Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
The TL;DR; best possible answer to the extragalactic planets question is “Probably yes”. The degree of fuzziness in the above answer reflects the complexity of what was done and the degree of certainty that surrounds the conclusion reached. We can’t go with “yes”, nor can we go with “No”, but instead the best we have … Read more
Regarding the above posting title about the new Maya discovery in Guatemala, I’m not exaggerating. Take for example this tweet by Egyptologist Sarah Parcak … Hey all: you realize that researchers just used lasers to find *60,000* new sites in Guatemala?!? This is HOLY $HIT territory. — Sarah Parcak (@indyfromspace) February 2, 2018 Beyond the … Read more
Over the years various health-scare stories have popped up regarding the supposed dangers of cell-phone radiation causing cancer. This plays very much into the observation that literally billions of humans now use cell phones and so if the danger is real then that is something that we should not only understand but come to terms … Read more
Some rather dire news has been issued within an official press release from the UK’s Met Office. Entitled “Five-year forecast indicates further warming” they explain that their climate models point to us probably breaching the 1.5 C Global Warming limit in the next five years … A new forecast published by scientists at the Met … Read more
A couple of days ago the UK’s Independent, and several other media outlets, have promoted this claim … Religious people are, on average, less intelligent than atheists, researchers claim. To be clear, this posting is not simply a dig at the Independent. Other outlets ran with the same story. The International Business Times very explicitly … Read more
A formal study entitled “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign” has been published this month. Just to be totally clear here, the term is a reference to misinformation – news that is presented as true, but is instead partially or wholly false, and so … Read more
