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Talking Black Holes with Astrophysicist Katie Mack
One of astronomy’s great explainers tells you about the Event Horizon Telescope’s image and plenty more
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When Lab Experiments Carry Theological Implications
Efforts to create new life-forms—and new universes—will raise profound questions
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Where Are the Black Women in STEM Leadership?
By training diverse women in science and tech to become leaders, the whole ecosystem benefits
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Impropriety or merely the appearance thereof?
Consider the case of pulmonologist David Schwartz, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Science. * The $250,000-a-year director earns $150,000 as an expert witness in asbestos cases during his tenure so far (pdf)...
Are journalists innumerate? Because the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal certainly seems to be.
I know we're not all scientists here, but anyone who has even glanced at the graphs in a few scientific papers will instantly recognize that trying to fit a curve to the following data is prima facie idiotic: I'm not going to go into the reasons why picking an inflection point at the one outlying data point on this graph is so, let us not be delicate-- dumb --that you don't even have to understand the math to sense why this is wrong...
The all-white jury v the diverse: Evidence, for a change
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Mind Matters
where top researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry explain and discuss the findings and theories driving their fields...
The Empress and a latter day Noah (of turtles)
A chance encounter in a Manhattan Chinese restaurant with a terrapin turtle led Richard Ogust into living in a tent besides a New Jersey warehouse where he temporarily stored a collection of rare and endangered turtles that had swelled to more than 1,200 specimens...
Altered crops: Your thoughts?
From The Editors: In "Future Farming: A Return to Roots" in the new August issue, Jerry D. Glover, Cindy M. Cox and John P. Reganold argue that many of the problems associated with the modern agriculture--soil erosion, excessive water demands, high energy inputs and so on--are linked to the fact that most important grain crops are annuals, not perennials...
Stem cell therapy's killer app: breast augmentation breast reconstruction
Artificial fertilizer was a by-product of the effort to wage deadlier warfare, and sex drives early adoption of new media technologies, so I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the killer app that finally brings stem cell therapy into the mainstream might be, as one Australian news service so delicately put it: "Lunch break boob jobs."Using fat from the patient's own body to rebuild other areas is not a novel idea, but such reconstructions often fail as the fat is simply reabsorbed.However using fat-derived stem cells appears to overcome this problem, according to the company behind the procedure, Cytori Therapeutics.Quoth the BBC.UPDATE:A PR rep for Cytori Therapeutics, the company behind this technology, just contacted us with the information that (surprise surprise!) the original news items on this technology were a bit, shall we say, sensationalized?...
When scientific findings are politically inconvenient, guess which priority wins
Scientists often uncover truths that are politically inconvenient for whomever is in power. Which doesn't make it any less saddening that this sort of thing goes on.
It's just your imagination -- Or is it your memory?
Mind Matters Mind Matters is Sciam.com's "seminar blog" on the sciences of mind and brain. Each week, top researchers describe their disciplines' most significant new findings -- and what they, as fellow researchers, find most exciting, maddening, significant, odd, or otherwise noteworthy in the research driving their fields...
Vice President Cheney found to be in violation of the law--of quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics shows up in editorial cartoons about as often as James K. Polk, which is why it's especially gratifying to see such a nuanced application of it in today's episode of This Modern World...
Thank you, Mr. Wizard
I am saddened by the news that Don Herbert, aka "Mr. Wizard" died yesterday at the age of 89. His weekly program, on NBC from 1951 to 1965, brought simple science to children—and made it fun...
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