Halloween Horror Science: Are Chickens That Learn A Bigger Threat To Us Than AI?

The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) vegetarian advocacy group ...

Ignore Critics, Gen Z, We Weren't Smarter In 1984

It's commonplace for older generations to criticize the young. In my early career, an older fellow...

Taking The Book Of The Dead To Heart

In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed...

American CO2 Is Below War War II Levels But We Keep Emissions High In Poor Countries

In politics, one way to make your belief in alternative energy seem feasible is to make its competitors...

Hank Campbell

I founded Science 2.0® in 2006 and since then it has become the world's largest independent science communications site, with over 300,000,000 direct readers and reach approaching one billion. Read More »

Culture Vultures Pounce - Banning Betting Would Help The Economy, Says Professor

Sep 23 2008 | comment(s)

You've probably heard that saying, 'if your only tool is a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nail.' So it goes with culture too. People who have an agenda jump on every opportunity to advance it in every exploitative way - they are culture vultures. Obviously it's easy to be jaded because I live in California and California is home to cultural fundamentalists in a way that people in actual religious areas of the US can only dream about - because they aren't pushed off to the fringes, they have center stage. John W. Kindt is a University of Illinois professor in Business Administration and a fundamentalist about gambling in a way that would work well in California. I don't gamble, I am too good at math to think I am going to win when casinos hire people a lot better at it than me to make sure I don't, but I don't tell people they are too stupid to be good at it. Why? Because I don't have the fundamentalist mentality it takes to think everyone is too stupid to think for themselves.

Why We Love Evolutionary Psychology - People Assign Personalities To Cars, Says Study

Sep 22 2008 | comment(s)

Truls Thorstensen (EFS Consulting Vienna), Karl Grammer (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Urban Ethology) and other researchers at the University of Vienna say that people make lots of assumptions about sex, age, emotions, and intentions by looking at human faces - and we do it with cars as well.

They're not the first ones to come up with this idea; five year olds have been finding personalities in inanimate objects for thousands of years and my kid has been saying "Ka-chow!" ever since he saw Cars, but they are the first ones to tackle it in a systematic fashion.

How did they do it? They asked people to describe car grills anthropomorphically. Then they used geometric morphometrics to calculate the corresponding shape information, whatever that means. One-third of the respondents associated a human or animal face with over 90 percent of the cars and everyone noted eyes (headlights), a mouth (air intake/grill), and a nose in 50 percent of the cars. Yep, that means people think cars have a personality.

Why Do Democrats Want To Get Rid Of The NIH Public Access Policy?

Sep 17 2008 | comment(s)

Public access for studies paid for by taxpayer money seems like a no-brainer. There's no reason peer-reviewed journals should get to charge researchers (paid for again by taxpayers) and then have a copyright on the work. Last year the government approved a bill that would require government-funded (NIH) researchers to submit their studies to PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. It was a real win for open access advocates, many of whom wrote here about it.

Anglican Church Sends Darwin An Apology, Promotes Him On Their Website, In Honor Of His Bicentenary

Sep 14 2008 | comment(s)

The only thing I get tired of more than crazy people invoking Galileo as their defense against criticism of whatever bizarre science 'theory' they are foisting on the world are people on the other side who paint legitimate skeptics as 'Holocaust deniers' - in both cases the comparisons are done by people who have no knowledge at all about the analogy they are using. But sometimes the Galileo comparison is apt and no one got more religious criticism that turned out to be misplaced than Charles Darwin. The church in his native land thinks so as well, and some 150 years too late will concede that it was tough on Chuck.

I am betting the LHC will not destroy the Earth - any takers?

Sep 09 2008 | comment(s)

Yes, I am putting my money where my brain is. The LHC is big news ... for about 24 more hours. Heck, watching The Today Show this morning, even Matt Lauer said he was going to Google Dr. Otto Rössler - and it sure means something when they can get my kid to ask if a black hole is really going to consume the Earth on my birthday and why she should have to do her homework if Strangelets are the only things that will see it anyway. I can't argue with that. I am not sure why I even bothered to write this blog. Except ... except ...

A 'Missing Link' In Space? Maybe Not, But A Backward-Orbiting Object May Provide A New Origin For Comets Anyway

Sep 06 2008 | comment(s)

When scientific terms become part of the cultural fabric they often lose their meaning. Biology has had its share of modern misunderstandings with 'evolution' becoming colloquial rather than scientific, along with the general term 'theory', which today is used by anyone with a crackpot notion about particle physics, math or the end of the world due to a tunnel in Switzerland.

So it goes. That's why today we have advertising claims like 'the next evolution in cars' and then press releases about the 'missing link' in comets.

Hey, we don't shape the culture, we just try to cut through it. So this time we will talk about the 'missing link' between an Oort cloud and Halley's comet and discuss the 'evolution' of these mysterious space bodies, which will make biologists here irritated. Later on we can use terms like 'genesis' and 'creation' in their place so religious folks can feel slighted also.

Why mention all that? Well, we run out of science terms to use when there is no previous explanation for an object, so we have to fall back on cultural ones in order to convey why something is important. In this instance, a team of scientists has found an unusual object whose backward and tilted orbit around the Sun is just baffling enough that it may tell us about the origins of some comets.

You heard me. Researchers from the Canada-France Ecliptic Plane Survey project have discovered an object that orbits around the Sun -- backwards. And it is tilted at an angle of 104 degrees, almost perpendicular to the orbits of the planets. Take a look: