More Cancer Breakthrough

An other major cancer breakthrough. This one for skin cancer. They inject cloned immune cells back into the body. The patient was free from tumours within eight weeks.

Science Under Attack?

I was listening to the podcast of NPR’s Science Friday as I was packing chocolate. Last Friday’s show included a discussion about that Louisiana Creationism issue I mentioned last week. The Science Friday Show went well beyond that though.

Cancer Advances

P. Z. Meyers has a fantastic post on advances in cancer treatment.

Louisiana Puts Creationism in the Schools

Louisiana appears to have passed a law teaching Creationism in school.

Does Anti-Matter Fall Up?

OK, my business partner mentioned to me a Slashdot article one whether anti-matter fell up. I was incredulous at first. After all if it has positive mass what’s the question? All theory says it falls down. But I guess it’s never been empirically tested. (See Baez’ Physics FAQ) I [...]

Cold Fusion Redux?

Put this one in the “I’ll believe it when someone replicates it” category. PhysicsWorld reports the Japanese have made a big cold fusion breakthrough. Those of you old enough might remember after all the hype and then backlash that some claimed cold fusion worked only with palladium from certain mines where some [...]

Gender and Science

Way back in college (OK, not that long ago all things considered) one of my math professors made all his students read various papers on gender differences in mathematics and education. I believe this was actually encouraged by the department to try and get more women in the math and sciences. This was [...]

Time as Space

OK, this one I just had to make a comment on beyond adding it to the sideblog. Over at Developing Intelligence Chris Chathan has a post on reversing time by crossing your hands. The paper discussed shows that the perception of temporal order may be reversed if you cross your hands. The [...]

Reading…

What I’m reading this month.

God and Science Collide

I’d seen ads for this in various journals. But I guess the full thing is out now. It’s an odd joint work between “Skeptic” magazine publisher Michael Shermer and the John Templeton Foundation. It’s a collection of answers by scholars to the question, “does science make belief in God obsolete?” There’s [...]

Vaccines Again

OK, I promise that forthcoming posts will primarily be focused on philosophy. I’ve got a bunch of fairly technical posts coming up. I wanted to comment a bit about all the controversy over vaccines though. It’s been a big topic of discussion at the various science blogs as well as being in [...]

People Assign Blame to the Mentally Ill

There’s a great post at Garden of Forking Paths on how people will assign moral responsibility to the mentally ill. I found this was something my wife had intuitions about as well. I took her down some thought experiments and she reconsidered her opinion. But I think this is a fairly common [...]

Meltdown of the EPA

Meltdown of the EPA (HT: The Intersection). I was pretty critical of the EPA under Clinton but what’s happened under Bush on so many things is horrific. He’s replaced political debate with fixing the science. I think on many issues (including global warming) there’s a big valid political disagreement about what to [...]

Global Warming Doubters

Nice discussion from January over at Dot Earth about scientists who are concerned about global warming. The article is about the American Geophysical Union statement on global warming. But in the comments they address the supposed experts on that supposed Senate report about climate skeptics that has been making the rounds. One [...]

Choosing Before Awareness of Choosing

Chris over at Mixing Memory has up a great post about fMRI images and predicting behavior. It’s well worth reading if you’re familiar with the old Libet study where the brain decides a choice before we’re aware of making the choice. That study was often quoted but ended up being problematic as it [...]

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