When I cite a news article, I almost never cite The New York Times. There is a reason for this. The reason is that New York Times articles are long, detailed, well written - and carefully crafted to present only one side of the story. In more plebeian sources, one sidedness is often easily detected, but in the New York Times, the level of detail ( Read more... )

I previously posted about a clinical trial which proved that 1100 IU daily of vitamin D - about triple the recommended amount - can reduce cancer by 77%. Unfortunately, the trial did not test vitamin D in the absence of supplemental calcium, did not test men, and did not test people under 50, so we only know that this works for older women who ( Read more... )

Newt Gingrich said in last Thursday's debate that if he became President, we'd have a base on the moon by the end of his second term. My immediate reaction was the same as Romney's: too expensive. But while Gingrich has some pretty wacky ideas, he's also a pretty smart guy, so I figured I ought to do the math.

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You may have read the recent news about neutrino speeds being measured as faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum. They were only measured as about 0.002% faster, but given the presumptive status of c as a hard limit, that's still major news, if true ( Read more... )

I previously posted on how we in the U.S. could save perhaps half of our health care costs by eliminating useless treatments that are given only because of the urge to "do something ( Read more... )

You have probably heard of "mitochondrial Eve". Mitochondria are the bacteria like organelles in most of our cells that provide our energy. "Mitochondrial Eve" is the last woman to have had mitochondria from which the mitochondria in all of us are descended ( Read more... )

Ardipithecus ramidus is a 4.4 million year old hominid, one of whose examples has yielded the most complete skeleton to date from that time period. As the date of the fossil is close to the date for the branching between the human and chimpanzee lines, it's likely that A. ramidus is quite close, morphologically, to the common ancestor of those two ( Read more... )

( Maybe I've just been living under a rock, but I was surprised recently to find out that humans are no longer evolved from chimpanzees. Rather, it now seems that chimpanzees are evolved from humans. )