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” …
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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 …
