Category Archives: science education

Universe’s First Stars Detected? Get the Facts. read
Carl Zimmer, David Reich Unearths Human History Etched in Bone “In less than three years, Dr. Reich’s laboratory has published DNA from the genomes of 938 ancient humans — more than all other research teams working in this field combined. The work in his lab has reshaped our understanding of human prehistory…..A finger bone from a Siberian cave yielded the genome of a previously unknown lineage of humans called Denisovans, a diverse group who split from Neanderthals roughly 400,000 years ago.” read
Adam Rogers, Julie Muncy, Aarian Marshall, Jason Pontin, Monique Brouillette, Shannon Stirone, Patrick Honner, Robbie Gonzalez, Eric Niiler, oo Much Engineering Has Made Mississippi River Floods Worse read
Rebecca Worby, What Scientists Are Saying About the EPA’s ‘Secret Science’ Rule read
Veronique Greenwood, These Ants Explode, but Their Nests Live to See Another Da read
Carl Zimmer, Bodies Remodeled for a Life at Sea read

RJ Reinhart, In the News: Cloningread
Jeff Street, 10 Characteristics of Highly Evolved Beings read
Kevin M. Folta, Genetic Engineering of Plants and Animals read
Michael Shermer, Science Denial versus Science Pleasure read
The occult roots of higher-dimensional research in physics – Paul Halpern read
Quantum Poetics read
Michael Shermer, For the Love of Science “That liberals are just as guilty of antiscience bias comports more with accounts of humans chomping canines, and yet those on the left are just as skeptical of well-established science when findings clash with their political ideologies, such as with GMOs, nuclear power, genetic engineering and evolutionary psychology—skepticism of the last I call “cognitive creationism” for its endorsement of a blank-slate model of the mind in which natural selection operated on humans only from the neck down.” read
Morten Høi Jensen, Darwin on Endless Trial. 2 new books “Victorian Mythmaker is a thorough dressing-down, a prolonged hatchet job. Unfortunately, it is also a work of intellectual calumny: a muddle of false claims, willful deceit, and unbridled hostility….What Wilson characterizes as a “childishly simple” theory becomes, significantly, a “brilliantly simple” one in Lieberman’s telling: “Any heritable variation that fosters the survival of an individual and its offspring will be retained,” he explains.
“. read
Hemant Mehta, COSMOS Is Coming Back for a Second Season read
Rise and Decline of Science in Islam “Many centuries ago, the Islamic faith produced much of the world’s most progressive advances in physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and a number of other scientific endeavors.” read
Josh Jones, Carl Sagan & the Dalai Lama Meet in 1991 and Discuss When Science Can Answer Big Questions Better Than Religion “The majority of religious believers do not fit this description. But some do. So too did Carl Sagan, to whom Gould dedicated his essay in a postscript. Sagan “shared my concern for fruitful cooperation between the different but vital realms of science and religion.” However, like Gould, Sagan gave the scientific method the override, and strenuously advocated that we all do likewise or become easily duped by charlatans or by our own flawed perceptions.” read
Carl Sagan’s Syllabus & Final Exam for His Course on Critical Thinking (Cornell, 1986) read
Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detection Kit”: 8 Tools for Skeptical Thinking read
Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America: Unable to Know “What’s True,” We Will Slide, “Without Noticing, Back into Superstition & Darkness” (1995) read
Evolution acceptance in children linked to aptitude, not belief read

David Dobbs, Survival of the Prettiest How Darwin’s sexual selection came to be confirmed. read
Jeremy Adam Smith,, The State of Mindfulness Science ““Mindfulness” is a big umbrella that covers many different kinds of practice. A 2016 study compared four different types of meditation, and found that they each have their own unique benefits…..Our recommendation? Try out different durations, types, and frequencies of meditation and jot down how you feel before and after the practice—and see what seems to work for you.” read
Christina Sarich, borne Lithium & Other Chemicals read
Sharon Weinberger, Web of war. Internet developed fromCold War “The conversation to approve the money for the ARPANET, the computer network that would eventually become the internet, took just 15 minutes.” read
Jonathan Shaw, Life Beyond Sight: The microbial earth, brought into view read
Ashley Braun, Here’s the Teacher-Friendly Antidote to Heartland Institute’s Anti-Science School Propaganda read
nytimes.com, What We Learned in 2017 (in Science) read
Francis Collins, The Language of God (1h 3m) watch

