The Trump administration has announced it is partnering with drugmaker AstraZeneca for at least 300 million doses of a corona virus vaccine developed by the University of Oxford, and is committing up to $1.2 billion to the effort. As an alumnus of Oxford I am naturally proud that my alma mater is at the forefront of …
Recently, the World Economic Forum launched 1t.org, a plan to plant a trillion trees. Even Donald Trump, who has withdrawn the US from the Paris agreement, has backed the initiative. But can trees store enough carbon to buy us time to act on climate change? A recent paper said 0.9 billion hectares could lock up …
Jeff Bezos is donating $10bn of his personal wealth to help “save Earth”. The Amazon chief executive said he would fund “any effort that offers a real possibility to help preserve and protect the natural world”. (The Week 21 Feb 2020) On this blog I have, for what it’s worth, criticized the richest man in …
The outlook for wildlife would be grim even if the planet were not warming. According to a major report last year, 1 million species could soon be wiped out – a sixth mass extinction. The main cause at present is the loss of habitat, but over this century the changing climate is expected to push …
Common bottle nose Dolphins have a dominant right-hand side according to research by naturalists. About 90% of all humans are also right- handed as are gorillas. It appears, however, that a “right- hand” bias is stronger in dolphins than in humans. Wow! The ice is melting, the seas are rising, the volcanos are doing what …
Far from being an indefinable concept, a single measure of intelligence underpins our problem-solving, musicality and even creativity and emotional skills When researchers talk about intelligence, they are referring to a specific set of skills that includes the abilities to reason, learn, plan and solve problems. The interesting thing is that people who are good …
Kefalonia We came, we saw, we sunbathed Odysseus, who came from Ithaca, just next door, Found Kefalonia a bore. No dragons, no beasties, no Charybdis or Scyllas, Just a load of young Brits drinking beer in their villas. From the earliest moment when he was a boy, He wanted adventures, like leveling Troy. But …
Soon, most of us will stop eating beef, and it won’t be because we’ll all agree with vegans that meat is murder. It’ll be due to the logic of advanced capitalism. The alternatives to meat now being developed – plant-based substitutes and vat-grown meat produced from cultured animal cells – will taste the same as …
Continue reading ‘Time to say farewell to steak and chips (fries)’ »
The following is an excerpt from the New Scientist: “The Hubble constant may not be that constant after all. Something is wrong with the expansion of the universe. Nearby galaxies seem to be moving away from one another too fast, we don’t know why, and every new set of data just seems to make the …
Continue reading ‘Our understanding of the cosmos is wrong?’ »
If you know where to look in academic journals, it turns out there is indeed lots of good evidence to suggest that some organically grown crops can be higher in certain vitamins and minerals. The tricky thing is, there are also lots of studies that suggest the exact opposite is the case. The more you …
Walter Isaacson, biographer ofAlbert Einstein, writes the following (page 550): Perhaps the most important aspect of his personality was his willingness to be non- conformist. “The theme I recognise in Galileo’s work” , he said, “ is the passionate fight against any kind of dogma based on authority”. Plank, Poincare and Lorentz all came close …
From Scott McNeil, Banstead, Surrey, UK In your article about the Greenland ice sheet melting, you mention how “bad news begins to wash over you” . I spend time in parts of the US that have a lot of climate change sceptics. Discussing evidence and reasoning is often met with suspicion, or even outright derision, …
From time to time I publish, or re-publish, some basic background information about Epicurean science. Epicurus reached twelve conclusions of particular importance, provable through firm evidence and reasoning. The three faculties being given us by Nature to deduce this evidence are (1) our five senses, (2) our faculty of perceiving “anticipations,” and (3) our faculty of “feeling” …
Continue reading ‘Epicureanism: 12 main conclusions about the universe’ »
Dr. Brett Helms. who heads up a team of scientists, has announced that he has discovered a way of making scrap plastic indefinitely re- recyclable able. Plastic material can be recycled, but because its quality degrades during the recycling process, even the stuff that makes it as far as a recycling plant (which is …
Continue reading ‘Re-cycling, Part 2: Endlessly recyclable plastic’ »
Microplastics have been found dropping from the sky in a remote stretch of the high Pyrenees – a stark illustration of the way that the pollutants, carried on the winds, have the potential to accumulate “anywhere and everywhere”. Humans and other animals are consuming microplastics via food and water (including tap water), and there is …
Continue reading ‘What a mess we are making of our planet!’ »
This planet of ours is beginning to burn — and not just last week or month either. It’s been smoldering for decades now. Last summer, for instance, amid global heat records (Ouargla, Algeria, 124 degrees Fahrenheit; Hong Kong, over 91 degrees Fahrenheit for 16 straight days; Nawabsha, Pakistan, 122 degrees Fahrenheit; Oslo, Norway, over 86 …
Only 40% of adults in the United States believe evolution to be “true”. A third of American adults positively believe it to be false, presumably believing that God delivered man and woman, fully formed, to the Garden of Eden five thousand years ago, as per one of the Hebrew creation myths (there were two of …
A recent study suggests that we quickly get used to unusual weather, which has troubling implications for our ability to motivate people to support measures that will protect us from global climate change. The study measured the literal remarkability of different temperatures by seeing how much comment they generated on Twitter. Hot and cold conditions …
Since the days of Huey Long, in the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, the U.S. would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a …
Epicurus believed that there were twelve principles of nature, provable through firm evidence and true reasoning, using our five senses, our faculty of perceiving “anticipations,” and our “feelings” of pleasure and pain. He believed in conclusions supported by clear and convincing evidence. No evidence, he said, is ever to be disregarded as worthless. Real evidence …
Students in the US who have a type of brain parasite carried by cats are more likely to be majoring in business studies. The pets are hosts for the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii. It can infect people through contact with cat faeces, poorly cooked meat from infected livestock, or contaminated water, and A many as …
The first modern Britons probably had blue eyes, dark hair and dark brown skin, according to a new DNA analysis of the oldest complete skeleton ever found in the UK. Cheddar Man, dug up in Somerset in 1903, lived some 10,000 years ago, not long after settlers began crossing over from Europe at the end …
Continue reading ‘Our ( British) ancesters were all probably dark brown’ »
Children in Italy, Greece and Spain are now the fattest in Europe. More than 40% of boys and girls aged nine are either overweight or obese. Sweets,junk food and sugary drinks have displaced the region’s traditional diet based on fruit and vegetables, fish and olive oil. (World Health Organisation) One study suggests that your bank …
The late Stephen Hawking famously declared that there was no need for a creator. He was an atheist who stated that science offered a more convincing explanation of life and the universe than god or gods. He believed that the universe is governed by the laws of science. In his 2010 book, “The Grand Design” …
I have just been to CERN and was reminded that Epicurus was a forerunner of todays particle physicists. Epicurean atomism was remarkably similar to nineteenth-century atomic chemistry: atoms as indivisible, eternal building blocks, things regarded as mere accumulations of atoms colliding with each other. More, the Epicureans came up with a “many worlds” cosmology long …
