post as I was eating breakfast. But then I woke up to an extremely cognizant, articulate post by Stef McGraw, complete with a shockingly arrogant, jackass comment by Rebecca Watson, and I was like "Ah, no. No 'Full House' heart-warming conversation with Watson. She wanna act a bitch, she gonna get a bitch." One of these days, theyre going to come for my Vagina License.…

One More Round...

I had not intended to do another post on this subject. But in response to P.Z.'s post , my fellow Panda's Thumber Burt Humburg left a lengthy comment that I feel requires a response. So I'll ask your patience as we go one more round... Burt wrote: You know what audiences really love PZ? The ones who are steeped in religion and have steeped their children in it to the point that they think that all of morality and goodness and apple pie proceeds fundamentally from a love of God? Those guys? Turns out, they absolutely love it when “2 + 2 = 4” comes coupled with “Therefore, there is no god.”…

Hitchens and Donohue on Hardball

God is Not Great author Christopher Hitchens and Catholic League president Bill Donohue showed up on Hardball yesterday to mull over the issues raised by the Time article. I'd write some commentary, but some things simply defy comment. I have taken the liberty of putting certain choice nuggets in bold: MATTHEWS: I want to go to Christopher Hitchens. Christopher, you have been tough. You say this is a profound revelation, that this woman did not believe. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS, AUTHOR, “GOD IS NOT GREAT”: Yes, and a very moving one, actually, and a very honest one, I have to add. She…

The Creation Museum 3: General Overview

After leaving the theater it was time to enter the museum proper. The nice fellow at the door scanned the barcode on my ticket to verify that I wasn't trying to sneak in. He advised me that I should allow at least two hours to see all the exhibits, then invited me to go on in. The museum is laid out like a long, twisting path. Visitors are moved through various sections, organized around the “Seven C's” of history. Those would be Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross and Consummation. To which I add an eighth C: Clever! Two things struck me soon after entering. The…

Evidence and the End of Christianity

And speaking of evidence for God, here's Matt Rossano putting forth an interesting idea: Now this may seem too whimsical to be taken seriously, but the important point is this: however one envisions convincing scientific evidence of God, let's suppose we've got it. Let's further suppose that this god is pretty much the god we all expected to find -- not Aristotle's reclusive thought-contemplating-itself god or Plato's disappointingly limited Demiurge, but the “golden rule,” Ten Commandments kind of god with whom we are all pretty familiar. This God is now on the same footing as gravity,…

Jo Walton, Among Others [Library of Babel]

This is a difficult book to review, which is probably fitting, because it's a very personal book. My reaction to it is largely personal as well, and may or may not be of any use to anyone else. Given the surprising number of people who had Opinions regarding my recollections of telecommunications, I almost think I might be better off not saying anything, but it's going to nag at me unless I write something about it, so what the hell... So. Among Others is the story of Morwenna "Mori" Markova (previously Phelps), a girl from Wales who sees fairies and whose mother is an evil witch. Literally.…

We can come up with better ethical principles than any religion

Last night, in my talk, I said that I didn't think religion was necessarily a force for evil. Then, this morning, I was sent a link to some convoluted religious sophistry that made my lip curl in revulsion. Maybe I was wrong. The link will take you to an article by Orson Scott Card in which he complains about homosexuals. That probably tells you all you need to know; Card has this reputation for letting his mormonism hang out in the ugliest ways possible. Look at these horrible rationalizations for oppression. One thing is certain: one cannot serve two masters. And when one's life is given…

Why Teach "Modern Physics?"

The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish "Modern Physics" classes like the one I'm teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week's post about what "Modern Physics" is as a class: Having passed through those classes (I'm now a grad student), I have to say I didn't see much worth in the Modern physics class (and your description of it is pretty much how I remember it, except without the relativity). It's basically in that middle ground trying to…

Scientists Don't Have to Do Everything Themselves

The Mad Biologist, like 80% of ScienceBlogs, is mad at Chris Mooney: Here's the problem: you keep coming to evolutionary biologists with a problem (the perception of evolutionary biology), and you don't have a solution. Do you think there's a single evolutionary biologist who is happy with public opinion regarding evolution and creationism? But you're not giving us concrete solutions. Between teaching and research, along with all of service obligations expected of us (including public outreach), we have too much to do. When we are then told that we need to somehow organize a pro-…

