web analytics

Posts made in October, 2014

Why Do Random Walks In Evolution Lead To The Same Place?

An interesting experiment published in Science placed baker's yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae) in separate identical bioworlds. Then, at the same time, historical contingency events would happen, just like they have on earth - and only the fittest survived.Evolution tells us that there are things besides natural selection going on - there are mutations and genetic drift. If we boiled up some...

read more

Science Left Behind 2014: The Anti-Vaccination Update

Science Left Behind, a book I co-authored in 2012 with Dr. Alex Berezow, covered the ways that anti-science beliefs had become mainstream among political progressives in the United States. It addressed dozens of topics but the three biggest ones denied by progressives (along with a few fellow liberals and Democrats) were the findings that anti-vaccine, anti-biology and anti-energy science...

read more

Are Republicans Responsible For The Lack Of An Ebola Vaccine?

Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, has a $29 billion per year budget, which dwarfs the National Science Foundation and NASA - combined.You'd think for all that money they could have done a lot to create an Ebola vaccine before the crisis was all over the pages of The New York Times. But it seems they need just a little more. Dr. Collins says they have been working...

read more

That Airport Could Give You Cancer

California has a lot of quirks that outside people jeer at. There is no defending it, when people ask about California, I simply tell them 'all of the weird things and the good things you hear are true.'One of the biggest cultural disconnects is that Californians will promote tolerance and diversity and choice by banning everything. This downward spiral did not happen in the 1960s - the hippie...

read more

Bulgarian Indiana Jones Finds Vampire Graves

The precautionary principle has been around in all countries and for centuries, it seems. The ancient temple of Perperion, south-east of the Bulgarian capital Sofia, contains a vampire burial site containing skeletons which all have an iron rod impaled through their bodies where their heart would have been - further evidence that people really did believe that vampires could rise from...

read more