In a talk at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Frisco, archaeologist Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University in New York described the discovery of numerous tools at the site of Lomekwi 3, just west of Lake Turkana in Kenya, about 1000 kilometers from Olduvai Gorge. In 2011 they spotted what Harmand called unmistakable stone tools on the surface of the sandy landscape and...
read moreTo modern cultural sensibilities, "Victorian" means 'repressed' because it seemed overly formal to people that want to wear flip-flops into the office, yet they clearly got some things right.(1)The name derives from the reign of Queen Victoria in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century, a time when England ruled the western world culturally and every region militarily. The...
read moreHaving once lived in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, on occasion I would drive to those old gigantic relics of steel mills.They were behemoths and so were the buildings that housed them. They looked like they could block out the sun. In John Ford's "The Quiet Man", a native of Ireland asked John Wayne's character what they feed men in Pittsburgh that makes them so big and Wayne replied, "Steel,...
read moreIs there still bias in academic science? There is definitely unequal representation in some areas. The social sciences, for example, is 70 percent women while physics is 70 percent men, but there is no evidence that either gender is being blocked out.Instead, there is second order sociological claims of stereotype threat, with the NSF funding games like Gender Bias Bingo, but there is little...
read moreOrganic food is a gigantic profitable Big Ag enterprise ensconced in a health halo that glows so brightly the bulk of consumers believe it not only has no pesticides but actually contains no chemicals of any kind.My concern about the science literacy of Whole Foods shoppers aside, from a purely practical point of view, if I were a farmer and walked into a store and saw berries for $8 a pack and...
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