While I am still some seven years away from having a teenager of my own, I well remember being a teenager, and being occasionally asked by an exasperated parent, “What were you thinking?” To which, as often as not, I replied, “I don’t know.” This was seldom seen as an acceptable answer. Had I but …
Tag: science
There are no utopias, as I believe I’ve said before
Bullies are everywhere. Even in Second Life. Why research bullying in a virtual online world? Funding for this project has come from the Dean of Business, Law and Social Sciences, Professor Christine Ennew, who describes bullying as a complex issue and one which perhaps hasn’t had the research attention it deserves. Professor Ennew said: “When …
A most appropriate presentation
This is cool: Nobel laureate James Watson – co-discoverer of the DNA double helix and father of the Human Genome Project – today, in a presentation at Baylor College of Medicine, became the first human to receive the data that encompass his personal genome sequence.It’s astonishing how far we’ve come in genetics in such a …
Planets, planets everywhere
It’s been about five years since I last wrote about the search for extrasolar planets–that is, planets orbiting other stars. As I noted then, the idea that the universe is full of planets has been so firmly established in our minds by science fiction that it’s amazing to realize that we only found the first …
The face is familiar, but that can’t be your name…
Do I look like an Edward to you? You can be honest, since I can’t hear what you’re saying anyway. (Unless you give me a phone call, and I’d really rather you didn’t.) To me, of course, I do look like an Edward (and also an Ed, and, to those who knew me growing up, …
Why am I confident the universe is teeming with life?
Because we keep finding it on Earth in even the most apparently inhospitable places…like the Rancho La Brea tar pits.
What a setting for a science fiction story!
A Neptune-sized planet made of hot ice and shrouded with steam, orbiting a star just 30 light years away. More important than its fictional possibilities, of course, is the fact that it seems to have a lot of water, albeit it in ultra-dense, ultra-hot solid form. A little further out from its sun, and it …
SCORE one for efficiency
This being hockey playoff season, everyone is talking about scores. In the hope I might be taken as something other than a science geek, I thought I would, too. So let me tell you what the score is regarding SCORE–the Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity. SCORE is a joint research project by four U.K. …
Spock’s home planet in our sights?
I haven’t posted anything Star Trek-related in, oh, days, so here’s something: Science fiction may soon become science fact. Astronomers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have recently concluded that the upcoming planet-finding mission, SIM PlanetQuest, would be able to detect an Earth-like planet around the star 40 Eridani, a planet familiar to “Star Trek” fans …
A warning to preachers?
According to a new study, asking people how often they are likely to engage in a negative behavior actually increases the likelihood they will engage in it. Which got me wondering…if a preacher emphasizes the dangers of sin over the rewards of righteousness, so that he gets people constantly thinking about sin and temptation and …
Trained bacteria…
…the next frontier in medicine! Seriously, this is neat stuff. If you can make bacteria go where you want them to go, you can use them like little tiny pack animals to deliver drugs, clean up pollutants, and other Good Things.
Looking for something to read?
Better get started on The Encyclopedia of Life now, because it’s going to take a while: In a whale-sized project, the world’s scientists plan to compile everything they know about all of Earth’s 1.8 million known species and put it all on one Web site, open to everyone. The effort, called the Encyclopedia of Life, …
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