Tom DeRosa in Morris

As promised, I attended Tom DeRosa's creationism talk this evening, and as expected, it wasn't very informative but it was mildly entertaining. He's a good, enthusiastic speaker — he's just unbelievably wrong. We might have a recording later on; Skatje was taping it, but it was just with our little home digital video recorder, and we don't have any idea what the quality will be like, yet. I'm letting her handle the A/V stuff on this one. Anyway, it wasn't quite what I expected. I was thinking it might be based on his recent book, Evolution's Fatal Fruit, which blames every social ill of the…

Little Red Hens find their own peer mentors

I like many, many things about my department. But I am a little frustrated about the lack of formal-ish mentoring present. It's a little awkward -- we had a couple of regular opportunities, like monthly lunches with the department head, or the senior faculty chatting with the junior faculty at a breakfast every so often, but these seem to have disappeared, for some very good reasons that I'm not going to get in to here. The point is that I need some help, I've been asking senior faculty for help, and nothing continues to happen. Okay then. So in November, I started working on my own…

Of voles and men: exploring the genetics of commitment

Love is all around us and love is in the air, and if I know my mainstream science reporters, today they will have you believe that love is in our genes too. A new report suggests that variation in a gene called AVPR1A has a small but evident influence on the strength of a relationship, the likelihood of tying the knot and the risk of divorce. It's news for humans, but it's well-known that the gene's rodent counterpart affects the bonds between pairs of voles. The story really starts with these small rodents and it's them that I now turn to. Voles make unexpectedly good animals to study if…

Clean smells promote generosity and fair play; dark rooms and sunglasses promote deceit and selfishness

The English language is full of metaphors linking moral purity to both physical cleanliness and brightness. We speak of "clean consciences", "pure thoughts" and "dirty thieves". We're suspicious of "shady behaviour" and we use light and darkness to symbolise good and evil. But there is more to these metaphors than we might imagine. The mere scent of a clean-smelling room can take people down a virtuous road, compelling them to choose generosity over greed and charity over apathy. Meanwhile, the darkness of a dimmed room or a pair of sunglasses can compel people towards selfishness and…

How Kenny Rogers and Frank Sinatra could help stroke patients

We're used to thinking of neglect as a lack of appropriate care, but to a neuroscientist, it has a very different meaning. "Spatial neglect" is a neurological condition caused by damage to one half of the brain (usually the right), where patients find it difficult to pay attention to one half of their visual space (usually the left). This bias can affect their mental images too. If neglect patients are asked to draw clocks, many only include the numbers from 12 to 6, while some shunt all the numbers to the right side. When two famous neglect patients were asked to describe a familiar square…

When Two Zeros Are Not Zero: The Strange Lives of Quantum Cell Phones

A result of much quantum coolness out today: arXiv:0807.4935 (scirate): "Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels" by Graeme Smith and Jon Yard. Strange things they are going on when we try to use our quantum cell phones, it seems. Quantum cell phones, what the hell? Read on... You know the situation. You're standing in line to get your morning coffee and bagel, and you get a call from your boss: "Hey Pontiff Dude, what's your bank account number? I need to have it so that I can deposit this large bonus into your account and if I don't do this within a few seconds, you won't get…

Possible New Nonaddictive Anti-Anxiety Drug

Those of us who watch the drug development pipeline have been pining for a nonaddictive anti-anxiety drug.  Occasionally there are glimmers of hope.  One candidate is href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emapunil">emapunil, aka XBD-173 or AC-5216.  In 2004, there was an article in the British Journal of Pharmacology about this.  That article described promising findings, in rats and mice.  Now, there is an article in Science that finally show some findings in humans. href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1575165/">Antianxiety and antidepressant-like effects of AC-5216, a…

Are Whales Fish? Author D. Graham Burnett Discusses

Part 1 | Part 2 - - - The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about a most unique and forceful book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2007), with its author D. Graham Burnett. He is associate professor of history at Princeton University. Professor Burnett is the author of three previous books, Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago University Press, 2000), A Trial by Jury (Knopf, 2001), and Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (American Philosophical…

Gravity trumps sunlight!!

