As everyone knows, Roseanne Barr posted a racist tweet. She claimed that the sleeping medication Ambien affected her behavior, but her show got cancelled anyway.
Now, I think this scandal raises some surprisingly interesting philosophical questions about moral responsibility and the nature of self-control. What follows is a dialogue between two hypothetical speakers exploring some of these questions. To be clear, this is a post about philosophy, not about Roseanne. I don’t know or care if ...read more
A closely-related species of long-beaked echidna. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
We all know Schrödinger’s cat, right? It’s a neat thought experiment (and one of the best analogies for quantum physics) but the situation always felt a bit forced to me. When are you really going to find a cat in a box with a radioactive substance and a flask of poison?
So here’s a more realistic version of the quantum analogy, one, in fact, that’s currently playing out in natu ...read more
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Take a second and try to talk about a person without mentioning gender.
If English is your native tongue, odds are you failed. But if you had been born in Indonesia, you might have succeeded.
Lera Boroditsky, who studies language and cognition at the University of California, San Diego, recalled a conversation with a colleague from the Southeast Asian country. He was asking her about someone she knew back in the states, and gender didn’t pop up until questi ...read more
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Walking and chewing gum, at various points in this nation’s history, has served as a benchmark to gauge one’s competence as a leader.
Democratic vice presidential-nominee John Edwards in 2004 assured Americans that a president must possess the ability to walk and chew gum. During that same campaign, Sen. Jim Bunning boasted to Kentuckians that he could indeed walk and chew gum. Last year, Rep. Paul Ryan promised citizens that Republicans in the Hou ...read more
A kind word or gesture from a friend can give you the warm fuzzies. But a warm, fuzzy friend can give a macaque a better chance of surviving the winter. After following dozens of macaques through snowy woods for months, scientists found that friendlier monkeys earned themselves more cuddle buddies on cold nights.
Earlier studies in macaques, baboons and even wild horses have shown that animals who are more social may live longer and have more offspring. In other w ...read more
(Credit: Stephane Bidouze/Shutterstock)
The stick insect may have something else in common with plants besides its stem-like looks.
Plants use wildlife to spread seeds, and, similarly, the stick insect might use wildlife to spread its eggs, a study in the journal Ecology reported this week.
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Most of a stick insect’s life is spent in a circle of trees and bushes, even for those species with wings. The insect would have an evolutionary advantage if it could disper ...read more
This tiny toe tip of a baby Spinosaurus reveals a surprisingly big piece of information about the famous dinosaur. (Credit G. Bindellini)
Big paleontological news can come in teensy packages, as shown by a new study on a fragment of a very young Spinosaurus, one of the most fascinating flesh-eating (in this case, fish-eating) dinosaurs.
You remember Spinosaurus, right? And I’m not talking about its cheesy guest role in the worst of the Jurassic Park sequels.
I’m ...read more
Check out this imagery from the next generation, polar-orbiting NOAA-20 spacecraft, which also heralds improved environmental monitoring
The NOAA-20 satellite captured this infrared image of Tropical Cyclone Mekunu on May 25 as it was approaching Yemen and Oman. (Source: NOAA/UWM/SSEC/CIMSS, William Straka)
A constellation of satellites that monitor the vital signs of our planet just got a new, official member: the next-generation NOAA-20 satellite. It was declared fully op ...read more
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Vitamin — the first four letters come from the Latin word for “life.” To sustain that, we need these organic compounds in small amounts, but it seems their purpose ends there.
New research reaffirms the counterintuitive notion that vitamin and mineral supplements aren’t the magical panacea we’ve been led to believe. It’s something that researchers have been finding for years, and a meta-analysis, summarizing the ...read more