Antony Alumkal, A New Book Explains How the Christian Right Has Gotten Selective Denial Down to a Science “I coined the term “paranoid science” to refer to pseudoscience movements driven by paranoia. I built on historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which describes the recurrence of grand conspiracy theories (our whole way of life is under threat). When Christian Right leaders object to some sector of science, they respond by creating a grand conspiracy theory.” read
Jay W. Richards, Perfect Eclipses: Coincidence or Conspiracy? read
Michelle Rodrigues, The Science of Sex Differences Is Complicated (and Biased) read
Michael Skinner, Unified theory of evolution (Epigenetics?) read
Alex J. O’Connor, So Much for a Finely Tuned Universe (Hemant Mehta,) watch
Nick Hughes, Do we matter in the cosmos? read
Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen et al, The Human Cell Atlas: from vision to reality read
Philip Perrym The Story of How the Americas Were Peopled Is Radically Changing read
Jonathan Shaw. Life Beyond Sight: The microbial earth, brought into view read

The Science of Stress: From Psychology to Physiology (5
0m) watch
Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks, A Test for Consciousness? read
Sean Adl-Tabatabai, Harvard Study: Big Pharma, US Gov. Behind Opioid Epidemic read
Tom Jacobs, Positive News Coverage Bolsters Support for Science read
Christopher Keane, When the federal budget funds scientific research, it’s the economy that benefits read
Darwin’s importance (DONALD TRUMP AND THE COMING FALL OF AMERICAN EMPIRE (1h 8m) watch
Natalie Wolchover, Jack Stewart, David Pierce, Adam Rogers, Rhett Allain, Megan Molteni, Menaka Wilhelm, Nick Stockton,, Controversial New Theory Suggests Life Wasn’t a Fluke of Biology—It Was Physics read
Jeremy Lent, The dangerous delusions of Richard Dawkins read
F. William Engdahl, The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation “The author cogently reveals a diabolical World of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.” read
Dr. Dilts, Kurt Gödel’s Story read
Genes account for half of differences in social mobility read
Nick Stockton, Andy Greenberg, Steven Levy, Laura Mallonee, Menaka Wilhelm, Matt Simon, Eric Niiler, Megan Molteni, Your Brain Doesn’t Contain Memories. It Is Memories read

Samuel Redman, Behind closed doors: What the Piltdown Man hoax from 1912 can teach science today read
Eric Zuesse, America’s Top Scientists Confirm: U.S. Goal Now Is to Conquer Russia. “Disarming Enemies with a Surprise Nuclear First Strike.” The key turning-point that led up to the present crisis was the gradual and increasing acceptance, on the American side, of the concept of using nuclear weapons for conquest instead of only for deterrence read
Bill Nye, ‘Hey Bill Nye, If Scientific Discoveries Are Dangerous, Should They Be Censored?’ read
Shobita Parthasarathy, Obama administration’s big science and tech innovation: Socially engaged policy read
Harvard Astronomer: “We Seem to Be Cosmically Special, Perhaps Even Unique” (Howard Smith crit. Stephen Hawking) read
Maria Popova, The Greatest Science Books of 2016 read
Michael Segal, Ingenious: Richard Dawkins read
Hayley Dunning, Theory that challenges Einstein’s physics could soon be put to the test read
Jeremy Hance, Why don’t we grieve for extinct species? read
Christian de Quincey, Cosmological Models: The Beginning and End of the Universe: Examining the second law of thermodynamics, and exploring the universal concept of entropy. read

