Though the developed world is concerned about greenhouse gas emissions implicated in climate change and global warming, reactions in nature have been less consistent.Polar bears have been increasingly forced on shore due to sea ice loss, where they eat berries, birds and eggs, while ice seals, the usual lipid-rich prey of bears, couldn't be happier that thinner ice has made them harder to get to.
Esquire magazine scribe Tom Junod recently wrote something that made me question my judgment and his sanity - namely that Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology
Now, the last time someone compared themselves to Isaac Newton it was ... well, okay it was me, but even I can't be serious about comparing myself to Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton is a serious guy in physics. A giant. Maybe the giant. It's one thing to make comparisons for dramatic effect, which a keen writer like Junod can do better than anyone, but another to make a serious case.
I'm usually a pretty patient guy about marketing. Unlike some, I am not educated by it and, unlike others, I don't look down on it. I know why it it exists and I appreciate its value but at some point in advocacy issues ( in this case the environment ) it invariably crosses a line from being funny to offensive and then it goes completely over the line into being the kind of junk science that needs to be ridiculed.
Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.
His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people.
I saw a few articles discussing an upcoming convergence between robot and human culture based on research by Netherlands student David Levy, who completed his PhD on the subject of human-robot relationships. Using the Artificial Intelligence ( A.I. if you are new to, well, everything ) curve laid out by Levy, humans and robots would be inter-marrying by 2050. Inter-marrying means sex and, of course, I am a specialist in the science of sex.
Who knew that the sex lives of African bat bugs could be so interesting? Males with female genitalia, female bugs with 'paragenitals' on their abdomens that guide the males to the right spot by basically impaling them if they mess up, males trying to impregnate males.
It's Extreme Transexualism, coming soon to a species near you.
Why is it necessary in these bugs? Males tend to get overanxious and just start stabbing away anywhere in the abdomen but they really need to go into a special warm place that some men on the internet know nothing about - though it's still in their abdomen, in the case of female bat bugs.
Yes, your favorite color is blue. Most of you, anyway. Except some women, who go for the redder part of the red-green axis.
A lot of science sites got a press release from Current Biology and went with the "women do prefer pink" headline without even reading the abstract much less the actual article, which is why you're smart enough to read about it here instead. In fact, if you read a story today that had "Girls prefer pink ..." somewhere in it, you can guess some journalist phoned that one in.
"It's hard finding the perfect woman," my friend Jack said to me.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
It's no secret that Europeans enjoy new ways to tax people - if they can tell you they are doing it for your own good, so much the better.
I often hear arguments that start with phrases like "If we we can save even one life doing ( insert your pet cause here), it's worth it" but is there a limit to how much society wants to spend to save a life?
A study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health says the UK could save the lives of 3,200 people if they taxed more foods.
I have always loved numbers. My whole life I have manipulated them, caressed them, cared for them.
My friends, I am a six fiend.
And I am not alone. Heck, even among physics gurus I am in pretty good company, including notables such as Paul A.M. Dirac, which, by the way, is his real name and not something he made up just for D&D. That guy lived for number correlations.
There's a problem in all of the climate predictions people have made over the last few years - we just don't know who to trust. Some experts remind us that since we can't predict the weather more than 10 days from now making economy-shattering policy decisions on such incomplete science is a bad idea. One prominent politician says he took a random sample of all the climate studies out there and that 928 out of 12,000 articles agreed with him, so he must be right. How are we to know?
Global warming is more politics than science and I don't want to get into whether it is happening or not, or how much, because that's not science, it's advocacy no matter what I say.
There aren't many people who will claim that the government is here to help you and they will save you money, but Chris Cooper and Benjamin Sovacool are doing just that. Cooper is Senior Policy Director, Network for New Energy Choices while Sovacool is a Senior Research Fellow and teaches in the Government and International Affairs program at Virginia Tech.
They recently completed a study advocating a national energy policy mandating renewable energy.
There's a war that's brewing and you may not be aware of it. It's right under our noses but it has been kept out of the mainstream media due to a growing web of deniers and obfuscaters who regard misinformation and doubt as allies. Like many insurrections it has been funded quietly but it's effects can be devastating to people in the war zones, like the line that stretches out the door at Tully's.
That war, my friends, is the War On Coffee.
Coffee is good. Coffee is good for you. Science has proved this on numerous occasions yet time and again I see sources in the mainstream media trying to establish doubt about the total awesomeness of coffee.
