Regular readers will perhaps know that I (and others) have been saying for a while that Mesozoic Earth was not the global hothouse that many have long assumed. There’s evidence for cool continental interiors and poles during parts of the Jurassic and Cretaceous (Barron & Washington 1982, , Sloan & Barron 1990, Sellwood et al.…
A Princeton physics professor tries to get all rational over climate change fears. I am fascinated by the way this plays out in public, among non-scientists trying to make sense of it all. It is easy to be confused about climate, because we are constantly being warned about the horrible things that will happen or…
Space seems like a fitting locale for the casual gaming franchise Angry Birds, considering its meteoric rise in popularity since launching 2009. —Review: Angry Birds Space out of this world. Excuse me, but do meteors actually rise?
The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid…
Replacement parts are hard to come by for a 17-year-old robot, so science center staff long have known that Hoops is one major breakdown away from forced retirement. That would leave a void not only for a generation of visitors who have marveled at the lanky mechanical athlete, but also for staff who have grown…
Early tomorrow my son and I will be carpooling to Greensburg to participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition “Rebound Rumble” challenge. Our team built and programmed robot from a kit of loose parts. The effort was a success, said Peter Jerz, 14, of Greensburg, who said he learned about teamwork while working on the online…
How it works is kind of cool, from a Spy Kids / Bill Nye the Science Guy perspective, but will the world be a better place if we use technology to enforce manners? Kurihara and Tsukada suggested the speech-jamming gun could be used to hush noisy speakers in public libraries or to silence people in group…
The street artist Shepard Fairey, whose “Hope” campaign poster of Barack Obama became an enduring symbol of his last presidential campaign, pleaded guilty Friday to a charge stemming from his misconduct in trying to bolster claims in a lawsuit over which photograph had been used as a basis for the poster. Shepard Fairey Pleads Guilty Over…
An interesting thing to read when I find myself awake in the middle of the night. In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day’s Close: Night…
The Russians beat us into orbit, and for the moment only the Russians can ferry American astronauts to the International Space Station. It’s hard to believe that just seven years after the first American was launched into orbit, Americans were walking on the moon. (It would be nice to see someone walk on Mars in…
Interesting application of math to sports. In analyzing teams’ shot quality, shot rates and shot percentages, Skinner found that the average NBA squad has a 4 percent probability of shooting the ball when left with 15 seconds on the shot clock in their final possession. The ideal rate is 12 percent. Skinner didn’t offer guidelines…
They gathered professional violinists in a hotel room in Indianapolis. They had six violins — two Strads, a Guarneri and three modern instruments. Everybody wore dark goggles so they couldn’t see which violin was which. Then the researchers told the musicians: These are all fine violins and at least one is a Stradivarius. Play, then…
A dozen atoms have been made to store a bit of data magnetically – a feat normally performed by a million atoms. The work could one day help shrink the devices that store computer data. —Smallest magnetic memory uses just 12 atoms – physics-math – 12 January 2012 – New Scientist.
You don’t have to get into the curvature of space-time, but you can tell your kids that Santa uses deep scientific knowledge to see a different map of the universe, one that contains roads most people don’t know about. The Jolly Old Elf may have found a way to jump or drop from one house…
According to a color-picking test at synesthete.org, these are the colors my daughter perceives when she sees or thinks about letters and numbers. As you can see, each time the test flashed a random letter or number, she didn’t always adjust the sliders to find the exact same colors. For one item (I forget which)…
This story features my Seton Hill colleague, Lee McClain. “It’s kind of like if you are looking at a bunch of leaves on a tree, you could study them, but you’d have to work really hard to tell them apart,” said McClain. That is how she sees faces. “That part of my brain that most…
Researchers have found a bright vein of gypsum, a mineral that could only have been deposited by water. The finding suggests that billions of years ago warm water flowed through underground fractures in the rocks. —NASA Rover Spots Unambiguous Evidence for Water on Ancient Mars | Wired Science | Wired.com.
When our firstborn was little, my wife carefully avoided saying “no” to him, saying “no thank you” instead. When he melted down in public, he would scream, “No thank you! Noooo thaaaank YOOU!” The key to a new theory of tantrums lies in a detailed analysis of the sounds that toddlers make during tantrums. In…
The researchers also suggested that the success of the “Star Wars” prequel films might partially rely upon how teens can relate to the troubled Anakin Skywalker. Only adults can be diagnosed with to borderline personality disorder under the current DSM-IV guidelines, but Bui and Rodgers pointed to several studies that suggest the disorder is fairly…
Even the most nimble-minded among us have pondered that question after walking into a room with some purpose in mind — to get something, perhaps? — only to blank on what that purpose was. Now a new study suggests that it’s the very act of walking through a doorway that causes these strange memory lapses.…