Interstellar: A Spectacular View Of Science But Not Without Compromise
Black holes aren’t black. Warner Bros.
By Alasdair Richmond, University of Edinburgh
Note: this article has spoilers.
In Interstellar’s near-ish future, our climate has failed catastrophically, crops die in vast blights and America is a barely-habitable dustbowl. Little education beyond farming methods is tolerated and students are taught that the Apollo landings were Cold War propaganda hoaxes.
Baseball Offseason Debate: Who Is The Best Left-Handed Player?
Though the World Series is over, baseball never really ends in the modern era. There are MVP announcements, free agency and then the winter meetings. Before we know it, it will be February and pitchers and catchers reporting for spring training in Florida and Arizona.
Villagers, Pitchforks And The Profane Nature Of Science
In 1752 in the British city of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin did something that horrified the superstitious people of the day - he captured a lightning storm in a jar with nothing but a piece of string controlled by some dry silk.Is Truthy Truthful Or Truthiness?
Imagine a site where the lead developer supported the Discovery Institute, the Tea Party, the Mitt Romney campaign, Greenpeace, Joe Mercola, Just Label It, and various other political activist and anti-science groups.Would you believe it was really neutral about science?
Perhaps. It depends on how many other people are involved in the project, but it would certainly bring a higher level of scrutiny.
The Ghosts Of The First Neolithic People In A Paleo World
If you lived in Hilazon Tachtit, near the Hilazon river of Israel 12,000 years ago, you might have borne witness to a world first; the earliest known religious ceremony.Talking While Female: 6 Things About The Perception Of Women’s Voices
You may not have realized it, but women's voices are a big topic. For women, at least.I suppose it may be true. If someone asks me to describe the characters in television comedy "The Big Bang Theory", my natural response would be 'the guy that matches the stereotype of how people think physicists are, the actual physicist, the engineer, the psychologist, the girl who looked a lot better with longer hair and the girl with the squeaky voice.'
See? 16% of my responses were related to female voice. She did better than the Indian guy, I forgot him completely, but whatever her science degree is was completely left out, the voice sticks out.
Preventing Murder: 3 Ways To Predict Who Will Become A Killer
Right now, the police can't do much to help you until after a crime has been committed. In a science-fiction tale about free will and psychological determinism, Philip K. Dick's "Minority Report" detailed a world where PreCrime officers stop acts before they happen. They know who is going to do it.
But psychic mutants are a simplistic convention, criminologists have instead been trying to do it in the real world.
The Science Of Voodoo Dolls – Coburn’s Annual Wastebook Released
Voodoo Dolls, Gambling Monkeys and Zombies in Love sounds like a 1980s B-movie title, along the lines of "Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town", but it's actually part of the latest Wastebook from Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK).If you didn't know that NASA built a $350 million launch pad tower even after the the rockets it was designed to test were scrapped, well, Coburn is here to help. They also spent $390,000 on a cartoon about global warming and $3,000,000 to try and figure out how Congress works.
Those and 97 other funny or outrageous bits of spending waste are documented.
I’d Put Warning Labels On Mutagenic Plants Before GMOs
Imagine we lived in a world where spontaneous mutations were caused by radiation and then released on an unsuspecting public without any testing.
Well, we do. It's called nature.
High-energy cosmic rays have been breaking chromosomes into pieces that reattach randomly, and sometimes creating genes that didn't previously exist, for as long as some thing has eaten some other thing.