Lately, for a variety of reasons, my thoughts have returned more and more to two subjects that have long concerned me: the continued devastation inflicted on our environment and the Earth's runaway overpopulation problem. Both of these areas touch on many different facets of life, so any number of things can make me return to these subjects: an ( Read more... )

In the wake of the NSA surveillance revelations, it's nice to know that sometimes we can at least rely on the courts to do the right thing in protecting fundamental human rights and dignity.

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  In the decision that's getting all the attention, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that companies cannot patent naturally occurring human genes. I was ( Read more... )

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  Well, about those flying cars -- back to the drawing board.
  


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  Wired magazine has written an interesting profile of neuroscientist Henry Markam. If you haven't heard of Markam, he's one of those guys whose ideas about the future of technology make TED talks seem almost bland. Four years after he gave his own TED talk where, among other things, he ( Read more... )

So there's a lot of talk about Angelina Jolie getting a double mastectomy because of a genetic test that discovered she has an 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer. Was this a courageous decision, as so many are portraying it? Perhaps ( Read more... )

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  Most of the time in my Science Friday posts, I stick to actual science (go figure). But occasionally, I come across an utterly ridiculous example of pseudoscience and I feel the need to share. To a long list of historical science scams that include the likes of cold fusion, perpetual motion, and snake oil miracle cures, we can now add, the " ( Read more... )

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  From mussels covering the bottoms of the great lakes to Burmese pythons running rampant in the Florida swamps to the creepy-looking snakehead fish, America's environment is under a widespread attack from invasive species that's only getting worse. In the latest installment, Florida is being overrun by giant African land snails. The snails can ( Read more... )

One of the key things that needs to happen before technology reaches what's been known in recent years as "the Singularity" is a far better understanding of the human brain that would allow us to essentially reverse engineer the root of human intelligence ( Read more... )

Just started reading Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail -- But Some Don't today and from what I've read so far, it promises to be a rich and interesting read ( Read more... )

I've ordered Erasing Death: The Science That Is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death after hearing an interview with the author on tonight's Fresh Air. As much as I follow science, I hadn't realized that "resuscitation science" -- bringing a patient back from the dead, in some cases after hours have passed -- has made such progress over ( Read more... )

Today the idea of a weekly, regularly scheduled sci-fi post occurred to me as a natural complement to Science Friday. Perhaps that has something to do with the lengthy Battlestar Galactica marathon that's taken up a lot of this afternoon and evening or maybe the arrival in the mail last week of the complete V series on DVD. Saturday of most weeks ( Read more... )