In 1989, the communist dictatorship oddly named Union of Soviet Socialist Republics reached the extent of a third giant hole in the Arctic Circle, Kola Superdeep Borehole SG-3, where they'd been drilling for 19 years. It clocked in at nearly 8 miles deep.
Your preference for whether you would rather spend your time with cloying religious fundamentalists or annoying atheists is solely a matter of taste. To people in the middle, they are two sides of the same coin.But there may be hope for New Atheism, according to a sociologist. They just need to lighten up a little.
20 years ago, nuclear science died a horrible death at the hands of President Clinton and Senator John Kerry. It's science fiction fantasy to imagine now what nuclear science would be like if the last 40 years had been spent with American ingenuity and technological prowess tackling the issue, rather than it becoming a political football to placate anti-science activists before finally being killed off.Its legacy haunts us today. With nuclear energy blockaded well before that, and modern hydraulic fracturing not yet created, America had to rely more on coal. Environmental groups never accept any blame for the U.S. rise in CO2 emissions, but it rests squarely on them as much as it does on automobiles.
In the early 1990s, American politicians saw a statistic that showed people with a college education earned more money than people without one. In politician thinking, they figured they would create a lot of sympathetic future voters by declaring a college education a 'right'. Student loans became unlimited and tuition soon followed. The strategy worked, sort of. The beneficiaries of all that money are politically so far out of the American mainstream as to be almost unrecognizable, while a lot of disgruntled students have found that when everyone gets a degree, it is no longer special, and now they need a PhD or an MBA.
Cancer is the blanket term for over a hundred diseases where abnormal cells divide and invade tissues through blood and lymph systems. The extra cells are often detected in the form of a tumor that people notice as their first symptom, and those can be benign or malignant.
The 21st century will be the century of the 'smart home', where your home and your portable technology all interact seamlessly with one another.
If you read politics on Twitter, you would have recently seen that Republicans in the U.S. Congress are going to impeach President Obama if they get enough seats in November, so it is vital that Democrats win elections.
DDT, the first modern pesticide, has been banned in the United States since 1972 but it is still commonly used in places where malaria is prevalent. The United Nations recommends it because it is far less harmful to people than malaria is and remains superior to replacements. Malaria drugs have become less effective over time so it's better kill pests before they infect people.
Revolutions are messy business, they require participation by a type of personality that is not very savory; militant, bombastic, a little crazy.
There is a little miracle of science happening in your body right now. As you read this, a minuscule 5 grams of a high-energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate - ATP - is causing all kinds of reactions in order to give you the energy to sit at your computer. In total, 8 ounces of ATP is being recycled hundreds of times each day, so many times that a human can use their body weight - 200 pounds of ATP in my case – every 24 hours.
George Dyson. Credit: edge.orgIf you read about Big Data for very long, a quote from science historian George Dyson is sure to come up: "Big data is what happened when the cost of keeping information became less than the cost of throwing it away." That will be a platform to talk about the challenges, etc.But there is a bigger problem that shows the challenges of Big Data - that isn't what Dyson said. But like with Einstein quotes about bees, in a Google world, where accuracy is measured by how often you are repeated and thus make it to the top of search engines, the Big Data problem is accuracy, not volume.
In today's Wall Street Journal, I have an article discussing recent problems in peer review.
A recent review in the British Journal of Nutrition concluded that the nutritional quality and safety of organic food was higher than conventional food. Fruits, vegetables, and grains, organic versions were better in all ways than conventional farming, they determined.
Organic food had fewer pesticides, a much different result than other studies, and also had more important nutrients, also a much different result than other studies.
