This month celebrates the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s publication of the paper laying out what we now refer to as the General Theory of Relativity. Steven Strogatz describes two pivotal moments that Einstein says influenced his way of thinking.
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According to NASA, October was the hottest month of record. But what is more, it surpassed the baseline temperature NASA uses that is based on the 30-year average period from 1951-1980 by more than a whopping one degree Celsius. Such a huge jump has never happened before.
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Carly Fiorina’s lies during a debate about a video she had seen that she claimed showed officials of Planned Parenthood callously discussing harvesting aborted infants for fetal tissue research has given that topic a lot of adverse publicity. But this article by Carina Storrs explains what fetal tissue research actually involves and the enormous benefits that it has provided in finding treatment for polio, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases.
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One of the self-driving cars being tested by Google was pulled over by a police officer for driving too slow, 25 mph in a 35 mph zone. I had not been aware that driving below the speed limit was a primary offense but apparently it is if you are causing a traffic backup behind you. Or maybe not, because the news report is a bit confused about whether it is an offense or not.
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Whenever there is a mass shooting of random people, as occurs all too frequently in the US, people immediately seize on the issue of the mental health of the gunman (it is almost always a man). Some use it purely opportunistically, in order to deflect attention away from the easy accessibility of guns in the US that enables individual to obtain an arsenal of lethal weaponry with far less effort and time than it takes to get (say) a driver’s license.
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It looks like we are getting really close to the global eradication of polio. The last countries where it had not been eliminated were Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan but Nigeria has had no new cases of polio for the last year so the African continent seems to be now clear. The remaining cases are in a region of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border but even there only 51 cases have been reported this year and health officials are cautiously optimistic that they can get that area clear too. But until we are sure it is completely eradicated, people all over the world will have to continue to be vaccinated against it.
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Food writer Michael Pollan says that when you look at time-lapse photography of plants as they grow so that you can see them move as they grow, it looks eerily like they are acting with a sense of volition, although of course they do not have a central nervous system.
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Some of the people who are determined to believe that there is a link between childhood vaccinations and autism have rejected all the scientific findings so far that have shown no link, suggesting that there is a collusion between scientists and the pharmaceutical industry to hide the truth. In order to bolster their case, some of them who belong to a group known as SafeMinds commissioned a study to find just such a link. The researchers have come back with their conclusion that they could not find any such connection.
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The gas helium is invaluable for scientific research and is used in its liquid form for, among other things, reaching temperatures close to absolute zero. It is also, next to hydrogen, the most abundant material in the universe. That is well known. What is less well known is that our own supply of helium comes from underground gas traps as a byproduct of natural gas exploration. Thus the world’s supply is limited which means that we should not be wasting it on party balloons and the other frivolities.
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Somehow or other, I have got on the mailing list for WebMD, the medical information site that is often the first one that is returned by search engines when you look for information on anything health related. I get emails from them regularly and on the surface, it has all the signs of being a reliable objective source of authoritative health-related information.
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