Nineteen times out of twenty. We come across these numbers almost daily in the news. But behind them there’s an old problem. In the 1800s British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli famously said that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Or so American author Mark Twain claimed. Too bad for his story that Disraeli died […]
Here’s more news from big telescopes. The galaxy depicted in the illustration is called CR7. It has a football flavor: Google tells me CR7 is Cristiano Ronaldo, star player for famed Spanish soccer team, Real Madrid. The galaxy named after him shows up way down on page three of my search results! That bright patch […]
Sex may be mostly private, but sometimes clues can tell you that a couple has got something going on. That’s not unusual. But here’s a story of ancient history coming to life that is unusual. It’s about an interspecies coupling of a Homo sapiens and a Homo neanderthalis forty thousand years ago, and of how […]
Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg makes a high-profile case against spending on Ebola. It may be good politics, but is it good science? Why should we care? One reason is that scientific thinking on Ebola could save lots of lives and staggering amounts of money. Science is a driver of our economy. Science is why […]
Finding new drugs these days is largely done with quantum mechanics. Fifty years ago it was more like what the Brits (and the indie rock band Arctic Monkeys) call suck-it-and-see. So thousands of Americans don’t know that they have arms and legs and normal lives thanks to the courage of a Canadian—and American—physician. She says […]
Sounds like a The Big Bang Theory episode. Maybe someday it will be. But even in the fields of physics, supersymmetry is esoteric. What is it? What is its calamity? Why should you care? What it is is an idea: Particular superheroes! Here’s their story. The Standard Model is the crown jewel of physics. It […]
Last week’s post looked at how physics turned its back on time. It had consequences. Today, leading physicists speak of time in despairing terms. Some propose to abandon it. Though buried deep in science journals, this situation eats at the roots of our economy. Is time lost beyond recall? Let’s recap: In 1905 Albert Einstein […]
Around the world we’re starting to see same-old knee-jerk stuff. Irrational reactions to Ebola hurt us all: World Health Organization Director-General Margaret Chan says that 90 per cent of economic costs of an epidemic ‘come from irrational and disorganized efforts of the public to avoid infection.’ ‘Public’ includes public officials and push-button politicians and panicky […]
Ebola is a scary virus. Most know it is deadly. It is an international problem. We need evidence-based action to solve it, not play-on-fear border closings (c.f., SARS and swine flu) that do no good but damage the economy. We need a public conversation on ebola and it might be aided by some terms you […]