How would you do homework at night if you don't have electricity? As much as one fifth of the world may not have regular access to electricity but 16-year-old Ann Makosinski of Victoria, Canada may have helped solve part of the problem; she created a flashlight that is powered solely from hand heat.
read morePerl or Python? It used to be that you could learn as much about a computer programmer asking that question about scripting languages preferences as I could learn by asking a racing fan if they liked Jeff Gordon or Jimmie Johnson.Not any more. Perl, which was regarded as really good for 'non-programmers' has lost a lot of ground, while Python is still popular. Python, which had once been...
read moreHuman exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) has recently been linked to negative health claims, like a decline in reproductive function in adults and stunted neurodevelopment in children, and so people consumed with the 'natural' fallacy have been up in arms about it. It hasn't quite become 'BPA causes autism' hysteria, like they did with vaccines, but it is getting close. Naturally,...
read moreDo you think pharmaceutical companies are creating problems that don't exist in order to keep selling drugs to an increasingly over-medicated population? Do you think scientists are unethical if they work at a corporation like DuPont or in nuclear science, rather than being funded by the government? Such beliefs have become so increasingly mainstream among a particular political and cultural...
read moreWhen I was a young guy, there were predictions of doom based on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Weirdly, it is still discussed in media reports every single day, even though it doesn't tell us anything at all about peoples' lives.Do most Americans feel like the economy is doing well, even though the DJIA has gone up a lot? The president certainly claims the economy is better now than when...
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