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By Stanley Kutler
$24.06
By Gretchen Morgenson, Joshua Rosner
$17.04
$21
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Kaptain Kobold (CC-BY)
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Trust in science as a means of discovering and understanding reality has declined among self-identified conservatives since the mid-1970s, sociologists at the University of North Carolina found, and even more so in recent years if they held high level university degrees.
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AMC
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New study, new round of bad news. Researchers have determined that the level of obesity in the U.S. is being dramatically underreported. The current, too-conservative estimate already says that one in three Americans is obese, so this may be one time you don’t want to click “Read more.”
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Wikimedia Commons / PiccoloNamek (CC-BY-SA)
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It might seem somewhat obvious, but scientists looking for reasons why bumblebees have been dying in waves in recent years are pointing to pesticides as a possible cause, as the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
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oshkar (CC-BY)
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A British philosopher suggests that popular confusion over what philosophers do requires the epochs-old discipline follow the suit of other academic subjects and update its name.
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bbc.co.uk
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And now for a brief bit of dinosaur geekery: Researchers at the University of Manchester had the fun job of putting together a computer model of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull that gave them a clearer idea about the bygone species’ bite, which turns out to be more impressive than previously believed.
Posted on Feb 29, 2012
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In the face of ever-increasing contradictory evidence, millions of Americans believe God created humans as they exist today and that Earth is just thousands of years old. Why?
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WilliamMarlow (CC-BY)
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Remember the announcement that shocked the physics world last September? Scientists claimed to have measured a neutrino traveling faster than the speed of light—a feat that would have undone Einstein, if, that is, the measurement proves not to have been the result of a bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer, as researchers now suspect.
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Wikimedia Commons / National Institutes of Health
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What a relief to know that men might not be an endangered species with a potential expiration date in only 5 million years, according to a new study published, appropriately (if heavy-handedly), in a journal called Nature. The issue boils down to a predicted, but now contested, process of genetic decay targeting the man-specific Y chromosome.
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NASA
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Fifty years ago, John Glenn sat in a little metal capsule rocketing around the Earth, while down on the ground NASA scientists thought his eyes might change shape. (more)
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Flickr / pointnshoot (CC-BY)
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Here’s a new Frankenfood twist on classic cuisine: A team of scientists in the Netherlands are this close to producing a hamburger made of meat generated from stem cells. Soon, we will be able to enjoy the delicious taste of test-tube hamburgers and other prime laboratory-grade delicacies (but at a price).
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USFWS / Tom MacKenzie
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Researchers have invented a kind of soap that can be magnetically corralled to help clean up toxic spills. The feat is accomplished by infusing more mundane suds with tiny iron particles that join together and react to magnets.
Posted on Jan 23, 2012
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This is the kind of scientific story that’s a little “ooh” with some “ew!” mixed in, too: Scientists at Utah State University have cleverly combined goat and spider genes to make a normal-looking strain of goat that happens to be able to produce extra protein in its milk that can be made into spider silk.
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Wikimedia Commons / Brandonc (CC-BY-SA)
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Sorry, all you Mayan-influenced doomsday enthusiasts, but it’s looking to some of the great minds over at NASA as though 2012 isn’t going to be particularly apocalypse-friendly as such. Ancient augury versus contemporary astronomy: Who will prevail?
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John McNab (CC-BY)
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Increasingly chaotic weather, potentially habitable planets and closing in on the elusive Higgs boson are just a few of the developments observed and discoveries made by the scientific community in 2011. The editors at LiveScience asked university scientists to describe what they think were the most important advances of the year.
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Centers for Disease Control
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More than half of the people infected with H5N1—the bird flu virus—are dead, so it’s a damned good thing the virus isn’t airborne. That is, until now. U.S.-funded researchers in the Netherlands have successfully engineered a viral H5N1 strain that can spread through the air, realizing fears of a potentially weaponized germ that infects easily and kills half its victims.
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U.S. Navy / MC1 Matthew M. Bradley
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An article in The Lancet argues that earthquakes are particularly devastating when compared with other natural disasters. Earthquakes “frequently affect populous urban areas with poor structural standards” and they impair emergency responders. Shifting tectonic plates killed more than 780,000 people in the last decade. (more)
Posted on Nov 6, 2011
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WWF Greater Mekong
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A subspecies of rhino native to Southeast Asia has been wiped out. There are now just 50 members of its parent species, the Javan rhino, left in the world. It’s a reminder that the danger in endangered is real, and we can’t just sit back and hope conservationists can keep human beings from annihilating Earth’s biodiversity. (more)
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By David Sirota — Like most people living through this jarring age of economic turbulence and political dysfunction, you can probably recall a moment in the last few months when you thought to yourself that our lawmakers and corporate leaders are all crazy.
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Dr. Tom Wagner of NASA is remarkably cheerful as he explains how the historic melting of sea ice in the Arctic threatens to exacerbate climate change across the globe.
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Flickr / Gerry Dincher (CC-BY-SA)
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Last month, the investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica published a report that highlights how dangerously little scientists and government officials know about the health consequences of living near a natural gas drilling site.
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Marco Raaphorst (CC-BY)
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Seafood fans beware: You and your appetites may be toying with evolution. A team of scientists is investigating the fallout from overfishing, which causes fish to be smaller and reproduce earlier, and whether these changes are short-term reactions or the result of unnatural selection. (more)
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NASA / Artist concept of an SLS launch
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Who said NASA is dead? The space agency has unveiled its new rocket design—the most powerful ever if we go ahead and build it—capable one day of dropping a human or two on Mars.
