There aren’t many out-and-out good eggs in British journalism but Ben Goldacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Goldacre and http://www.badscience.net/) is one of them. He mounts a ferocious attack on bad science. Currently (2013) he is Wellcome research fellow in epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and has, since 2003, doubled as The Guardian’s scourge of sloppy science reporting, […]
In February 2021 concerns across the globe are rightly focussed on the COVID-19 pandemic. Humans will survive this disease and so far the global death toll is nowhere near the estimated 50 million dead of the 1918 flu pandemic.(1918 Pandemic (H1N1 virus) | Pandemic Influenza (Flu) | CDC) Once the virus has been tamed the
Collapse by Jared Diamond Read More »
In 1900 a group of sponge divers blown of course in the Mediterranean discovered an Ancient Greek shipwreck dating from around 70 BC. Lying unnoticed for months amongst their hard-won haul was what appeared to be a formless lump of corroded rock, which turned out to be the most stunning scientific artefact we have from
Decoding the Heavens Read More »
Beginning with Mt. Vesuvius, whose eruption in Roman times helped spark the science of geology, and ending in a lab in the West of England where mathematical models and lab experiments replace direct observation, Richard Fortey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Fortey) reveals the latest science about ancient geologic processes. He shows how plate tectonics came to rule the geophysical landscape and
The Earth: An Intimate History Read More »
Arno Karlen (May 7, 1937 – May 13, 2010, http://antiochcollege.org/news/obituaries/2453.html) was an American poet, psychoanalyst, and in particular, popular science writer. He won the 1996 Rhone-Poulenc Prize for science books with Plague’s Progress which deals with the relationship between Man and disease. Terrible diseases have wreaked havoc on human life since the dawn of history.
The discovery of the nucleus transformed the twentieth century and will revolutionize this one. Nuclear physics is one of the most exciting—and useful—branches of science. In medicine, it helps save lives through innovative medical technologies, such as the MRI, and in nuclear astrophysics, state-of-the-art theoretical and computer models account for how stars shine and describe how
In 1974 Thomas Nagel (http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/thomasnagel and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nagel) published a highly influential philosophy paper entitled ‘What is it like to be a bat?‘ In it, he argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it feels like to be a particular conscious being. We are not constituted likes
The Higgs boson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson) is the particle that more than six thousand scientists have been looking for using the Large Hadron Collider (http://www.lhc.ac.uk/), the world’s largest energy particle accelerator, which lies in a tunnel 17 miles in circumference, as deep as 575 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It took ten years to build and this
The Particle at the End of the Universe Read More »
Plant biologist and President of the Genetics Society (http://www.genetics.org.uk/) Enrico Coen offers us a wonderful book in Cells to Civilizations. This is a unified account of how life transforms itself – from the production of bacteria to the emergence of complex civilizations. What are the connections between evolving microbes, an egg that develops into an infant, and a child who
Cells to Civilizations Read More »
