Tenzin Gyatso, who some call “Dalai Lama” and other funny names, has been awarded the 2012 Templeton Prize, as announced here, and if you look at the given justification, you could be excused for mistaking the Templeton Prize for a straight science award and Tenzin for a scientist. Tenzin has supposedly a

“long-standing engagement with multiple dimensions of science”

“Specifically, he encourages serious scientific investigative reviews of the power of compassion and its broad potential to address the world's fundamental problems”

Neil deGrasse Tyson shared “deeply cosmic” thoughts, whatever that is supposed to mean, and then “a fascinatingly disturbing thought” - watch it on liveleak.

There is a lot one can criticize* about his claims, however, he is missing something obvious that stands out like a sore thumb: Silicon!

We seem to not be able to “explain” certain aspects like the nature of time, and not for lack of trying. Especially: We cannot explain a single subjective feeling in ways that satisfy many – not subjective sounding of sound, not the redness of the color red, not why pain “really” hurts. In spite of all the science we threw at them, something unexplained seems left about how feeling feels. Do we simply commit another ‘regress-error’ here?

Regress Error versus Recursion

Why take something for free and feel cheap if you can pay half a grand and support quackery? Precisely! Hangovers from alcohol are almost entirely due to dehydration, read: too little water in your body. Although you drank a lot of water along with the spirit, the alcohol made your body dehydrate; no matter you didn’t even dance enough to break a sweat. Our bodies also do not like the alcohol metabolites, the main problem being acetaldehyde from the action of the liver enzyme alcohol-dehydrogenase, and then acetic acid. I wrote about these and why Asians should be especially careful with booze in “Alcohol in China and Enzyme Evolution”.

Matter annihilates antimatter, mostly resulting in light (no, not “pure energy”, whatever that is supposed to be). Matter and antimatter can also come into existence together via a process that is the reverse of annihilation. Yet our universe has almost no antimatter. How can such be if they come into existence in exactly equal amounts, each particle together with its antiparticle?

Trimethyl-Xanthine (spoken: Zanthine) is a bitter, white crystalline alkaloid. It is found in varying quantities in the seeds, leaves, and fruit of some plants, where it is naturally synthesized as a pesticide that paralyzes and kills certain insects feeding on the plants. Having evolved for no other reason than to kill a wide variety of animals, it should not come as a surprise that some of its effects on our human bodies are less than desirable.