In 1998, a neuroscientist, Christof Koch, and a philosopher, David Chalmers, made a bet over whether science would, by 2023, have explained how consciousness comes into being. Twenty-five years on,…

Most of the world relies on a 113-year-old chemical reaction used every day. It is the Haber (or Haber-Bosch) process and while its contribution to energy usage and emissions is negligible…

After spending thousands of years converging on the perfect beers, this century culture went crazy and overdid hops, tinkered with grains, and generally made niche beers at high cost. Yet there is no…

What are gravitational waves? What are Pulsars and what does it mean to time a pulsar? How does this relate to past and future observations of gravitational waves? These are all fundamental questions…

If are in the humanities and want to win a case of wine in the future, bet against someone in the information theory space. Neither of you can ever really be correct but the one with at least the…

If are in the humanities and want to win a case of wine in the future, bet against someone in the information theory space. Neither of you can ever really be correct but the one with at least the…

The UK Daily Mail published a story with the misleading headline “Humans DID live with dinosaurs…” The story then talks about placental mammals that coexisted with dinosaurs. This shows a lack of…

Even tech experts have been astonished by the recent, rapid growth of AI technology, able to hold human-like conversations in multiple languages, create music and pass medical exams. While the…

Nearly 3 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, and for half that time they were butchering each other - a…

If you believed Monsanto controlled 500,000 biologists who accepted GMOs and weedkillers worldwide while Whole Foods, with more revenue, was standing alone selling organic food that made you…

The brain and the digestive tract are in constant communication, relaying signals that help to control feeding, and the implication that this communication network may also influence our mental state…

Blitz games on the internet are a lot of fun, if you love chess as I do. Perhaps a good share of the fun is due to the complete chaos that may arise, when you have few seconds left on the clock and…

A crippling flaw in much epidemiology is that it takes survey results as truthful and then seeks to correlate that to some benefit or harm. It's why epidemiologists said butter was bad and trans fats…

A colloquium with a former thesis intern yesterday brought me to ponder again over the important question of determining whether a student should choose an experimental or rather a theoretical…

Most if not all deep submergence vehicles that take people to the deepest parts of the ocean have a spherical pressure hull, not a cylinder. There is a simple reason for this: symmetry. The spherical…

Stars die in lots of ways. Most low-mass stars like our Sun shed their outer layers and eventually fade to white dwarf stars. Larger ones prefer to burn out rather than fade away so they go…

In the 1990s, utility regulations promised to do for electricity what it had done for airline travel and telephone calls - reduce costs by 90 percent for consumers. California instead did what…

While modern weedkillers are great about using fewer chemicals and therefore less runoff into streams, the organic manufacturing process uses older, less effective compounds and that means on a…

There has been a lot of talk recently of Betelgeuse possibly going supernova this century or not long after.  The basis of this is a paper referenced in this article: Betelgeuse is almost 50%…

One way to keep a healthy genetic population is a diverse enough group that there can be a random exchange of material. If that is a big factor, then geographically isolated giraffes on…