Some great words from such a great mind! Carl Sagan: A Universe Not Made for Us... Our ancestors understood origins by extrapolating from their own experience. How else could they have done it? So the Universe was hatched from a cosmic egg, or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god, or was a kind of product of the Creator’s workshop — perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. And the Universe was not much bigger than we see, and not much older than our written or oral records, and nowhere very different from places that we know. We’ve tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best effor ...
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Fusion is arguably the perfect way to power the world. (Not familiar with Fusion? (Click here). For one thing, there is enough fusion fuel to supply all of the world's energy needs for millions of years. Furthermore, it produces no environmentally damaging wastes, no carbon dioxide emissions and there could be no accidents that require evacuating the population surrounding a fusion power plant. Fusion plants would also not need significant land area, and fusion fuels (lithium and deuterium) are available in seawater. Unfortunately, it is hard to make fusion work. Indeed, after more than 60 years of fusion research, no device has yet made ...
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Some good news from Texas! Yeehaw! The Institute for Creation Research — one of the biggest nonsense-peddlers in the 6000 year history of the world — was handed a nice defeat this week. That link to the National Center for Science Education (the good guys) has all the info you need, but to summarize: the ICR moved from California to Texas. In the previous state, for reasons beyond understanding, they were able to grant Master’s degrees in their graduate school. But Texas didn’t recognize their accreditation, so they filed to get it approved. Not so surprisingly, scientists and educators rose in protest, and in 2008 the Texas Higher Educatio ...
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HEARD the latest? The swine flu pandemic was a hoax: scientists, governments and the World Health Organization cooked it up in a vast conspiracy so that vaccine companies could make money. Never mind that the flu fulfilled every scientific condition for a pandemic, that thousands died, or that declaring a pandemic didn't provide huge scope for profiteering. A group of obscure European politicians concocted this conspiracy theory, and it is now doing the rounds even in educated circles. This depressing tale is the latest incarnation of denialism, the systematic rejection of a body of science in favour of make-believe. There's a lot o ...
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For the first time, scientists have created life from scratch – well, sort of. Craig Venter's team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and San Diego, California, has made a bacterial genome from smaller DNA subunits and then transplanted the whole thing into another cell. So what exactly is the science behind the first synthetic cell, and what is its broader significance? What did Venter's team do? The cell was created by stitching together the genome of a goat pathogen called Mycoplasma mycoides from smaller stretches of DNA synthesised in the lab, and inserting the genome into the empty cytoplasm of a related ...
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