Science

By Eric Holthaus   A new study out on Monday makes an audacious claim: Hurricanes can be made safer just by changing their names. If you haven’t seen this headline yet, I defy you to guess the reason. Go on … OK, fine. I’ll tell you, but you won’t believe me. Published in the Proceedings of the …

By University of Oxford   Spider silk transmits vibrations across a wide range of frequencies so that, when plucked like a guitar string, its sound carries information about prey, mates, and even the structural integrity of a web. The discovery was made by researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Strathclyde, and Sheffield who fired bullets …

By Joseph Castro   Melted plastic trash on beaches can sometimes mix with sediment, basaltic lava fragments and organic debris (such as shells) to produce a new type of rock material, new research shows. The new material, dubbed plastiglomerate, will forever remain in Earth’s rock record, and in the future may serve as a geological …

In science, apathy might well be the key to irrationality.   No matter the brilliance of the idea, if we do not explain it then it’s worthless. No matter the manner of the explanation, if it can’t be demonstrated then it is pointless. And no matter the desirability of the idea, if it can’t be …

We must stop talking about facts in science as belief systems. It is said; all to often by educated or enlightened people in the media that they believe in climate change and the same rhetoric is often used for evolution. There is a problem with the public understanding of science and because of this lack …

My previous article on animal ethics elicited quite a debate on this site and its social media sister-pages. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to look at one of the more interesting arguments against explicitly promoting animal ethics. Hasn’t rationalism got enough to do without having to champion the cause of animals? There are many different …

It happened. Bill Nye faced off against Ken Ham to discuss evolution versus creation. Though this had been strongly advised against, it carried on as planned. Of course, it should have because the fallout of pulling out a debate would have been worse than the debate itself. So what happened during the debate? Did it …

Preparing for this article, I googled the word “meme” and generated 78,000,000 results! Looking back on 2013, the BBC published an article on-line listing its selection of the leading memes of the past year. Anyone who spends any amount of time surfing the internet will almost certainly have come across examples of that rather disreputable …

Following on from the huge success of the first Starmus “50 years in space” festival in Tenerife in June, 2011, which featured keynote presentations from Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, Alexei Leonov, Richard Dawkins, Kip Thorne and George Smoot. We are very pleased to announce the second Starmus 2014 Festival, the finest combination of …

For centuries, religion played no small part in the needless suffering of animals. In the work of religious scholars and philosophers – most memorably, that of Descartes – human kind was taught to believe that animals were nothing more than soulless automaton; renewable resources with which we can do what we wish. Indeed we refer …

The discovery of an ancient, hominid hand bone, a third metacarpal with styloid process, has sent a flurry of excitement through the paleoanthropological world, and could answer some important questions about the development of tool-making. Carol Ward, of the University of Missouri, published the find online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences …

Scientists should not debate creationists. Period. This may sound harsh but let's start by looking at what sparked this statement. TV personality and science advocate Bill Nye (Bill Nye the Science Guy) has accepted an invitation to debate Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis / The Creation Museum on February 4, 2014 at the Creation …