Why does the moon look bigger when it’s near the horizon?It's a mystery at least 3,000 years old. Physicists attributed it to refraction while the “angle-of-regard” hypothesis said it was due to the angle that our eyes (or head) make relative to the horizon. The more your eyes are angled upward, the thinking goes, the smaller something looks, due to the physiology of our visual system. And...
read moreIn 2013, archaeologists working in Alsace, in eastern France discovered the tomb and skull of an aristocrat who died some 1,600 years ago. Her skull was heavily deformed, with the front flattened, and the rear rising into a cone shape. An amateur digger might have been forgiven for thinking they had found one of the “Grey aliens” that UFO-spotters regularly claim to see. Instead, this...
read moreIn America, the social sciences, like psychology and anthropology, are regarded as female occupations - because they are.But does that mean women are self-selecting women and there is bias against males in those fields? It depends on who you ask. People rarely admit to bias and in 2015 people are rarely overtly biased, so instead it may be that when you walk into a classroom and no one looks...
read moreMichael LaCour, the UCLA graduate student at the center of a bizarre "science" scandal - we'd do science a real favor if we stopped calling political science and sociology science, even if they get published in Science - apparently made up data in a different study about political bias in the media. The one that got people looking into his other work was his claim that if we just talked to each...
read moreIt's time to end the federal porn subsidy.You might be asking, What federal porn subsidy? Fair question. Technically, there isn't a federal porn subsidy. However, if we borrow some of the logic commonly used by politically driven economists discussing fossil fuels, we can redefine the word subsidy to mean whatever we want.
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