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Science is the exploration of ignorance Science is not the cataloguing of facts or the accumulation of knowledge. It is the production of ignorance. Scientists are in the business of finding new seams of mystery. As Jennifer Doudna at U C Berkeley puts it in Erika Check Hayden’s Nature article about the tenth anniversary of the first draft of the human […]

Who’s Galileo and who’s the pope today? Unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition of remarks in an article by the climate scientist James Hansen: This is not the 17th century, when “beliefs” trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system and Religions across the spectrum — Catholics, Jews, Mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelicals — […]

Richer and nicer in the future? David Brooks on why America’s future is bright: In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism […]

Great new fossil, but the missing link it aint Big news? The Telegraph: Missing link between man and apes found. The Sunday Times: Fossil from cave is a ‘missing link’ The cliche is misleading. The new fossil is a very complete and therefore very interesting specimen from a poorly understood period. If it proves to have features of both Australopithecus […]

  For those who think truth is the most beautiful thing of all, enjoy this gorgeous short film by Cristobal Vila about the mathematics of biological shapes.    

How fresh and wondrous electricity seemed to Americans in 1916 From Maggie Koerth Baker at boingboing.net, a fascinating glimpse of  how fresh and wondrous electricity seemed to Americans in 1916. Pity she spoils it by an attempt at finding the cloud in the silver lining at the end. Centralized electricity changed energy production from a […]

Exaggerations run rife while the reality is strangely absent from recent reporting on melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Breathless reporting last week of a new estimate of Greenland’s melting ice. It’s higher than it was before: “The changes on the Greenland ice sheet are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass […]

Politicising, propagandising and polarising the climate issue A fine analysis by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the way that climate science has been distorted by environmentalism. They write: “The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in […]

Chiffchaffs are the first summer visitors to arrive, around here at least, and their distinctive song is hard to miss, and one day near the vernal equinox suddenly there they are. I have written down the date in my diary most years since 1990. Last night I went back through the diaries and collated the data. It’s […]

Genetic diversity within the Neanderthals is a more likely explanation Woke to find the newspapers all claiming a new “species” of human being discovered in central Asia. Here’s the Guardian: “The finding suggests an undocumented human species lived alongside Neanderthals and early modern humans in parts of Asia as recently as 30,000 years ago.” Leave aside the fact that […]