"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." R. Powers, Three Farmers... Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6 Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion [Note: if you're new to the series, don't know what's going on, and want a shortcut, I'd say you can start with Part 3, skip the sidebars, and still cut a reasonable swath.] It was gravity. Gravity gives us the answer. Not sunlight, not the pathetic fallacy, not Olga the tour guide, not forensic expertise about the shine off the cannonball. Gravity. So…

Abstinence-only education does not work, abstinence-plus probably does

The US government spends millions domestically and billions internationally on abstinence-only education with the intent of lowering the transmission of STIs such as HIV and limiting unwanted pregnancies. Yet abstinence-only education is demonstrably ineffective. The alternative called abstinence-plus education clearly does not make the situation worse -- as some critics have argued -- but it doesn't appear to work that well either. What's a person concerned with public health to do? Two reviews this year Underhill et al. look at the effectiveness of abstinence-only and abstinence-plus…

Sunday Sacrilege: The Plan, or not

Believers and I have a fundamentally different view of history. There are these words that religious people throw about with abandon — prophecy, fate, destiny, God's plan — that I don't believe in at all. We've recently witnessed an extreme example of this, as certain fundamentalist Christians paraded their eschatology before us, but it was only one narrow and specific version of a more commonly held dispensationalism that maps the history and the future of the world to a series of predicted events that typically include a period of tribulation, followed by a millennium of peace under the…

Paul Kurtz: In Contrast to the New Atheists, We Must Emphasize Shared Values with the Moderately Religious

Philosopher Paul Kurtz has been an influential mentor to me and he remains a major inspiration. Back in 1997, Kurtz hired me to work at the Center for Inquiry-Transnational as Skeptical Inquirer's media relations director. Three years later he strongly supported my decision to go to graduate school. In my time at CFI, I learned from Kurtz the importance of framing messages in ways that affirm shared common values and that go beyond just attacks. When I arrived at graduate school, I began to research how to turn Kurtz's philosophy and practice into a systematic approach to public engagement…

01110101011011100110 10010111011001100101

The history of information -- which is to say, the history of everything -- is littered with codes. Some are cryptic, designed to be understood by only a few, while others are made to be cracked. Numbers, for example, are symbols which translate the abstraction of mathematical information into a code we can understand. Language, too, is such an idea code. The Dewey Decimal System was a code for organizing all knowledge into ten distinct classes. Morse code broke meaning into short pulses of sound. HTML and other computer programming languages are codes which make the arrangement of graphics…

Blogosphere, MSM journalism, and the PTSD story

What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of long-form, slow-bake, "mainstream" journalism and the idiom we call the blogosphere? As per Bora, the meaning of these terms are shifting as we speak. Last night, using my recent story and blogging on PTSD as a point of focus, I put in my latest two cents on this subject at my talk -- actually a long conversation with host and audience -- at the NYU Science, Health and Environmental Program's "Inside-Out" lecture series. This was a crowd of writers, journalism profs, and journalism students, and I think we were all surprised at how many…

The coolest endangered species you've never heard of.

We've all seen a news story or documentary on Discovery Channel about how global warming is wiping out Polar Bears or how poaching and habitat destruction is killing off the Gorillas. There are a lot of endangered species, and some are particularly trumpeted by the media and scientists alike. But there are 1,642,189 species on the IUCN's Red List - most you've probably never even heard of. I've found ten of them I bet you didn't know about. What are they? Read the rest of this post!Take the Bumblebee Bat, for example. It wins the "cutest bat ever" contest hands down. Other wise known as…

Women Swarm Nation's Technical Campuses

By way of the LA Times, we learn that women are flocking in droves to Caltech this year: According to preliminary figures, 87 women are entering a freshman class of [235] students in September. That 37% share is Caltech's highest since it began admitting undergraduate women in 1970, when pioneering females comprised 14% of the entering class. Has Caltech gone soft and squishy? Though they protest that standards were not lowered, the LA Times does not seem convinced. Although Caltech insists that it did not lower its notoriously tough admission standards or practice affirmative action for…