I am not a fan of practical jokes. They are often cruel rather than amusing and it is not fun when one person is the victim and is being laughed at by others. Sometimes they can be excused because they cause just minor embarrassment but this too is dangerous because what can seem like something minor to the perpetrators can be traumatic for the victim. [Read more…]

Two dogs explain the different types of chemical bonds that form between elements.

My one suggestion for improvement is that the partner to a ‘cation’ should be a ‘dogion’ instead of the traditional ‘anion’.

(Via Maggie Koerth-Baker.)

Even though we were on the fringes of Hurricane Sandy, a massive pine tree in our backyard toppled over during the night, even though there was not much wind. We did not even hear it falling, suggesting that it fell over slowly rather than come crashing down, presumably because the cause was the soil being weakened by steady, but not heavy, rain rather than high wind. Fortunately it missed our house and garage and the neighbor’s house and garage and the main damage it caused was to the fence separating our two properties and to a smaller tree that was in its path. [Read more…]

My post about how to distinguish real science from fake science generated some interesting comments, especially over my assertion that we have not as yet been able to come up with an unambiguous way to distinguish science from non-science, and it prompted me to post a follow-up to try and clarify it. [Read more…]

One of the remarkable things about science is that it works. It produces results that are repeatable, testable, and useful. So what is it about this enterprise that we call science that makes it so successful? Philosophers and historians of science have struggled for over a century to answer this question and the related question of how to distinguish science from non-science (the well-known ‘demarcation problem’), and have basically come up empty. [Read more…]

The story of our ancestors never ceases to be fascinating to me.

(This clip appeared on November 15, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)

You do not have to go to exotic places like Charles Darwin did to find evidence for evolution. In an article titled Evolution right under our noses, Carl Zimmer says that Manhattan and its surrounding areas are rich in examples, such as mice responding to urban stress, fish in the Hudson river responding to pollution by becoming resistant to PCBs, worms becoming resistant to cadmium, and so on. [Read more…]

Some years ago, I attended a seminar at our university on the ethics of genetic engineering. The panel of experts spoke about the new ability to modify the genes of people with genetic disorders in order to remove the cause of their ailments. Even when they successfully cured the child of an inherited disease, the treatment did not prevent the child from passing on the defective gene to their offspring. [Read more…]

I have been hammering away at cases of cheating in science, trying to make them more widely known. I feel that this is a really important issue for a crucial reason. [Read more…]