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PBS.org
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The United States conducted experiments on unsuspecting Guatemalans in the 1940s in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin on STDs. According to the BBC, “some 1,300 prisoners, psychiatric patients and sex workers were deliberately infected with syphilis, gonorrhea” and other diseases. (more)
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gonemovie.com
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The Allen Telescope Array in Northern California was shut down due to government budget cuts, but more than 2,400 donors, including “Contact” star Jodie Foster, gave enough money to keep the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute-run facility open a little longer. (more)
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moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com
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Physical scientist Robert Grumbine crunches some numbers to determine that “the last time the global mean was below the climate normal was March 1976.” Basically Grumbine is looking for “normal” climate, and he sees things diverging after 1940. So tell us, old-timers, what was it like before the planet started melting? (more)
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imdb.com
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By Richard Schickel — We have witnessed, in this film, a prolonged study in animal abuse. I think Terrace is the worst kind of sadist—the unknowing kind—and I think this very good film provides a record of “science” at its most useless.
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Flickr/Venex_jpb (CC-BY-SA)
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Research on autism in recent decades has emphasized the contributing role of genetics, but a new study out of UCSF and Stanford might prove to be a game-changer, ranking environmental factors (e.g., parenting) higher than biology in order of importance.
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Vintage Collective (CC-BY)
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Researchers in the U.K. have found a way to make the hearts of mice repair themselves—a feat that the British Heart Foundation calls the “holy grail” (when applied to humans, we’re guessing). (more)
Posted on Jun 8, 2011
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Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News —
Posted on Jun 5, 2011
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And you think you’ve got problems. Take a look at nearby galaxy Centaurus A, which is in a losing battle with a black hole nearly 55 million times bigger (in terms of mass) than our sun. As it dies, its guts are being sprayed out in a trail of carnage 2 million light-years long, and NASA has the intergalactic snuff film to prove it.
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bbc.co.uk
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What happens when planetary bodies go rogue? Well, that’s one universal mystery that scientists didn’t actually know of until a team of Japanese researchers claimed to have found 10 such free-range roamers—and what’s more, they might be shockingly common in space.
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Aiwok (CC-BY-SA)
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A couple of neuroscientists looked through a billion publicly available Web searches from about a million people and told Salon, “There are almost three times as many searches for fat women as there are for skinny women” and “men search for penises almost as often as they search for vaginas.”
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Mike Baird (CC-BY)
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Contrary to popular belief, running might actually be good for your knees. In other health news: Walnuts are simply loaded with antioxidants and although all nuts may have healthy properties, walnuts make their cousins look downright schlubby.
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tonystl (CC-BY-ND)
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Researchers have adapted to religion a model used to forecast and explain the deaths of languages, and are predicting that in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland, religion is destined for extinction.
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YouTube / AssociatedPress
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Marine biologists are working to explain the millions of anchovies, sardines and mackerel that washed up dead in a Los Angeles area harbor Tuesday. Whether an algae bloom was a factor in the massive die-off is under investigation.
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The Pug Father (CC-BY)
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Scientists at the Institute of Marine Mammal Studies are investigating unusually high numbers of stillborn and aborted dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico region. Seventeen infant dolphins have washed up on shore so far this year, compared to an average of one or two a month, says one scientist. (more)
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The lopsided law of immigration vs. Wall Street, humans actually do make it rain, and Glenn Beck goes after Google. These discoveries and more after the jump.
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BlatantNews.com (CC-BY)
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A couple of political scientists out of Penn State University went looking into the way evolution is taught in classrooms, and discovered that the vast majority of teachers are overly cautious in their presentation of the concept, contrary to National Research Council guidelines. (more)
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Flickr / Chimpanz APe (CC-BY)
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A team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania believes defective stem cells cause male pattern baldness. Apparently the haywire cells cause shrinking follicles that produce microscopic hairs. A cure may be possible.
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Flickr / Andrew Mason (CC-BY)
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Scientists at University College London went poking around the noggins of a couple of MPs and 90 students and were surprised to discover that the brains of right-wing subjects were more prone to fear and anxiety and less so to courage and optimism when compared with their counterparts on the left.
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Flickr / The Pug Father (CC-BY)
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The overuse of antibiotics can lead to drug-resistant superbugs, so it’s cause for concern to the folks at Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Livable Future that the vast majority of bug-killing drugs aren’t even consumed by sick humans.
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Wikimedia Commons / NASA
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A young biochemist has caused a ruckus in the scientific community with her claim that one of the basic elements in the formula that has long been considered to define the building blocks of life may be swapped out—and for arsenic, no less.
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Today on the list: The GOP vs. Sarah Palin, what Google charges for government surveillance, and WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange’s political philosophy explained.
Posted on Dec 2, 2010
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nytimes.com
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How’s this for a mental image? In an effort to make our synapses sexier to the general public, one enterprising neuroscience aficionado and Ph.D.-to-be cooked up a book of pretty pictures of the human brain as rendered from past to present.
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Today on the list: Bribing Israel, the possibilities of precognition, the value of banks (it’s complicated), and the incredible shrinking withdrawal date.
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Benghazi: Dissecting Congressional Follies, Media Coverage and ‘Cover-Up’ Charges
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