“Various efforts are underway to find a cheap, efficient and scalable way to recycle the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide back into the hydrocarbons that fuel civilization.”
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Every so often a meme comes along that reaffirms the positive potential of the Internet. Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better Project” is one such example. “When a 13 year-old kills […]
Researchers have found that most migrating birds and other animals are just “following the leader”, which has serious ramifications as their habitats become more fragmented.
Tourists are creeping ever closer to the Eyjafjallajokull-Fimmvörduháls (at their own peril) and rumors of an eruption at Taal in the Philippines prove to be false.
111 years ago, San Francisco was almost wiped off the map
“A new study suggests that prayer can indeed guide people away from adulterous behavior.” The Economist explains that it is God who most effectively reproaches infidelity.
This week’s On the MediaspotlightsRushmore Drive, the new search engine marketed to African Americans (audio above). As the program describes, the search engine uses a unique algorithm to find those […]
Bird flu is suddenly back in the news as officials in Indonesia report new cases this week. In a spring 2006 Skeptical Inquirer Online column, after evaluating trends in reporting […]
n The German language describes the difference between two main types of federal states aptly and concisely as being between a Bundesstaat (1) and a Staatenbund (2). The European Union, […]
The calls of this bird vary regionally, as do the names people give them
News bits from Chaiten, Soufriere Hills, Shiveluch and Alaska legislators wondering if airlines should pay for ash monitoring.
“The search for artificial intelligence modelled on human brains has been a dismal failure. AI based on ant behaviour, though, is having some success.” Now engineers study ant collectives.
“Aboriginal Creation myths tell of the legendary totemic beings who had wandered over [Australia] in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path — birds, animals, […]
Over at the “ideas site” World Changing, David Zaks offers up an interview with the NY Times’ Andrew Revkin. As I’ve written on this blog before, Revkin is one of […]
Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai volcano has been putting on quite a show for people lucky (or unlucky) enough to be close enough to see it.
Tolkien himself wrote that “as for the shape of the world of the Third Age, I am afraid that was devised ‘dramatically’, rather than geologically, or paleontologically.”
Basketball games, elections and other head-to-head contests seem to affect the testosterone of people who care about them. Some studies have found that testosterone production goes down in fans of […]
Released just yesterday, Physics of the Future is my most ambitious book to date. Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the […]
Gore’s Live Earth concert series was supposed to catalyze American public attention around the problem of global warming, but did it? Polling data is not yet available regarding the concert’s […]
Birds do it. Bees do it. But primate species don’t sing and dance, except for Homo sapiens. Why is music-making part of human nature, then? Why do we enjoy singing […]
When I was in graduate school at Cornell, David Kirby was a course mate while he was working on a post-doc in science studies. Kirby was re-training from his former […]
Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s research looks at how language exists in our minds, and how it informs the way we create social relationships.
“Scientists have questioned the assumption that a lack of exercise causes fatness in children.
The study suggests that physical inactivity appears to be the result of fatness, instead of its cause.”
Part One of Two I often receive e-mails from my fans who state that my ability to popularize science and technology is reminiscent of the late Carl Sagan; This got […]
Charlie Riedel of the Associated Press deserves a Pulitzer Prize for his photos of the oil-slicked pelicans of the Louisiana coast. It would be an unconventional choice. Human subjects have […]
Mass shootings are mercifully rare in Britain. “Gunman goes on killing spree” is a newspaper headline that one might expect to read every ten years or so. But none of […]
The International Journal of Sustainability Communication is an important new open-access outlet for research and practitioner essays on environmental communication. In the latest issue, communication strategist Tom Bowman suggests that […]
Growing up, I always found the few Black faces in superhero comic books fascinating, like rare birds. Luke Cage, aka, Power Man, bristled with attitude like Shaft on steroids. Black […]
These maps can open the doors to some very dark powers
This has been the “Summer of the Spill.” Since the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion on April 20, 2010, the epic BP oil spill has oozed into imaginations trying to […]