FAQ | Register Now | Sign In

Subscribe to the newsletter

[x]

Stay in touch with the scientific world!

Placebo Buttons?

A recent article suggested that many of the buttons/toggles that we experience in our daily lives...

The Development Of Social Monogamy In Mammals

Two papers published this week have proposed explanations regarding the evolution of social monogamy...

Easy Answers To World Problems

After reading another article by Alex Berezow ["The Arrogance of a Well-Fed Society"] insisting...

The Precautionary Principle Review

There is an interesting series of articles published by the Guardian discussing various aspects...

Gerhard Adam

I'm not big on writing things about myself so a friend on this site (Brian Taylor) opted to put a few sentences together: Hopefully I'll be able to live up to his claims. "I thought perhaps you... Read More »

Spanking and IQ

Sep 25 2009 | comment(s)

Well, now we know that spanking results in lower IQs for children than those that aren't spanked. Of course, maybe once we figure out what IQ really means (if anything) this study might actually have some significance.

"But the 2- to 4-year-olds who were spanked scored 5 points lower on the IQ test than those not spanked. For children ages 5 to 9, the spanked ones scored on average 2.8 points lower than their unspanked counterparts.

The results, he said, were statistically significant."

The Rapture Industry

Sep 25 2009 | comment(s)

Well, it seems that someone has finally decided that with all this talk of "end-times" and the "rapture" it was important that we have a more scientific approach to determining how close we actually are to such events.

Hence we have the Rapture Index, which is billed as "The prophetic speedometer of end-time activity". By going to this site, you can quickly see what the Rapture Index value is and determine whether to sit down with a cup of coffee and await the end, or whether you still need to go to work.

Reversibility Of Evolutionary Processes

Sep 24 2009 | comment(s)

An article in LiveScience entitled "Evolution Can't Go Backward" has highlighted an experiment done to determine whether a protein could be "unmutated" (i.e. returned to its original state) and regain its ancestral functions.

The results indicated that this reversibility wasn't possible because of other mutational factors that occurred during the entire time interval rendering a return to a primordial form impossible¹.

This does raise an interesting question and suggests some possible misunderstandings about what this actually means.

Health Care Costs: Apparently It's Our Fault.

Sep 22 2009 | comment(s)

A recent LiveScience article argues that part of the problem in health care costs is the poor dietary and health habits those in the U.S. have.

"Americans get sick more. Why? Some argue that rather than an effective healthcare system, the United States has a "disease care" system, whereby far too many people are sedentary and eat poorly, leading to obesity and other health issues (obesity, in turn, raises the risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, and other diseases). Add smoking into the mix — the elimination of it would cause U.S. life expectancy to rise significantly."

Robots And Ethics

Sep 17 2009 | comment(s)

An article entitled "Can Robots Make Ethical Decisions" was recently published wherein the authors claim that they have successfully modeled difficult moral problems in computer logic, further asserting that morality is no longer solely within the realm of philosphers.

But is this true?

In the first place the "moral problems" selected are uncharacteristically binary in their approach and while they may represent a kind of moral dilemma, aren't particularly difficult to assess. More importantly, the central question of ethics is precisely that it isn't subject to a simple algorithm to determine the appropriateness of any particular action.

Teen Pregnancy and Religion