Crotchety old men seem to have won this argument.Modern pop music is too loud and does sound all the same, just like angry old types have been saying for 70 years. A team from Spain analyzed music from a 55 year period, using an archive known as the Million Song Dataset, and found that songs have indeed become both louder and more homogenized in terms of chords and melodies. read...
read moreAnti-science activists in a war on genetically modified organisms are for more pervasive than right-wing types who limited federal funding for human embryonic stem cell research 10 years ago - because right-wing people just wanted to let taxpayers opt out and left-wing zealots want things banned if it violates their naturalistic world view.Ireland is, by heritage, a potato culture - and nothing...
read moreIf necessity is the mother of invention, then surely poor farmers will invent more than billion-dollar corporations or highly paid academics.Or so believes Prof. Anil Gupta, who has spent two decades traveling rural India and searching for for its hidden innovations. So far, Gupta says he and his aides have uncovered more than 25,000 inventions.Some examples: A bicycle-mounted crop...
read moreIt’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical, says Berkeley physics Prof. Richard Muller, who still says that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. He has analyzed some of the most alarmist claims and his skepticism about them hasn’t changed. What has changed is his doubt about the very existence of global...
read moreScience journalism used to not have that 'science' qualifier. It was journalism, like any other kind, but about science.Last decade, though, science journalism lost its way, as we have discussed many times before. Too many science journalists became cheerleaders for science or, worse, advocates for aspects of controversial science topics. They were no longest trusted guides for the public...
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