If you have watched the strange, sad decline of psychology over the last decade, you may have started to wonder if any conclusions are legitimate. With evolutionary psychology claiming voting Republican is an adaptive function and social psychologists claiming people can predict the future, there is a lot of woo getting published.While scientists are sort of gracious about it - psychology...
read moreMeg Urry was on the senior scientific staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. That's no surprise to people outside the government-funded research world, women have been doing quality science work forever - heck, Marie Curie got two Nobel prizes and she was living in France at the beginning of the 20th century, you don't get more...
read moreWe're all going to die eventually, the overall mortality rate is still at 100%, but there are ways to postpone it. Coffee may be one of those ways.A large study (nearly 500,000 older adults) found a clear trend after 12 years: as coffee drinking increased, the risk of death decreased.
read moreThere are once-in-a-lifetime events and once-in-a-century ones as well. The meteor that exploded over the Chelyabinsk region in Russia was that second one; it has been confirmed as the largest such explosion in the last hundred years.The new estimates of its size make it the largest reported meteor since the one that hit Tunguska, Siberia in 1908. Researchers say it was about 55 feet in...
read moreProf. Emlyn Hughes of Columbia University believes that in order to understand quantum mechanics, you have to get rid of everything you know - 'strip to your raw'. So he did just that, he got naked and against a backdrop of 9/11 and Nazi Holocaust images, he remained in a fetal position as two people dressed as ninjas blindfolded stuffed animals.Then one of the ninjas impaled one of the...
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