Science
I first heard of this through the comic strip XKCD and thought that it was the author exaggerating a research trial a little. Turns out, he was spot on. The New York Times wrote about a recent study where doctors are able to used an attenuated HIV-1 to infiltrate and destroy cancer cells. The nutshell…
Philosophy Professor John Haldane adds his own commentary to the list addressing Stephen Hawking’s lately released The Grand Design. If the subject catches your interest, you should certainly read the whole essay, but one point attracted my attention in particular: [The authors] then go on to note, however, that “it is not only the peculiar…
Scientists are speculating that gravity is actually a force caused as part of the universe’s tendency toward entropy. Furthermore, the effect may have something to do with the way in which spacetime erases information on its march in that direction. The broader relevance of information is the interesting part: Over recent years many results in…
It doesn’t diminish the fields of history and science to express fascination that it’s entirely possible for some bones or fragments thereof to reorder the entire history of man: A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of…
This is fascinating: They found that the brain’s complexity is beyond anything they’d imagined, almost to the point of being beyond belief, says Stephen Smith, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology and senior author of the paper describing the study: One synapse, by itself, is more like a microprocessor–with both memory-storage and information-processing elements–than…
Further to this morning’s post about cultural expectations for geniuses, I offer the suggestion that true revolutionaries aren’t creating innovations, but discerning them in the patterns of the reality into which they’ve entered. Physicist Stephen Barr notes the corollary in science: As we turn to the fundamental principles of physics, we discover that order does…
So, you might have come across the minor splash that physicist Stephen Hawking recently made by publishing a book that declares the concept of God unnecessary. Physicist Mike Flynn notes some need for specificity of terms, in such conversations: … to say that a space-time manifold came from “nothing” is a stretch. The “no-universe state”…
It is most definitely consistent with a religious conservative’s worldview to argue that experience of happiness is a cocktail of biological, financial, cultural, social, and psychological factors, but I question whether the sort of scientific differentiation that University of Mary Washington Psychology Professor Holly Schiffrin attempts in a recent syndicated column is really all that…
I suppose it’s generally been taken differently, coming from a politically and theologically conservative traditionalist like me, but it looks like the thinking about the origins of homosexuality are moving toward what I’ve long contended to be the case (here presented by research psychologist Jesse Bering, who is, himself, gay): Another caveat is that researchers…
Kenneth P. Green and Hiwa Alaghebandian think they have identified why Americans seem to have less regard for science–and scientists–than they used to. Our theory is that science is not losing its credibility because people no longer like or believe in the idea of scientific discovery, but because science has taken on an authoritarian tone,…
