Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
A week ago there were stories circulating about four women and two men in Pakistan who had been sentenced to death for singing and dancing at a wedding. I need not explain why, by now you will be familiar with the thinking .. it was of course yet another example of Islamic clerics demonstrating just … Read more
Some folks claim they have a plan to establish the first human settlement on Mars in 2023. Apparently the idea is that they will build things first so that a habitable settlement will be waiting for the settlers when they land, and that the settlement will support them while they live and work on Mars … Read more
Very interesting article in Science yesterday regarding origins … Researchers agree that our immediate ancestors, the upright walking apes, arose in Africa. But the discovery of a new primate that lived about 37 million years ago in the ancient swamplands of Myanmar bolsters the idea that the deep primate family tree that gave rise to … Read more
People get offended by many things … smoking, chewing gum, spitting, etc… but there is apparently one very special category of offence in Spain, “offending religious feelings”, apparently that will potentially get you jail time. The news is that one of Spain’s leading underground artists has been charged with this, appeared in court and now faces … Read more
Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have reached an important milestone, they have released the first installment of data from the 500 terabytes so far collected in their pathbreaking project to construct the first whole-brain wiring diagram of a vertebrate brain, that of the mouse. Wow. The data consist of gigapixel images (each close to … Read more
Now this is really worth watching, it is an hour long interview of Daniel Dennett by Richard Dawkins. Least you wonder “Who?”, I’ll explain. Daniel Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive … Read more