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A huge spike in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen about 800 million years ago, the story goes, paved the way for the Cambrian explosion a couple hundred million years later, and with it the rise of complex life. But a new study out in Nature says that picture is incomplete. Researchers found evidence of substantial oxygen 1.2 billion years ago, meaning that the conditions needed for complex life appeared much earlier than scientists knew, and that perhaps something else was required to set of ...read more

I am in love with this comment and want to have its babies: pi appears as a constant in many formula of physics. General relativity says that it isn’t constant. Is it the origin of the pi particle, aka pion? A curmudgeonly literalist might, when faced with a question such as this, harrumph a simple “No.” A more loquacious sort might explain that general relativity does not say that π is not a contstant. Pi is not a parameter of physics like the fine-structure constant, whi ...read more

In the the 19th century the Democratic party, rooted in large part among Southern planters who were dependent on exports of commodities and imports of finished goods, was the party of free trade. The northern Whigs, and later the Republicans, were the party of tariffs. They were the faction which drew support from the industry of the North which benefited from protection against European competitors. The Republican support for tariffs and Democratic opposition persisted into the early 20th ...read more

A few days ago a friend was asking me about Aziz Ansari, the brown American comedian who grew up in South Carolina, and is of Tamil Muslim heritage. Since I don’t watch Parks and Recreation, I knew about him mostly through the Sepia Mutiny weblog. Some of the comments there indicated that Ansari was a practicing Muslim. That did not surprise me, South Asians are very religious. In particular, group religious identity matters a great deal to people whose origins are in Indian and Islamic ci ...read more

How do you know whether a scientific idea is a good one or not? The only sure way is to study it in detail and know all the technical ins and outs. But good ideas and bad ideas behave differently over time, and this can provide clues as to which ones are solid; useful if you’re a non-expert trying to evaluate a field, or a junior researcher looking for a career. Today’s ideas are the basis for tomorrow’s experiments. A good idea will lead to experiments which provide interestin ...read more