In addition to studying questions like what causes diseases and what is the origin or life and the universe, science also on occasion investigates important questions like why is it that the cord of your earphones get tangled up if you lay them down for even a second? It is easy to dismiss this as just one’s imagination but physicists find that this is a real effect and that the spontaneous formation of knots has an explanation.
[Read more…]
The trouble with research in the medical sciences is that much initial work is based on correlations and it is often hard to pin down definitively the causal relations between them. This can lead to health recommendations that later get nullified or even reversed when some hitherto unsuspected third factor is discovered to play a role in creating the correlation. This problem is especially prevalent when it comes to preventive health treatments designed to head off some future problem, where reversals of recommendations can happen frequently. This can be very disconcerting for health-conscious people who may well feel confused by the conflicting advice.
[Read more…]
Most people have likely heard of Google Glass, a device that looks like a pair of glasses that apparently enables the wearer to be connected to the internet all the time. It also allows them to record what is going on around them but because the glasses are unobtrusive, the people in their vicinity may not know they are being recorded and this has apparently led to angry confrontations with those who feel their privacy is being invaded.
[Read more…]
New research suggests domesticated camels arrived in the region now known as Israel between 930 and 900 BCE. What interested me about this result were two things: how the researchers narrowed the range of dates to just 30 years and the implications of this finding for people who treat the Bible as history book.
[Read more…]
I don’t recall much of my high school chemistry classes back in Sri Lanka. Our teacher was a nice old man who enjoyed telling us the history of chemistry and stories about the chemists of long ago rather than about modern chemistry. But he was a believer in experimentation and demonstrations and one that I remember was when he would cut a small piece of solid sodium and drop it into a beaker. It was fun to see the piece foaming and rushing around the container.
[Read more…]
There is a new food product that supposedly provides you with all the necessary nutrition in liquid form so that you don’t have to waste time shopping for food, cooking, cleaning etc. In a move that I must admit is marketing genius, the 25-year old inventor and CEO of the company has called its product Soylent, which was certain to attract attention from those who recall the classic 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green, even if the implications from that film are disturbing.
[Read more…]
This news report details a case study of how one unvaccinated two-year old triggered a measles outbreak that sickened 19 children and two adults in Minnesota.
[Read more…]
Recently we have had some studies showing the remarkable intelligence of crows as problem solvers and their ability to use tools. Given this information, it was thought that they would also be good at inferring causal relationships. But as often happens, we find that intelligence is not a simple thing and that success in one aspect of it does not necessarily transfer to other areas.
[Read more…]
Science depends on its practitioners behaving ethically. This is important for three reasons. One is because scientists depend upon each other’s work and fraud in one area can really mess up the work of those who use those results. Another is because science has acquired a hard-won credibility with the public that has to be preserved so that those who deny the scientific consensus on important questions like climate change and vaccinations are not given ammunition to claim that science cannot be trusted. And the third is because much of science depends on public funding and that can be threatened by misconduct.
[Read more…]