From 30,000 feet above sea level, why aren’t the stars visible from an airplane? “Don’t get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free […]
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From bizarre to enthralling, it’s the greatest cultural entertainment we miss out on in America. “If there’s one thing that I love as an entertainer, it’s a spectacle.” –JC Chasez Whatever […]
Every prediction it’s ever made has been verified, except for one. “These neutrino observations are so exciting and significant that I think we’re about to see the birth of an entirely […]
What glitters with the brilliance of 100,000 Suns? This guy. “It’s not what you have on the outside that glitters in light, it’s what you have on the inside that shines […]
An extraordinarily simple explanation of the most mind-boggling concept of modern science. “In the confusion we stay with each other, happy to be together, speaking without uttering a single word.” -Walt […]
What everyone should know about where our matter-and-radiation-filled Universe came from. “I don’t think at this point we have any way of knowing where the laws of physics came from. We […]
Is the largest object in our galaxy — our central black hole — poised to devour a massive gas cloud? “What makes us love… is when we learn all these fantastic stories. Feeding the imagination […]
Whether you’ve ever run across this famous “how many triangles” puzzle or not, you’re in for a treat looking at the magnificence of the solution. “Arithmetic! Algebra! Geometry! Grandiose trinity! […]
A victory for common sense, a setback for sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll
While the N.I.H. has prohibited research involving it sown chimpanzees since 2011, VandeBergargues that chimpanzees and gorillas may die from diseases “that could have been prevented or treated by medical products developed from research with chimpanzees.”
The weather has been all over the place this year, with record highs and lows recorded in hundreds of different locations around the globe. So how exactly are temperatures changing globally?
In September I covered a paper that described the massive amount of bias created in the legal system in parts of the US where forensic laboratories are paid in return […]
Expedition 36 Crew Member, astronaut Karen Nyberg, demonstrates how she washes her hair in space onboard the International Space Station.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time you’ll probably be familiar with the name Sokal from the Sokal affair, the scandal in 1996 in which physicist […]
How are we supposed to communicate about science in an age when political partisanship and media hype dominate the 24/7 news cycle?
A few months ago I posted a piece which has become my most popular blog post by quite a landslide.The postcovered various techniques for learning and looked at the empirical […]
As we head out into the future we know that we can predict certain kinds of disruptive technologies.
Is the pursuit of happiness, which we Americans will celebrate later this week, a worthy goal? Many have said no, on the grounds that happiness comes only to those who […]
Higgs is Confirmed After a Higgs-like particle was detected last summer by CERN scientists, that particle has now been confirmed to be the real deal. Read more here. Sex in […]
Why does the Purple Line in this alternate-universe railway map terminate in Quincy, Illinois?
Update (Jan, 2014): Amir’s patent application (search for no. 12/743357) has been rejected due to prior art by Mathews and MacLeod. Update (Feb, 2013): Following this blog post Amir corrected two […]
One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters. It’s […]
The Pope is not just the supremo of the Catholic Church, he is also the head of state of the Vatican
The problem of scientists manipulating data in order to achieve statistical significance, labelled p-hacking is incredibly hard to track down due to the fact that the data behind statistical significance is often unavailable for analysis by anyone other than those who did the research and themselves analysed the data.
There is therefore no better way to support our troops than to hire them into the civilian workforce. But don’t just hire them because it seems like a good, patriotic thing to do.
These specially-made relief maps showed blind children were sensitive to the geo-distributive aspect of maps
Just before Rip Van Winkle falls into his thirty-year slumber, he encounters the ghostly spectacle of a handful of ancient Dutch colonials playing at ninepins, the thunder rolling across the […]
Last month I asked if Whistler’s Mother is the greatest Mother’s Day painting ever, so it only seems fair to pose a similar question on Father’s Day. Although Mother’s Day […]
Athletes may be paid millions, but implicit in the bargain is that ownership of their bodies is no longer entirely theirs.
In the car, I listen to country music. Country has an ideology. Not to say country has a position on abortion, exactly. But country music, taken as a whole, has […]