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Now that his plan has backfired drastically (his own website has removed the link to his "Introduction" of Darwin's book) and more people were offended by his distortions than anything else, let me briefly point out some useful information. Comfort makes the following assertions in his introducti...
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In the op-ed pages of The Washington Post today, Elliot Gerson--the American Secretary of the Rhodes Trust--takes a bold stand:Tonight, 32 young Americans will win Rhodes Scholarships. Their tenures at Oxford are funded by the legacy of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, a man whose life would...
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Hardly a natural history documentary goes by without some mention of leafcutter ants. So overexposed are these critters that I strongly suspect they're holding David Attenborough's relatives to ransom somewhere. But there is good reason for their fame - these charismatic insects are incredibly su...
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Canada. Again. This time in Whistler: A 20-year-old male had been found unconscious by friends. When police arrived, Whistler Fire Rescue Service and Emergency Health Services personnel were performing CPR, but failed to revive the victim, who was pronounced dead a short time later at the Whistle...
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The Norwegian Institute of Public Health is reporting sporadic occurrences of a mutation in a portion of the flu virus that is involved with the process by which it attaches to cells. I use the word "sporadic" because at this point there is no evidence that the cases where the genetic change has ...
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We received an astonishing number of responses to last week's Casual Fridays study, which claimed to be able to identify what makes a good writer in just a few minutes.Of course, I wasn't actually very confident that a brief survey could actually identify the factors that make a good writer. But ...
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Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos -- novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes -- you are beyond doubt the strangest? -Walker PercyWhen you watch someone fall into a black hole, what you actually see is pretty surprising. You see, a black hole's gravity ...
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Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence betwe...
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Dr. Free-Ride: Any ideas for tomorrow's sprog blog?Younger offspring: I wanted to do how photosynthesis works.Dr. Free-Ride: Did you do any research on that since last week?Younger offspring: I don't do research. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Also check out the ...
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Artificial Intelligence as a term implies that there is a "natural" intelligence we wish to replicate in the lab and then engineer in any one of several practical contexts. There is nothing in the term that implies that "intelligence" be human, but the implication is clear that such a thing as "...
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In September we posted "M.D. Anderson name misused in Evolv nutraceutical water advertising," detailing the not-exactly-truthful claim by a multilevel marketing company that their bottled water product was "tested" by one of North America's premier teaching and research hospitals.A flurry of sear...
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Denise Gellene in the New York Times is reporting this morning that Scottish physician, Sir John Crofton, passed away on 3 November at age 97.Crofton is best known for implementing a combination drug regimen to treat tuberculosis, the insidious lung infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis which...
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When this publishes, it will be 8 am in Germany and my plane will have landed in Frankfurt a few minutes ago. As you are getting ready to snuggle into a warm bed, I will be jet-lagged, waiting to collect my checked bags and to work my way through Customs with my birds. Hopefully, I have all my pe...
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There is a radical proposal in Iceland to restore the economy and rescue the nation from bankruptcy: expand the tax base to recover revenue from the extensive underground economy. Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Also check out the featured ScienceBlog of the week:...
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Inquiring minds want to know: what's a feminist activist, and how should she dress? My last post has raised a lot of discussion for people about the nature of feminism and feminists. There are questions about litmus tests and whether Zuska applies them. I thought it best to take a moment or to...
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This post brought to you by Ben and Jerry's Dublin Mudslide Ice Cream. Because the Twitter people are like little devils on my shoulder, making me eat the cake... (
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(To watch this as a music video click on the volume icon in the top left.)Here you are, all your bright, shining faces with a brand new copy of On the Origin of Species. It's extremely generous of Ray Comfort and Living Waters Publications to distribute so many free copies of a book with no p...
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At last long there was solid proof that humans had died in a real Noachian Deluge. That such an event had occurred was widely taken on faith by Christians, and the belief that world's geology had been formed by the Flood was assented to by many naturalists, but in 1725 the Swiss naturalist Jacob ...
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I actually mentioned this video earlier, but you know, I don't think I did the pitch justice.So...Basically a TEDx talk by Jennifer Gardy, who outlines just how freaking fast that H1N1 information has been obtained. And all because of the open source and open access nature of the research work.F...
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Continuing with the series (I get more and more feedback that people love this) introducing, a few at a time, the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference. You can also look at the Program so see who is doing what.Anil Dash is a pioneer blogger (and of course twitterer) and one of the fou...
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I knew when I first heard about them that the new United States Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) recommendations on breast cancer screening would be controversial. I tried to discuss these guidelines and the issues involved in a calm and rational way, relatively devoid of Insolence, Resp...
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Richard Kerr's recent news feature at Science magazine offers a compelling look at the many communication challenges on climate change, especially at a time of apparent "climate fatigue." As Roger Pielke comments in the Science article, by sounding the alarm on climate change too loudly, campai...
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No matter how early I wake up, it's always five hours later in the UK and I'm overwhelmed by the thought that I'm already behind (I won't even get into the feeling I have when I think of our Australian readers).So when I start the day reading my Twitter stream, it's usually populated by midday ne...
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During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been pu...
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The Director of Loyola University Medical Center's clinical microbiology laboratory is reported as saying that rapid flu tests are a public health risk. Here's some of what he said and then my explanation as to why it is misleading or just plain wrong:Rapid influenza diagnostic tests used in doct...
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I'm back to my list of Ask Dr. Isis email. Next up in the queue is this one:Dr. Isis, I'm a regular lurker at your blog who is writing on behalf of my mother - she's a fourth grade teacher in an inner-city district in Arizona, and she has one very gifted young Hispanic girl in her class this year...
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And now Sci can finally get down to writing the hefty post in the oxyotcin series, what she likes to call the effects on the soft stuff. The emotions, memory, trust, that kind of thing. She didn't know if she'd make it, for verily, this little grad student hath earned her ramen this day in looo...
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In the comments on one of my posts, someone pointed me towards Stephen Crothers, who gives the following argument (in a nutshell) as to why black holes cannot possibly exist:General Relativity is our theory of gravity, which relates the curvature of space to the gravitational acceleration of obje...
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Answering my question from yesterday it appears that I have done relatively little bashing of the Impact Factor in recent months. Odd that. And since our beloved commenter whimple is stirring up trouble I thought I'd repost something that appeared Sept 21, 2007 on the old blog. I also ran across ...
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PZ has information that Ray Comfort and his merry band of misfits have changed their plans and are passing out their Origin of Species propaganda today. You should go and get a copy right away. They're most likely located at the busiest part of your college campus between 11 and 1pm (or whenev...
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Last Friday I went to at talk by Brian David Johnson from Intel. That sentence sounds like any other that an academic could write--always with the going to seminars we acahacks are. That is until you hear that Brian David Johnson is a "consumer experience architect" in the Digital Home - User E...
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