The Sombrero Galaxy – 28 million light years from Earth – has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across. and it’s very pretty.

HINT: You have to do it yourself OK, so you want an eponymous idea. Presumably you are currently below the Arbesman Limit, so that won’t be a factor. First, take your surname and append one of the following suggested terms … Continue reading →

I am impressed that the  BBC wrote a fairly technical article about the sequencing of a Neanderthal  genome. But I wish I could read the original study to see if it merits the focus on these two points: “they say … Continue reading →

John Derbyshire, over at Secular Right, has a post speculating on whether the left or the right is more hostile to science. there are two sides to the Left’s claim to be the more science-friendly faction. It’s not just conservative … Continue reading →

There’s a lovely essay in the NYT celebrating the restoration of scientists into the halls of goverment. The article makes the usual case that science is a way of thinking about the world rather than a collection of facts Science … Continue reading →

Among the small thrills of encountering canonical works for the first time – Homer, say, or the King James Bible, or Star Wars – are the moments when you come across some turn of phrase so well-used it has been … Continue reading →

Skepticblog has some nice speculation – starting with this video which claims that, whatever aliens look like, they certainly won’t look like us. Richard Dawkins wades into the argument to make the case for convergent evolution. Convergent evolution is the … Continue reading →

Imagine that someone could stick your head in an MRI and look into your brain to see what’s going on. Now imagine that, when you look at a particular image, certain patterns show up on the MRI. Maybe a clever … Continue reading →

Skepticblog is usually pretty good. Like this post about the Shermer’s trip to a TED-alike conference in Mexico. Then the evolutionary biologist David Barash spoke about redirected aggression, recounting a story about how when his horse kicked his dog, his … Continue reading →

Michael Shermer has a review of Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred. I’ve often wondered about the attempts to either explain phenomena like conscsiousness, free will and intelligence in terms of physics, chemistry and biology. Kauffman has written a book about … Continue reading →