One of the features of evolution is that once we have passed the age when we can have and raise children to a point where they can survive on their own and go on to have children, we have played our part in the process and have become redundant, evolutionarily speaking. Although our own bodies start to decay, this has no biological effect on our children. [Read more…]

Anyone who has a dog as a pet knows to avoid getting close to them when they are wet because they have a remarkable ability to shake themselves in such a way that the water flies off and drenches everything nearby. The interesting questions are why they do that and how they do that. [Read more…]

Where does our sense of justice, fair play, and morality come from? Is it acquired as a part of our culture or are the basic instincts innate? [Read more…]

My post on infinities and the accompanying video generated some interesting discussions and illustrated the difficulties that people have the idea of ‘operational definitions’ in science and mathematics. While scientists and mathematicians, like everyone else, use everyday language to communicate with one another, they are well aware that language contains traps in the form of implicit meanings and hidden concepts that can lead to ambiguities and even paradoxes in unfamiliar situations. These arise because our intuitive concepts are developed from our experience with the everyday world and while they may work well there, problems can arise when they are extended to regions beyond our immediate experience. [Read more…]

There is a problem in the current science climate which seems to reward original and exciting new research more and seems to value whether the results are true less. I have written before about the problem of journals publishing papers where the results don’t hold up under subsequent examination and how difficult it is to get them to publish articles that contradict earlier ones. [Read more…]

Someone has done an excellent job of splicing together the animation of the landing of the Mars Curiosity rover with the actual real-time narration of the event from NASA, the latter done in the familiar mission control voice with the deadpan, emotionless style we’ve come to expect from them, and set it all to background music. [Read more…]

The concept of infinity is hard to grasp because it is an abstraction. There are no tangible objects in our lives that are truly infinite in number so we really have nothing to compare it to. The only way to get an infinite number of anything is by invoking infinity elsewhere, which doesn’t really clarify matters much. [Read more…]

Why does sprinkling a little water enable sand to stick together sufficiently to enable the building of sandcastles? The cohesive forces produced are strong enough that one can build a tower that is 2.5 meters high on a mere 20 cm base. A group of scientists have looked into this and come up with an explanation. [Read more…]

From all early reports, it seems like the Mars Curiosity landing went off perfectly. So many things could have gone wrong, and almost any one of them could have resulted in disaster. [Read more…]