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.
The Lacey Act is one of few government regulations I have praised for its effectiveness. Few government regulations are actually designed to help anyone, they are either designed to hobble someone in order to artificially level the playing field or they are designed to boost a special interest. This act levels the playing field, but for the benefit of companies that are ethical.
Haute couture through history? It is when St. Pölten takes the Catwalk!If your only knowledge of Stone Age fashion is stricly limited to old Flintstones cartoons, you are in luck. On September 23rd the University of Applied Sciences (UAS) in St. Pölten, Austria
will be parading clothing from over ten millennia, a journey through time and
the world of fashion. Wilma Flintstone - fashion maven from the Stone Age. © Hanna-Barbera.
Have a telescope? Heck, do you have a pair of binoculars?If so, head outside the city and take a look at a Type 1A supernova. It's 21 million light-years away, which sounds like a lot, but to astronomers and modern optics that's actually pretty close. So close that over the next few weeks you can even spy it with a pair of good binoculars (25x100), a short while after sunset.
When I saw some preliminary results in Nature about CERN's CLOUD experiment a while ago, I didn't regard it as interesting enough to write about. Seriously, does anyone not think the Sun impacts the climate by now?I know, I know, in the 1990s it was all carbon dioxide, but it's no longer 2006 - anyone gullible enough to believe the French and the Germans insisted on a 1990 date in the Kyoto protocol based on science, rather than the fact that Germany simply had to close a few post-unification Soviet-era factories from World War II and France had already brought more nuclear plants online to more easily meet their goals, well, they were too stupid to keep their money anyway.
If you're one of those cultural mullahs who thinks smoking causes lung cancer - even a cigar or a pipe - you can stop reading. This article is not for you. I have never smoked a cigarette in my life but gradual efforts by the modern temperance movement to ban smoking everywhere(1) should be resisted by anyone claiming they care about independence, tolerance and diversity.(2)
One of the stranger claims of anti-science hippies is that there is not only a difference between 'organic' food (and apparently 'inorganic' food, whatever that could be) in structure - and if you believe that, go read Huffington Post, I won't take it personally - but also in nutrition.
Journalism as an occupation with ethical standards was a 20th century invention. For a brief, shining moment in time, journalists were interested in truth and newspapers flourished. Truth is subjective, of course, and so are editors who set the tone of newspapers and during the time when the press had power across all society, editors were on the left and the right. Newspapers reached everyone, multiple times each day.Today, the 'fourth estate', as Edmund Burke termed it in the 18th century, still has considerable power - it makes presidents and brings down companies - but it is less trusted than it was two generations ago.
Why would Mohamed Atta graciously let a car rental agent know the check oil light was on in the car he returned and then help crash a plane full of people and fuel into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, an act of simple religious hatred?It's a puzzle of psychology. The ability to deal kindly with people on an individual level and then demonize them when they are in a group has been a longstanding mystery. Group behavior, being social, obviously had benefits for early man; trying to live without a group was practically a death sentence even when an 'individual' victory in ways large and small was absolutely necessary for survival.
There's long been a maddening belief by a subset of psychologists who have never actually been to the Eastern part of the world that Asia is some collectivist Utopia.When it comes to inflated self-importance - hubris, even - some research contends, there is more of it in the west because Western culture prides itself on independence, personal success and uniqueness while in the East where harmony and belonging are supposedly valued, people are more modest.
Complexity theorists have some bad news for people who insist that unless it carries an organic label, food is evil; a group from the New England Complex Systems Institute says they've discovered what will trigger riots around the world in under two years. It's the price of food and when it rises above the threshold they list for instability, social unrest will sweep the planet.
Cooking is not a modern invention, concludes new research. It likely originated 1.9 million years ago, according to results they determined using statistical analysis and evolutionary trees.How so? They estimated, in their analysis, how long we should spend feeding every day, based on our body sizes throughout evolutionary history. Sure, it might seem at first glance like cooking would add more time than directly eating but their results say we would need to spend almost half of our time in the 'feeding' process given our current sizes - cooking basically made food easier to chew and digest and as a result we got more caloric benefit and a smaller digestive tract.
What constitutes racism? If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism? A recent survey of NIH R01 applications found that applications from black investigators were 13.2 % less likely to be awarded than whites while Asian investigators were 3.9 % less likely to have their work funded. This correlates to the number of applicants as well; blacks are only 1.4% of total applications while Asians are 16.2% and whites are almost 70%.
