A bit early this month but I need to make space for more updates next week. The most unusual thing about this installment is that none of the three articles this month are from The Economist! Two of the three articles are about biology while the last one is very speculative, very theoretical physics.
The first of these articles discusses a controversial book about a topic that I’m sure everyone has thought of at one point or another: were our ancestors really faster, stronger and tougher than the humans living today now are? According to the author of Manthropology: The Science of the Inadequate Modern Male, Peter McAllister, the answer is yes. An anthropologist, he bases his conclusions on a wide range of evidence. For example, he examined fossilized footprints of Australian aboriginals who lived 20,000 years ago to estimate their running speed.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (October ’09) →
Three articles for August and surprisingly for this blog, not a single one of them has anything to do with human nature. Two are related to biology but are more interesting in the way that they serve as examples of how science can correct a past mistake, even a long held one, as well as how popular reporting can easily misinterpret a scientific finding. The remaining one is a piece on dark energy, found via The Sycologist.
The first article deals with what is commonly taught as the most useless of human organs: the lowly appendix. As this article which appeared on Yahoo! by way of Livescience.com explains, all of us have probably been taught at some point in our lives that the appendix not only serves no purpose, being a relic of our evolutionary past, but is in fact a potentially lethal liability if it becomes inflamed.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (August ’09) →
Since my last entry in this series was a bit light, here are four articles for this month. Two are from The Economist, with one of them on how physics might help answer an age-old philosophical question and the other on how appearances count for more than we think. Of the remaining two, one is from CNN on a novel use for the laser technology originally conceived for the Star Wars anti-missile program and the last one is from the BBC on yet another piece of news “proving” that playing games is good for you.
The philosophy problem to start with. The question is no less than whether or not reality exists when we’re not looking at it, and if it exists, does reality behave in a different way when we’re not looking than when we are? Drawing on the theoretical work of Lucien Hardy who proposed a thought experiment whereby a pair of matter and antimatter particles could meet but do not mutually annihilate themselves under the condition that the interaction remains unobserved, two independent teams of physicists successfully performed the experiment as described. So it seems that people can indeed tell whether or not someone is honest just by looking at his or her face.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (March ’09) →
Wow, I haven’t done one of these in a while since my Economist subscription lapsed. I only renewed it fairly recently. Anyway, here are the three most interesting science related news items that I’ve seen in October, with one of them from The Economist. Let’s start with that one first.
The biological causes and effects of homosexuality is one of the perennial questions when you try to explain human nature in scientific terms. The most obvious of these questions is why homosexuality, since it can in large part be attributed to genetic causes, persists when common sense dictates that homosexuals shouldn’t be in a good position to pass along their genes to the next generation? A recent article highlights one possible answer: genes that make men more feminine and genes that make women more masculine confer a reproductive advantage to the person who possesses them, so long as they do not actually push them into homosexuality.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Oct ’08) →
From time to time, I’d like to highlight some of the most thought provoking articles on science that I’ve read recently. To me the most interesting ones tend to be ones that have some sort of philosophical implication, either on human nature or the nature of the universe in general. In this entry, I cover two recent articles on human nature, one on the latest attempt at a comprehensive theory of everything and finally one on an extremely speculative theory of what happens to the universe when humans simply observe it.
Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (Oct – Nov ’07) →
The unexamined life is a life not worth living