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By Julia Belluz Over the weekend, a Cleveland Clinic doctorâs anti-vaccine blog post sparked a social media furor, prompting the prestigious medical center to issue a statement reaffirming its trust in vaccines. In an op-ed on Cleveland.com, entitled “Make 2017 the year to avoid toxins (good luck) and master your domain,” Dr. Daniel Neides, the medical director …
By Emma Green The 115th Congress is back in session, and at least one thing looks the same as usual: 91 percent of its members identify as Christians. This proportion has basically remained constant for more than five decades, as long as this kind of data has been available, according to a new study from …
Jan 9, 2017 “Thomas Jefferson was a deist, living just like an atheist with no religious practices, but believing there had to be some kind of starter god or impersonal force that got everything going. The deists were the pre-Darwinian freethinkers, lacking a model for the origin of life. But Jefferson got it right about instincts, anticipating the …
By Steph Yin This is how weâre taught to count as children: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Yet our innate grasp of quantities isnât linear. Weâre more likely to experience the world in ratios, like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Itâs easier for us to see the difference between one and two marbles than 15 …
By William J. Broad Dozens of the nationâs top scientists wrote to President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday to urge him not to dismantle the Iran deal, calling it a strong bulwark against any Iranian bid to make nuclear arms. âWe urge you to preserve this critical U.S. strategic asset,â the letter read. The 37 …
By Robinson Meyer Americans who are concerned about climate change have long found themselves in an unenviable position: They have to debate about the existence of a debate. For about two decades, the vast majority of climate scientists have agreed that human industrial activity is forcing the planet to warm. For about as long, some …
By Sarah Kaplan For dinosaurs, hatching eggs was a long-term commitment. A nest pinned the parents down to the spot where the eggs were laid. As long as they were incubating their eggs, they couldn’t venture off in search of food or to flee predators. And their eggs incubated for a very long time. That’s according …
By Conor Friedersdorf Professor Keith Humphreys of Stanford University does not believe that speech is threatened on Americaâs campuses. Heâs never perceived a meaningful threat himself. And he is very antagonistic toward several of us who believe that important values and vulnerable people will suffer unless more is done to protect free expression. His posture …
By Joel Achenbach The Trump people are taking over NASA, and itâs hard to predict how this will play out for the agency’s human spaceflight program. Thatâs in part because the usual rules of partisanship and ideology donât apply in outer space. Above the stratosphere, thereâs no left and right. (If anything, things are somewhat …
By Ed Yong When the former nurse Jamie Tyrone learned that she carried two copies of a gene called ApoE4, she âlost hope and direction,â and her âdays were filled with fear, anxiety and sadness.â It meant that as she got older, she would likely develop Alzheimerâs disease, as her father had done before her. …
Author and Observer writer Robert McCrum loves a good list. Thus he has crafted a definitive selection of essential works of non-fiction, classic titles he believes have had a decisive influence on the shaping of our imagination â economically, socially, culturally and politically. The countdown starts here. His No 10 choice is The Selfish Gene, …
By Brooks Hays MOSCOW, Dec. 28 (UPI) — Scientists in Russia have calculated the rate of dark matter decay, explaining the decline of dark matter in the universe since the Big Bang. Cosmologists and astrophysicists are constantly trying to soothe disagreements between their various models. Often, a fault line between the early and modern universe …