Drake Baer, A Few Reasons Science Is Afraid of Animal Consciousness read
Gage Skidmore, Donald Trump’s War on Science read
Drake Baer, Octopuses Are ‘the Closest We Will Come to Meeting an Intelligent Alien’ read
Ed Yong, How Trump could wage a war on scientific expertise – The mechanics of stripping empiricism out of America’s regulatory systems read
this page, portside.org, Scientists Against Science Denialism and Pseudoscience read
theintercept.com, How Self-Appointed Guardians of “Sound Science” Tip the Scales Toward Industry read
Celebrating Science With Silliness: The 2016 Ig Nobel Prizes read
Michael Roston, This Thanksgiving, Be Thankful for Science read
theintercept.com, How Self-Appointed Guardians of “Sound Science” Tip the Scales Toward Industry read
Dan Rather, Dan Rather: Now, More Than Ever, We Must Stand Up for Science read
Michael Lewis, How Two Trailblazing Psychologists Turned the World of Decision Science Upside Down read
Pam Weintraub, Laws or comets? read
Joel Mokyr, Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness? read
Mitsuaki Iwago, Unified theory of evolution read
“Charles Darwin“, How About a New Theory of Evolution with Less Natural Selection? read
Lauren Griffin, Why do science issues seem to divide us along party lines? read
Ankita Rao, What a Trump Presidency Means For Science read
Alison Howell, Neuroscience hasn’t been weaponized – it’s been a tool of war from the start read
Andrew A., Did Tectonic Activity Trigger the Ice Age? read
How Einstein and Schrödinger Conspired to Kill a Cat read
Vivian Gornick, rev. Siri Hustvedt Views the Human Condition Through Art and Science read
David Leonhardt, From Michael Lewis, the Story of Two Friends Who Changed How We Think About the Way We Think read
David Ferguson, ‘We’re not just making sh*t up’: Neil deGrasse Tyson slaughters anti-science crank at press event read
Peter Godfrey-Smith, The Mind of an Octopus read
Frans de Waal, The link between language and cognition is a red herring read
Mike White, To Defend Science, We Need to Depolarize It read
Marcelo Gleiser, Does Science Know Right From Wrong? read
Rodrigo Ledesma-Aguilar, Time crystals: how scientists created a new state of matter read
Tom Jacobs , Debunking Myths About Creativity and the Brain read
Mark A. R., High Stakes (risky chemicals) read
Michael White. This Is What Real Human Genetic Engineering Looks Like read
David Niose, Yes, It’s Time to Politicize Science read
Science for the People (new site) read
Neil deGrasse Tyson Slams Science Deniers for ‘Dismantling of Our informed Democracy’ read
Brad Reed, Weak, sick and stupid: Neil deGrasse Tyson fears what Trump’s science-slashing budget will do to America read
Dennis Overbye, Cosmos Controversy: The Universe Is Expanding, but How Fast? read
Richard Grigg, Evolution’s Error: How Human Nature Went Awry read
Lucas Reilly, The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of read
Bob Berwyn, How Scientists Can Make Facts Great Again read
CalTech, Testosterone makes men less likely to question their impulses read
prri, Most Believe Science in Conflict with Religion—Except Their Own Religious Beliefs read
Ahmed Alkhateeb, Science has outgrown the human mind and its limited capacities read
G.Washington U, Bonobos may be better representation of last common ancestor with humans than chimpsBonobos may be better representation of last common ancestor with humans than chimps read
Yesha Callahan, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Message to Politicians: ‘You Don’t Get to Deny Science’ watch
Tom Boggioni, ‘Save the world!’: Watch Bill Nye’s barn burner speech in pouring rain at DC March for Science rally (3m) watch

Robert J. Richards, The Evolutionary War. 2012 rev. of Pinker’ The Blank Slate read

Sharon Lerner, HOW A PROFESSIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER DISCOVERED THE LIES AND DECIDED TO FIGHT FOR SCIENCE read

Ricky Gervais: If Holy Books & Science Books Disappeared, Only One Would Return with the Same Info read

Science Is For Everyone (March for Science) read

Neil deGrasse Tyson: Scientific Illiteracy Threatens U.S. read

Derek Thompson, The Post-Human World read

Jeremy Sherman, Why Do People Cherry-Pick Which Science They Accept? read

Samuel Redman, Behind closed doors: What the Piltdown Man hoax from 1912 can teach science today read

Paul Braterman, Even on his birthday, don’t say Darwin unless you mean it read

“Science confirms faith” read

How migrations and other population dynamics could have shaped early human culture read