Science
According to i09, citing National Geographic, there is oxygen-rich water on Jupiter’s ice-covered moon, Europa: That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in…
In the June/July issue of First Things, Mary Eberstadt suggested commonality between pro-lifers and vegetarians that (she thinks) justifies closer affiliation. Think what you may about the thesis, on which I’m not sold, a subsequent letter from a gentleman named Gerald Lame brings us back to dualism: So Eberstadt’s “moral traditionalists” are really animist-vitalists. And…
I turned on the last two minutes of today’s Patriots game, after not having taken in any broadcast communications over the previous 4-5 hours. In addition to noticing the Patriots leading 59-0, I also happened to notice it snowing in Foxboro in mid-October. Do proponents of the theory of “climate change” not caused by natural…
Michael Hanlon does raise the ethical hurricane that spins at the end of the effort essentially to create a human brain with computer technology: Well, a mind, however fleeting and however shorn of the inevitable complexities and nuances that come from being embedded in a body, is still a mind, a ‘person’. We would effectively…
Nicholas Wade has an interesting musing on the pitfall of conformity in intellectual pursuits: Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters. The…
On the whole, there’s nothing in what Stephen Hawking is reported to have said at a recent lecture that is incompatible with theism broadly or Catholicism specifically. Human beings are part of nature, and our actions affect the course of the universe to some extent. Theologically, we are called to make of ourselves God’s instruments…
Those of us who are constitutional tinkerers (meaning our own constitutions, not the nation’s) should find reason for deep concern in such news as this: Human DNA inserted into mice caused their offspring to squeak at a different pitch, suggesting that the gene involved may be linked to people’s ability to speak. The gene variant…
Walter Besio, a biomedical engineering professor at the University Rhode Island, has received a grant from the National Institute of Health to continue his work into developing sensors that can interpret the electrical signals that come from the brain — and perhaps turn those signals into functional inputs for a new generation of biomedical technologies…A…
Does anybody doubt that President Obama’s handling of the stem-cell issue is designed as a means of avoiding political heat while disregarding the beliefs of those who hold the culling of embryonic stem cells to be a form of murder? By placing determination of the “guidelines” for expanded funding under controle of the National Institutes…
The change in our nation’s direction on embryonic stem-cell research would concern me a little less if it weren’t expressed in such poorly conceived terms: As important as the stem-cell policy change is “the paradigm shift in making sure that research in this country is based on sound science and not any kind of political…
