Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
Today we learn the tragic news of the murder of Christopher Stevens, the US ambassador in Lybia. The BBC reports … Unidentified armed men stormed the grounds on Tuesday night in a protest over a US-produced film that is said to insult the Prophet Muhammad. They shot at buildings and threw handmade bombs into the … Read more
Many years ago when working in Dublin, I was out for a walk one lunchtime on one of those very rare days when that big rather unfamiliar yellow disk in the sky had strangely decided to not shroud itself in a layer of clouds. While meandering along and not paying too much attention, I was stopped by a chap who … Read more
The knowledgeable subject matter experts are yelling, but nobody appears to be really listening … The BBC reported a couple of days ago … Arctic ice melting at ‘amazing’ speed. Scientists in the Arctic are warning that this summer’s record-breaking melt is part of an accelerating trend with profound implications. … The Norwegian Polar Institute (NPI) … Read more
I blogged the day before yesterday about a study soon to be published in Psychological Science . It revealed that conspiracy theories tend to cluster, those that buy into moon hoax theories are prone to buy into other conspiracy theories such as 9/11 being an inside job, or climate change denial. Interestingly enough they also found that … Read more
Within a scientific context we know specific things to be true, not because they are the current fad or preference, but rather because that is where the data has led us. If new surprising data arrives that leads us to a different conclusion, then that is where we go. If however you reject the process, … Read more
This is big news, the international Encode project has found that about a fifth of the human genome regulates the 2% that makes proteins. What was the previous thinking? Until now, the thought was that the vast stretches of DNA between our 20,000 or so protein-coding genes – more than 98% of the genetic sequence … Read more