From Wired’s The End of Theory: “Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you [...]
From the Atlantic’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?: “Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of [...]
From ScienceNOW’s The Milky Way Gets a Facelift: “Forget what you thought the Milky Way looked like. The galaxy is far from the simple and elegant spiral-armed structure so often portrayed. New observations, presented today at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri, reveal, among other things, that…two of the [...]
From Carl Zimmer’s The More We Know About Genes, the Less We Understand: “The source of their strength lies not in a single molecule — DNA — but in a complicated web of relationships. The network itself is the mystery for biologists in the 21st century.”
April 24, 2008 – 03:46 pm
From Wired’s Study says near extinction threatened peoples: “Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests. The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday. The report notes that a separate [...]
March 19, 2008 – 11:42 am
From ’s Childhood’s end: Arthur C. Clarke passes away at age 90: “Clarke didn’t just give us great fiction [like 2001: A Space Odyssey], although that will be a major part of his legacy. He had degrees in science and mathematics, and his nonfiction work is important in a way that’s hard to overestimate”
February 13, 2008 – 12:24 pm
From Wired’s Complexity Theory Takes Evolution to Another Level: “A growing number of scientists do say that neo-Darwinian evolution doesn’t explain certain jumps in biological complexity: from single-celled to multicellular organisms, from single organisms to entire communities. The jumps…appear to be non-linear emergent phenomena, the result of networked interactions that produce self-organization at ever higher [...]
January 14, 2008 – 10:53 am
From Discover Magazine’s, Time May Not Exist: “Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and [...]
September 27, 2007 – 11:51 am
From the Guardian’s Bob Slavin: Which? doctor: “This month Slavin starts as founding director of York’s £11m Institute for Effective Education (IEE). The idea is to try to take the politics out of education policy by providing the bottom line in research on what works and what doesn’t. “The issue of evidence-based reform is the [...]
April 26, 2007 – 11:50 am
Can “neurotheology” bridge the gap between religion and science?: “Donning chain-mail hoods of electrodes and contemplating universal peace and love, the [Tibetan] monks [including the Dalia Lama] show EEG patterns that appeared to be laced with higher than normal levels of gamma waves—even after they stopped meditating. These higher-frequency vibrations have been proposed as a [...]
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