Secrets of Our Living Planet - The Emerald Band

I may not be able to blog this week, since I'm going to be spending some quality time with my family, so I'm leaving you dear readers with a fascinating documentary.We've seen in multiple cases before the intricacies of various animals. What's different about today's documentary is that it showcases the interesting and intricate relationships between various organisms to explain why there is so much biological diversity in the Earth's rain forests,...

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Dare Mighty Things - Curiosity on Mars

I don't know about you, but I'm still ecstatic about the Curiosity success, and things just keep getting better and better...Some of the obvious important and concrete goals of NASA have to do with scientific research, discovery, application and engineering, but although it cannot be so easily quantified, one could easily argue that whether by design or chance, it is one of the greatest vehicles we have to increase the fecundity of scientific inspiration:...

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Todd Akin, Republicans and "Legitimate Rape"

As you may be aware, Congressman Todd Akin has been receiving fire from all directions for his stupid, right-wing ideological, scientifically illiterate and insensitive remarks about how women who are victims of "legitimate rape" have natural physiological mechanisms to prevent pregnancies, implying that women who do get pregnant after being raped were not really raped. Everyone's been jumping on the response bandwagon, and so I can do no better...

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Horrifying Planet - Zebra: Nature's Ultimate Prey

When it comes to the philosophical problem of evil (the question of how an omnipotent and benevolent God would allow unnecessary suffering to exist), religious believers tend to argue that suffering is a necessary consequence of our having free will: sure, our freedom does tend to produce all kinds of nightmares every now and then, but overall, the net benefits of having free will outweigh the bad.Whatever merit that answer may have (it doesn't),...

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Jane Goodall on Chimpanzees and Human Emotions

Jane Goodall's story of scientific discovery is an amazing one, but even more amazing are the stories that she shares with the world, the way she tells these stories, and the optimism with which she confronts pressing global issues such as conservation, poverty, education, deforestation, etc.If you want a basic introduction to the wonders and mysteries of our closest evolutionary cousins, you could probably not do better than to listen to Jane...

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I Want to Be Sarah Palin?

One of the things I despise about politics is the hypocrisy and the double standards: it's okay for our group to do something, but if those from the other side of the isle do the same thing, then that very same thing is evil; or conversely, it's so wrong for those on the other side to do something, but it's perfectly fine for our group to do the exact same thing, or even the very same thing on steroids...I don't know whether it's willful manipulation...

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U.S. Teens Lead World in Teen Pregnancy-Test Scores

Say what you will about our alarming rate of science illiteracy, the decay of our political discourse, the brainwashing and mindlessness of our entertainment industry... We may be lagging behind in a lot of different areas, but there are some things at which we Americans are still number 1!  USA!  USA!?  USA??I bet these girls didn't even study and still got positive scores on their tes...

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Interactive Fully Panoramic Photograph of Mars via Curiosity Rover

This may just be the coolest thing you see this week: a high-def 360-degree panoramic image based on photographs taken by the Curiosity rover in Mars.And as if that weren't awesome enough, if you view this image through your mobile device, the gyroscope inside it will help give you a more realistic experience, since the picture is configured to show you different angles of Mars (and the rover itself), depending on the direction your phone or tablet...

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The "Theory" of Revolution :)

Every now and then a cartoon comes along that, through the use of a hilarious reductio ad absurdum, so clearly and succinctly demolishes creationism as a viable alternative hypothesis to explain the complexity and diversity of life, exposes its inherent irrationality, and makes clear its ulterior motivation and the double standards on which it is popularly accepted, that I just have to share with everyone here.In this case, it comes from Saturday...

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Einstein Mask Optical Illusion

In our everyday experience, it seems as though perception is simply a matter of information hitting your sense organs and going straight to our brain. In reality, however, perception turns out to be an incredibly sophisticated and complex concatenation of various brain modules actively trying to interpret and synthesize the disparate information sent by the different senses. The reason perception may seem to be a passive phenomenon is that it's effortless,...

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Doctor-Patient Relationship Getting Serious

Human knowledge starts with experience, but it doesn't end there. We use the data of our experience to come up with theories and explanations for those experiences, so that we can make sense of them and so that we can compare, contrast and contextualize them in terms of all the other things we know.In philosophy, we sometimes like to talk about the idea of an "inference to the best explanation," and as The Onion shows in the hilarious piece below,...

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Quit Your Technology Job and Get a Ph.D. in the Humanities

As a student of philosophy, and as someone who has chosen to dedicate his life to the pursuit and sharing of wisdom, you might call me biased, but I really believe that the world would be a better place (intellectually, morally, politically, culturally, scientifically, aesthetically, etc.) if we had more philosophy in our lives.And I'm not alone in this position. If you remember Damon Horowitz (from one of the best TEDTalks of all time), he's the...

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Jon Stewart on the Curiosity Mars Touch-Down

Yes, here I go again with more stuff on the landing of Curiosity on Mars, but you'd have to be made of stone not to be awed and excited by the incredible accomplishment this landing represented. When Jon Stewart saw the Curiosity's Seven Minutes of Terror we featured a couple of months ago, he was on the edge of his seat.But have you wondered why the folks at NASA worked so hard to get this done? Maybe this is what they have to do to get laid :)The...

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Update on Curiosity Awesomeness

Here I was, getting all depressed about the fact that while we know Curiosity landed successfully and according to plan, no one got to experience the epic descent, but as it turns out, NASA was way ahead of the game and made perfect plans for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to snap some awesome pictures, like the one below:I don't know the exact details, but the math that must have been required to triangulate and synchronize all these times, places,...

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Curiosity Has Landed!

Across the vastness of interplanetary space, the nice folks at NASA have hit it out of the ballpark with what looks like a perfect landing on Mars.I don't know if I can convey the significance of this event, but consider just how momentous an accomplishment this is: Curiosity landed safely at a distance our human brains can't apprehend, and yet this all happened because of the science that human brains can comprehend.And the thing that's bitter-sweet...

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