When you think of underwater photography, you probably think of the clear ocean waters of the Bahamas or other exotic tropical locales - certainly that's where I would go.Andrej Belic has other ideas. The whole site is done in Flash so it's impossible to navigate but this is a guy who does things the hard way and, like the pictures he takes, the effort is worth it.
It was many years ago we pointed out some real flaws in the 'skeptic' movement - first is that it is mostly about ridiculing religion and Bigfoot and if those are the only things you can be skeptical about, you aren't really skeptics, you're just a front for militant atheists who want to cover their cultural agenda with a veneer of science. The second issue is that, for being progressives who coo about tolerance and diversity, women sure are not in it.
Under 5 launches per year instead of the 65 launches per year NASA projected. $450 million per shuttle launch instead of $50 million NASA projected. A risk of catastrophic failure of 1 in 100 instead of the 1 in 100,000 NASA projected and an actual failure rate of 2 out of 135.
The space shuttle era is over and it was an unquestioned failure. Finally, with its passing, at least a few science writers have stopped being science cheerleaders and are echoing what I have said for a decade plus - the shuttle was a glorified delivery truck that had no value at all in advancing science, and the money could have been used better on real science projects.
Finally, someone outside science has caught on to this 'organic food is better' nonsense. It isn't nutritionally any different, it isn't structurally any different, it is just marketing - they pay a fee and fill out paperwork. Small farmers that actually are completely 'organic' in their methods, with no pesticides (including organic ones that will kill you just the same, like strychnine and ricin) can't actually afford the fee to be labeled organic.
A study that set out to reveal the genetic factors that help people live to ages 100 and older (see Identified: Genetic signatures of exceptional longevity in humans) has been retracted. The researchers reported 150 genetic variations that could be used to predict whether a person was genetically inclined to live to be 100, based on the genomes of over 1,000 centenarians, but geneticists noted that the control samples and the samples from centenarians were analyzed in different ways.
We can only confuse science and environmentalism when science happens to match their cultural agenda - ethanol, for example, was lousy science and the anti-science positions embraced by environmentalists to combat pollution were firmly in the anti-science camp; biology and the energy sector have terrific solutions available right now but if 'stop CO2' is instead a cult-like mantra, they can't be part of the policy discourse.
Snow height or rock height? Chinese and Indians disagree on even how to measure the height of the world's highest mountain, since if you have ever had one of those 'why can't they just talk to each other?' moments about actual serious geopolitical issues, you know it is never that simple.Mount Everest is in both countries and its official height 29,029 feet and both sides agree that is the official height, but the pesky Chinese still use their rock height number instead of the snow height number, which is 12 feet higher. So Nepal says it will take an accurate measurement.Both countries could be wrong. The US Geological Survey used GPS in 1999 and say it is approximately two feet higher than the official number.
Nothing says celebrating athletic perfection like a McDonald's hamburger.Actually, elite athletes likely can eat all the hamburgers they want but you get the idea - a McDonald's, nay the world's largest McDonald's, at the site dedicated to athletic excellence is pretty funny.But Brits are nothing if not funny. And so they get a 3,000-square-meter McDonald's restaurant, on two floors and equivalent to half the length of an American football field. Olympic chiefs have moved quickly to reject claims that the new McDonald's will deter from aims to promote a healthy and active lifestyle, which London chiefs have been pushing since winning the Olympic bid.
It's not easy to get a tenured professor to leave his job - unless he is caught dog-fighting or saying girls might be different than boys, there isn't a lot off-limits, especially at a progressive bastion like Harvard.But bad press is not always good press and Harvard evolutionary psychology Professor Marc D. Hauser has announced his resignation. A three-year investigation said he fudged data in his research on monkey cognition and he was on the wrong side a Psychology Department vote in February to disallow him from teaching in the upcoming academic year.
Partisans on each side will claim some vast conspiracy in the debt ceiling debate - Republicans are bought by corporations and hate poor people because they want to lower their taxes, Democrats are bought by unions and hate poor people because they want to give them stuff for free - but it may be simpler than that. Cooperation is in our nature but morality can undercut the tendency, writes Jason Castro in Scientific American, and game theory can tell us some things about why - at least academically.
