Scientists have created a computer simulation that produces a realistic picture of the evolution of the universe, starting from just after the Big Bang to the present, compressing the 13.7 billion years into just over two minutes.
[Read more…]
Modern scholarly techniques are used to detect which ancient documents are genuine and which are forgeries. In 2012 there reports of the discovery of a piece of papyrus that seemed to suggest that Jesus had been married. The document had been given by an anonymous person to a Harvard scholar who proclaimed it to be genuine. Needless to say, this caused a huge fuss and scholars pored over it and the weight of their opinions went from genuine to forgery, back to genuine, and now back to forgery again.
[Read more…]
When boarding airplanes, different airlines have different policies. The most common policy adopted by airlines is to board passengers by seat rows starting from the back. This makes a kind of intuitive sense. A few airlines have some kind of zone system. About three years ago, a physicist studied the issue using Monte Carlo simulations came up with a plan that can cut boarding times by half.
[Read more…]
The study of the origins of altruism is quite fascinating. There is increasing evidence that our cooperative, helpful, and altruistic behaviors have an innate component that we add to by acculturation. Felix Warneken has done some experiments on the origins of altruism and helpfulness and the results are quite remarkable.
[Read more…]
CNN must be dreading to watch The Daily Show because, next to Fox News, Jon Stewart seems to enjoy taking shots at them for their descent into mindless coverage of non-news. It seems like he expects them to be better than they are while he has no hope for Fox.
[Read more…]
Science and religion share a long history of controversy and even hostility. Mathematics and religion, not so much. There could be many reasons for this, the primary one being that there is some similarity in the way that both mathematics and theology operate. Both seek to create self-contained systems based on axioms that are assumed to be true. In the case of mathematics, the axioms depend upon the field of mathematics being studied while in the case of theology, the fundamental axiom is that ‘god exists’.
[Read more…]
Animal intelligence is a fascinating topic and there have been many attempts at studying it. Many of the individual studies look at one or other specific trait that we associate with intelligence in one species and the traits studied can differ from species to species, making general conclusions hard to arrive at. Ed Yong reports on a massive multinational study that looked across many species at one aspect of intelligence (self control) as demonstrated by two specific tasks. (You can read the paper on which his article is based here.)
[Read more…]
In the Superman folklore, he turns a lump of coal into a diamond by compressing it in his fist, cementing the idea in popular culture that diamonds are compressed coal. But in reality, while both diamonds and coal are both made of carbon, they are formed differently and at different locations underground. Coal and other fossil fuels are formed in the Earth’s crust (see the comments to an earlier post for some excellent information from readers about how fossil fuels form) but diamonds are created at much greater depths within the Earth’s mantle.
[Read more…]
Another day, another depressing report about the level of ignorance of basic science in America. This one is based on a representative sample of 1,012 people over the age of 18. You can see the full survey results here, and the first set of items is the one that made the news.
[Read more…]
The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in a closed system the entropy will either stay the same (for reversible processes) or increase over time (for irreversible processes). The entropy of a closed system can never decrease, except for short-lived random fluctuations. But an open system that can interact with its environment can have its entropy decrease.
[Read more…]