Many of you will have heard of the famous Stanford prison experiment in 1971 when Philip Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University, randomly assigned one group of students to be inmates and the other group to be guards who had total power over the prisoners for two weeks. The setting was a mock prison (actually the basement of a university building). But after six days the experiment had to be called off because, as claimed by Zimbardo, the ‘guards’ used such sadistic methods against the ‘inmates’ that the latter were on the verge of breakdowns. The experiment has been cited numerous times to warn of the dangers of giving people unchecked power over others and the need for prison reform.
[Read more…]

Jennifer Barfield, a professor of assisted reproductive technologies at Colorado State University, clearly explains how it can come about and what led to the development of the technology that has made it possible. The key point is that in addition to the DNA that comes from the father and the mother, the fertilized egg also contains mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that plays a vital role in producing energy.
[Read more…]

This video of a tornado touching down in Laramie, Wyoming last week is awe-inspiring. I had thought that tornados start in the clouds and then touch down on the ground but in this video at the 18-second mark you see that there is also a bottom-up element, a sliver that starts on the ground and joins to the larger part coming from the top. The tightness of the funnel cloud is indicative of the massive destructive power that it can unleash for anyone and anything that has the misfortune to lie in its narrow path.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a post about how the rate at which clocks run is affected by the strength of the gravitational field in which they are in. So a clock on the surface of the moon would run faster than an identical clock on the surface of the Earth because the gravitational field there is less than the field here.
[Read more…]

Questions like the above are inherently ambiguous and will not have an answer that satisfies everyone because of the difficulty of defining what we mean by the word ‘science’ even with the added qualifier ‘modern’. The latest issue of New Humanist has an interview with David Wootton, professor of history at the University of York and author of the book The Invention of Science, who takes a stab at it and argues that “it happened between 1572 (when astronomer Tycho Brahe saw a new star in the sky) and 1704 (when Isaac Newton drew conclusions about the nature of light, based on experiments).”
[Read more…]

I am of the age group where we encounter the phenomenon of people having Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia on a fairly regular basis, either because our parents or the parents of friends or even in rare cases with people closer to our age group who succumb to early onset forms of the disease. As a result, the conversations often assume the inevitability of our own serious cognitive decline. The attitude is that it is a question of ‘when’ not ‘if’, and various strategies are bandied about as ways of delaying it.
[Read more…]