By ‘habitable’ I mean planets that are neither too cold nor too hot but occupy a sweet spot that would be conducive to life as we know it existing. By combining actual data, from the Kepler space observatory launched by NASA in 2009 to look for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, with statistical analysis, scientists have come up with an estimate of 15-30 billion habitable planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. That seems like a lot, even if that number is tiny compared to the estimated 10¹¹ stars in the galaxy. [Read more…]

That excellent independent investigative journalistic outfit ProPublica has been running a series of articles about the dangers posed by people not knowing what harm Tylenol and other acetaminophen-based drugs can do to them if they are not careful about its use, and says that the FDA hasn’t acted quickly enough to alert people to the dangers and the need to be really careful about dosages. [Read more…]

Periodically one encounters the question of whether this or that topic or discipline is a science or not a science. This is a venerable problem that even has its own name (the demarcation problem) that I have written about extensively in the past (see my 2011 series of posts on the Logic of Science) and the consensus has been that it is impossible to specify both necessary and sufficient conditions that are necessary to do so. In most cases this inability to construct a strict demarcation rule does not really matter in any tangible way. After all, what does it matter what label you give something? But unfortunately it is the case that being considered ‘scientific’ adds a certain authority to statements, which is why people invoke it so frequently. [Read more…]

In Newtonian physics, mass is an invariant, by which I mean that any observer would measure the same value for the mass of an object, irrespective of how fast the observer was moving. Also, the relationship between momentum (p) and mass (m) was given by momentum equals mass times velocity (v). i.e., p=mv. [Read more…]

With all the stories about the NSA spying on the communications of people all over the world, we may have an exaggerated sense of the NSA’s code-breaking capabilities. Matthew Green, the cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was temporarily censored, explains that there are three ways to get past encryption. [Read more…]

Religion thrives on mysteries, those things that seem so inexplicable that we do not know how to even begin investigating them, what questions to ask, and what tools to use to study them. We are tempted to just throw up our hands. Puzzles, on the other hand, are those things for which we do not as yet have answers but do know what questions to ask, have hypotheses about what might be going on, and can investigate systematically. [Read more…]

In setting standards for their science curricula, state and local boards of education invariably have to deal with the question of the nature of science because having students understand it is usually one of the mandates given to the drafting committees. This becomes especially necessary in order to know how to best respond when efforts are made to insert religious ideas into the science curriculum or to undermine those scientific ideas (like evolution) that are viewed by religious people as being opposed to religion. [Read more…]

The ‘Cambrian explosion’ is the name given to the geologically short time period of about 20 million years that occurred around 500 million years ago in which there seemed to be a surge of new kinds of organisms that appeared in the fossil record. Critics of evolutionary theory, always on the look out for what they see as possible signs of divine intervention, seized on it as something that seemed unlikely to have happened due to the slow processes of natural selection and thus a signal that god may have intervened to speed things up a bit. [Read more…]

One of the most famous experiments in psychology is that of Stanley Milgram who in 1962 purported to show how a surprisingly high percentage (65%) of ordinary people could be persuaded by authority figures to inflict extremely high levels of pain on others, well beyond what one might expect normal people to do. I wrote about this back in 2008. [Read more…]