With the hundredth anniversary of the maiden voyage, and subsequent sinking, of the RMS Titanic (covering April 14th-April 15th, 2012) fast approaching, you probably expect someone in the world of 2012 to implicate global warming.Donald Olson, a physics professor at Texas State University, has a more interesting idea. Along with fellow TSU member Russell Doescher and Roger Sinnott they...
read moreWith the tantalizing possibility of guaranteed, unlimited student loans the past 20 years, colleges have gotten silly about some of the options they offer - Columbia'a $90,000, two-year Environmental Journalism program comes to mind - but MIT at least has one that sounds cool: piracy.Unofficially, for at least 20 years any MIT student who completes courses in pistol, archery, sailing, and fencing...
read moreOne of our popular topics last year was earthquakes. That makes sense, with the earthquake in Japan. It's not like there was some greater instance of earthquakes but if you are a Doomsday fearmonger, any event is a good event; that means anti-science activists determined to send us back to the 13th century looked for ways to make earthquakes result from fracking.If you dispute that,...
read moreIn 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik, it began a new era in the Cold War. The Race to Space. Senator Lyndon Johnson worried the commies could rain nuclear bombs down on us from the high ground, making him the perfect guy to run NASA and because it was a military concern it got funded. Only later it became a human exploration issue and much later became a science one. read...
read moreDid you know there is a war on women? If so, it isn't just a few on the right, it seems. Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Bill Maher and others have been waging it for years with their misogynist outbursts, argues Kirsten Powers in the Daily Beast. There have even been boycotts by people on the left who are outraged that these guys still have jobs. Oh, wait, that last part never...
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