It's easy to get depressed reading the criticisms of self-loathing types who demand a zero-defects culture. If some weirdo neuroscience PhD student shoots up a movie theater, well, that is reason for a whole bunch of people to want to run out and ban neuroscience.And if you read anti-science people, the world is a scarier place than it was when we were huddled in caves, starving. We...
read moreGlobal warming and more water would be good for surfers, right? Nope. Did you see any surfing in "Waterworld" or"The Day After Tomorrow"? Nope, because higher sea levels mean terrible breaks. As Sam Kornell at Pacific Standard puts it, "the contour of a wave is as important as its size, and the way a wave builds and breaks is determined chiefly by the shape of the ocean...
read moreResearchers from Uppsala University in Sweden recently set out to test the unwritten rule of the sea that, during maritime disasters, women and children are first in the lifeboats.What they found was that, factoring out a big disaster like the Titanic, sailors don't much care about gender these days. Women are no more likely than men to survive any wreck where at least 100 people were on...
read moreThe landing of a cute robot on Mars really resonated with American popular culture this past weekend; and so the first few images Curiosity snapped have caught fire as well, including a blotch that was no longer there in later pictures.Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5 PDT near the foot of a mountain three miles tall inside Gale Crater, which is 96 miles in diameter. Curiosity is the...
read moreSay what you want about former President George W. Bush, he was good for science. Sure, he had a moral position against human embryonic stem cell research, but President Obama has only been different, and no better. Where they stand apart is funding research.Supporting science is more than flowery prose. "Is it what anyone says or is it where money gets spent?" asked...
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