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Hypatia, Agora, and Religion vs. Science
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through...
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Pathological Science
Pathological science is a term that refers to research characterized more by obsession than by results. It’s something that most of us are probably subject to, to one degree or another. Many...
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Bad Science journalism 101
The long-discredited idea of sauropods snorkeling in deep water as illustrated in this old painting by Zdenek Burian. The biggest problem is that they couldn't breathe in water this deep with the...
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Terrifying UFOs, or Fata Morgana Mirages?
An animation I made of the northern end of Santa Catalina Island. The lighter, lower contrast frames were later in the evening. CLICK TO WATCH THE ANIMATION. One of the benefits of living on the coast...
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The Unknown Unknowns
This review of Ignorance: How it Drives Science by Stuart Firestein (Oxford University Press, May 2012, ISBN 13: 97801-998-28074) was originally published in Nature, 484, 446–447 (26 April 2012) as...
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The Toothpaste Puzzle
Most people get the right answer to the toothpaste puzzle, but it never ceases to surprise me how many get it wrong, and even staunchly argue their position. I’ve even seen it tested by taking a tube...
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WHen cold fusion was hot
Stanley Pons (right) and Martin Fleischmann with a publicity shot staged to show them “working” on their experiment in 1989 The first principle of science is that you must not fool yourself and you are...
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The republican brain on science
A Review of The Republican Brain: The Science of Why they Deny Science—and Reality by Chris Mooney, John Wiley, New York, 327 pages. Reality has a well-known liberal bias. —Stephen Colbert...
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Cracking earth and crackpot ideas
Most educated people in modern society have no difficulty accepting the idea that the earth is roughly spherical, or that the sun is the center of the solar system and the earth moves around it....
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Save the Field Museum!
Buried in all the news of the end of the world, the “fiscal cliff”, and the holiday season was another item that probably escaped most people’s attention. The Field Museum of Natural History in...
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Can We Be Clear On Something? It’s STEM, Not STEAM.
STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. The STEM fields are of special significance in the United States, as they are considered by the government to be strategically important, and...
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Sex, dinosaurs, or chocolate
The workshop was held at NESCent, with modern facilities built inside classic old brick buildings on the Duke campus that used to be warehouses On the weekend of March 22-24, 2013, I was privileged to...
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Written in your genes—and atoms
A review of The Universe Within: Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People, by Neil Shubin (Pantheon, New York, 2013). Popularizing science, and writing science trade books for...
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Should we let the clowns run the circus?
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom —Isaac Asimov A few weeks ago, we heard in the news the chilling and alarming statement that...
View ArticleBellybuttons and Testable science
Many creationists try to get around the fact that the world LOOKS like it has a long history by arguing that God created it that way! That argument was actually first put forth in 1857, and completely...
View Article“Observational” vs. “historical” science? Pure bunk!
Is there a distinction between "observational" and "historical" science? Only in Ken Ham's deluded thinking...
View ArticleSmarter than thou?
When Neil DeGrasse Tyson appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" on July 25, it reminded us of some ugly threads of anti-intellectualism in the U.S.
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