2012 being a leap year, today is the extra day. Some of us are aware of the rule that says that we add a leap day for years that are divisible by 4 but not if it is divisible by 100 unless that year is also divisible by 400.
The reason for these complicated leap day rules is [Read more…]
Most scientists know how to fight for acceptance of their ideas within the community of scientists. The rules of the game are fairly well understood. But when it comes to politically charged issues, they tend to be at a loss because they work as individuals and hence do not know how to respond to massive organized attacks, of the kind that they have been under from climate change deniers. The attacks have ranged from explicit and [Read more…]
If there is one thing that people can agree on as a universal good in education, it is that we should seek to increase the critical thinking abilities in people. Actually, that is not quite true. During the days when the debate over intelligent design was raging in Ohio in 2003, one letter to the editor by an ID advocate dismissed [Read more…]
With the exploratory glamor being hogged by the space program, it is good to remind ourselves of the vast unexplored regions of the Earth.
Here is a nice graphic that shows what happens as we go down deep into the ocean. Of course, we don’t really know for sure since going deep is a formidable challenge. The deep ocean is largely an unexplored frontier. [Read more…]
Radiation has a very bad reputation. There is something about it that scares the daylights out of people. This is understandable since the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced graphic images of the devastation that radiation could cause. The Cold War generated additional fears of radiation silently killing off large numbers of people. Even today, one sees the fears generated by the phrase ‘dirty bombs’ that kill by nuclear radiation. [Read more…]
I am one of those people who can fall asleep almost anywhere at almost any time, even on planes. But in addition to such naps, I also value getting a good continuous night’s rest, which is usually conceived of as about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
So I was surprised by this report of a study that said [Read more…]
Russian scientists have managed to grow a plant from 32,000 year old seeds that had been buried by an Ice-Age squirrel. (Who knew that the Ice Age animated films were documentaries?) The previous record for such an achievement was a mere 2,000 years. [Read more…]
The two posts on changing the seasons (here and here) resulted in a lot of interesting information in the comments and it seems like there is quite a geographical variation in how the seasons are demarcated, with the US possibly being an outlier in using the solstices.
Reader ahcuah is a kindred soul and has kindly sent me the data he collected over a full year of the daytime high and low temperatures. He lives fairly close to Cleveland and [Read more…]
If an object like a thrown ball or a car is heading towards us, we know that we can react and take effective avoidance strategies very quickly. How do the neurons in our brains manage to work so fast to determine the trajectory and decide what is the best avoidance strategy? It is clearly automatic and not done by our conscious brains.
A recent study, the conclusions of which are summarized [Read more…]
The news that some neutrinos may travel faster than the speed of light caused a sensation when it broke in September of last year.
Like many physicists who have lived through similar reports in the past, my reaction was one of skepticism, both of the claim and [Read more…]