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mspringer | March 12, 2009A reader writes in with a question about the physics of Star Trek:
When the Enterprise goes into warp speed (which as I take it are multiples of the speed of light, warp 5, 5x the speed of light, etc.) and they show the ship zooming through the cosmos, they always show the stars its passing as elongated. In the special theory of relativity, is it not true that moving near the speed of light objects will appear to actually contract? But then again, according to relativity one can't go faster than the speed of light, so perhaps there is some other physical phenomena going on here. Or maybe I…
gregladen | March 12, 2009It has long been known that incest is not as bad as you think. Anti-cousin marriage laws are like prohibition laws and blue laws. They arise from a Christian conservative movement that swept Western Civilization from the late 18th century through the 19th century, up to about the time of the repeal of Prohibition.
Sure, marrying, or just plain having sex with, your sibling is disgusting. I mean, think about it. No, wait, don't even think about it. But cousin marriage? That depends. Your cousin may be kinda cute, you never know.
(a repost)
But seriously, anthropologists have long known…
pharyngula | March 11, 2009Tune in to KPFT for some stem cell talk sometime in the next few minutes!
gregladen | March 11, 2009Bill Gates is now (once again) the richest person in the world, even though he lost a personal 18 billion dollars since last year.
In other words, Bill Gates lost more than the GNP of Kenya, El Salvador, Iraq, Qatar and about a hundred other countries. If Bill gaes was a country, he'd be about the fiftieth richest, give or take. (For reference, there seems to be about 224 countries in the world at the moment.)
more of the gruesome details
gregladen | March 11, 2009Mother ship? No, I'm not talking about Target! I'm talking about SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, the web site of Seed Magazine, which in turn, is inextricably (much to their horror, I'm sure) entangled with Scienceblogs.com.
The home page of the venerable purveyor of Science as Culture is HERE. Have a look at, and play around with, the new layout.
gregladen | March 11, 2009Lee Yong Dae is an Olympic gold medal winning badminton player. ..
Totally stolen from Miss Cellania:
Watch Badminton Shuttlecock Smashes Watermelon and more funny videos on CollegeHumor
gregladen | March 11, 2009Funniest thing on the internet today.
Here in the TC, we have howling winds and sub zero temps, and the wind chill is 30 or 40 below. But we have food, at least.
cortex | March 11, 2009A general assumption in the sports world is that athletes get better over time. Sprinters get faster, hitters hit more home runs, quarterbacks throw fewer interceptions, etc. And yet, there's one sports statistic that has refused to budge: the percentage of free-throws made in the NBA. Here's the NY Times, via Kottke:
The consistency of free-throw percentages stands out when contrasted with field-goal shooting over all. In men's college basketball, field-goal percentage was below 40 percent until 1960, then climbed steadily to 48.1 in 1984, still the highest on record. The long-range 3-point…
mspringer | March 11, 2009Conservative forces, that is!
Hold a basketball in your hand and move it around. When you move it up, you do work against gravity. You have to put energy into the system to get it to gain height. Relax your arm, and the force of gravity pulls it downward, converting that potential energy into kinetic energy and speeding up the ball's downward motion until you stop it with your hand.
You can wiggle the ball up, down, and all around. It doesn't matter what path the ball takes, if it starts and ends in the same place, the total energy transfer done by gravity is zero. Forces with this…
sciencepunk | March 11, 2009
Last week I wrote about how the BBC's Drive Time show on Radio 2 allowed a quack therapist to promote herself on air, making bizarre statements about the human body. This included the 'scientifically proven' existence of meridians which "carry the energy of our thoughts".
Needless to say, myself and others took umbrage to this miseducation, so I submitted the following to the BBC complaints panel:
As a science writer, I was disappointed to find out that your R2 Drive Time show on Wednesday gave a considerable amount of airtime to life coach Janet Thompson, allowing her to voice numerous…
gregladen | March 10, 2009The basic fabric of the universe is heterogeneous and lumpy. Why? Cosmologists fight over that. Recent theoretical work may be pushing the pendulum towards a string-related explanation (after a period of time when this seemed less likely).
A network of 'cosmic strings' criss-crossing the Universe could be responsible for a mysterious flux of antimatter particles which has been puzzling astronomers. ... theoretical astrophysicist Tanmay Vachaspati at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, suggests that space may be threaded ... with a network of much lighter strings - too lightweight to…
pharyngula | March 10, 2009How do you think the Rabid Right is reacting to Obama's enlightened stem cell policies? This comic isn't far from the truth.
Here's Glenn Beck, always the representative of Idiot America.
So here you have Barack Obama going in and spending the money on embryonic stem cell research, and then some, fundamentally changing - remember, those great progressive doctors are the ones who brought us Eugenics. It was the progressive movement and it was science. Let's put science truly in her place. If evolution is right, why don't we just help out evolution? That was the idea. And sane people agreed…
gregladen | March 10, 2009Pytoplankton gets some of its nutrients from the dust that settles on the ocean surface. Unfortunately, some of this dust, owing to human caused pollution, is toxic to phytoplankton.
Adina Paytan, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues have found that air samples from different areas of the world are toxic to the most common phytoplankton species, Synechococcus.
Paytan incubated seawater phytoplankton in flasks filled with different samples of aerosol-rich air. "We wanted to find out how aerosol deposition impacts the phytoplankton community,"…
nisbetmc | March 10, 2009
This past weekend, a diversity of scholars and experts were called to Oregon for what might be described as a "three cultures summit" on climate change. The two-day deliberation included scientists, philosophers, poets, writers, social scientists, and filmmakers. Our focus, as Oregon State philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore defined it, was to figure out how to effectively communicate the "second premise on climate change," a set of moral and normative frameworks that can stir policymakers and the public to action.
An overwhelming majority of scientists have concluded that climate change is an…
cortex | March 10, 2009Apologies, once again, for the blogging silence. I was busy in London, on tour for the UK version of the book, which is called "The Decisive Moment". (We got some great press, including being featured as "Book of the Week" by BBC Radio 4.)
Although book tours can, on occasion, be frustrating and grueling - I'm so sick of airport food that I don't even like Egg McMuffins anymore, and I'm getting to the point where I detest the sound of my own voice - one of the genuine highlights is getting to answer questions from your readers. As an author, there is nothing more exciting than learning which…
gregladen | March 9, 2009Franken/Coleman recount updates, what happened to the General Motors pension funds, 10 reasons why conservatives' fiscal ideas are dangerous, and the last stronghold of free-market economics: academia?
catch up here.
gregladen | March 9, 2009I am reluctant to use the term "power couple" in reference to a pair of Minnesota leaders in the area of science and politics, but considering the contributions of Rebecca and Shawn Lawrence Otto, the term moves past cliché and into double entendre. Rebecca is the Minnesota State Auditor, an elected constitutional office that I consider to be second only to the governor in terms of authority and importance. Shawn has been one of the key figures involved in the organization Science Debate 2008, originally formed to spur the large field of 2008 presidential hopefuls to have at least one…
sb admin | March 9, 2009Today, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum to the heads of executive departments and agencies regarding scientific integrity. It begins:
Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security.
Itâs wonderful to have an administration committing so clearly to the use of science to inform health and environmental…
gregladen | March 9, 2009 Capt. Charles Moore of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation first discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- an endless floating waste of plastic trash. Now he's drawing attention to the growing, choking problem of plastic debris in our seas.