Developments in robotics that mimic living things are quite amazing. Here’s one robot designed to look and work like a pack mule that can go over rough terrain. [Read more…]

The practice of snake handling as a test of faith is popular in certain rural Pentecostal churches in the US. There is even a TV series called Snake Salvation about this practice on the National Geographic channel. It is highly dangerous to handle poisonous snakes and this has resulted in some of the people being fatally bitten. [Read more…]

The Mythbusters look at how hard it is to separate two phone books whose pages have been interwoven together so that it is just paper-on-paper friction that binds them.

Jonathan Turley has an interesting story of someone who was caught urinating into an open reservoir that served as the source for a city’s drinking water supply. While authorities are looking into whether the man should be prosecuted, the more interesting fact is that the city decided to dump all the stored water, nearly 8 million gallons of it, as a result. [Read more…]

Malcolm Gladwell has made a good career out of taking a few research findings, buttressing them with a few stories from here and there, and creating sweeping, plausible, and appealingly counter-intuitive theories about human behavior, while ignoring anything that disagrees with his thesis. As someone once said, the facts agree with Gladwell’s theories except when they don’t but you’ll have to find those on your own. [Read more…]

Spiritualists used to be quite the rage back in Charles Darwin’s day and even he was persuaded to attend a séance with one of the leading practitioners of his time. He was not impressed with the obvious theatricality and trickery involved in producing the noises and movement, but many people were duped into thinking that spirits existed. [Read more…]

Last evening I watched the PBS Frontline program League of Denial that I wrote about yesterday. (You can watch the program here.) It showed how playing football can cause traumatic brain injury that can occur from the normal give and take of playing football, even without any concussions. Autopsies of players as young as 18 have shown them having a particular form of brain damage called chronic trauma encephalopathy (CTE). [Read more…]

The PBS Frontline program League of Denial says that traumatic brain injury can occur even from the normal give and take of playing football, even without any concussions. You can watch the program here. [Read more…]

As expected, this year’s Nobel prize in physics, announced today, was awarded for the discovery of the Higgs boson. The prize was awarded to two people, Francois Englert and Peter Higgs. As I said in one of my series of posts on the Higgs boson, the award of the prize was bound to raise hackles because five theorists had some claim to the discovery (there were six but Robert Brout died in 2011), as well the experimental groups that found the particle last year, not to mention CERN, the laboratory where the experiment was done. [Read more…]