Vishay Singh

Author Vishay Singh

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

Author Vishay Singh

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

Author Vishay Singh

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