The remains of a man who died 10,000 years ago were found in a cave in England in 1903 and a tooth from the skull was recently DNA sequenced to reveal the individual's dark skin and blue eye colour. The man, known as Cheddar Man was a member of Haplogroup U5. While other older skeletons found in...
JPL co-founder Jack Parsons was a brilliant rocket scientist who was also a follower of Aleister Crowley. He became a leader in Crowley's religion in the US and was later conned out of a huge sum by L.Ron Hubbard who made off with Parsons' girlfriend in the deal. Blackballed during the Red Scare,...
I went out last night with my youngest for a meteor shower watching party which had been scheduled from 9 to 11 up at the school. It was colder than its been all season, but the sky was clear and the moon was last quarter and hadn't risen as yet. We bundled up really well, brought out some camp c...
We still have a couple months of hurricane season left on the east coast and we recently lost GOES-13, the geostationary weather satellite that used to provide high-quality satellite images of the Atlantic. There was only a 21 hour period of no coverage, but it should serve as a wake up call abo...
I wonder how Hitler would have responded to the following. Dark skin is well adapted to tropical, unforested regions where ultraviolet radiation is particularly intense. Lighter skin makes a person more susceptible to skin cancers from this kind of radiation, making them less likely to survive and...
Today's APOD (Astronomy picture of the day) is of Vesta, a rocky asteroid named after the Roman goddess of home and hearth. Vesta is the second most massive asteroid in our solar system, but the first to be visited by the Dawn spacecraft which finally arrived there in July after launch in 2...
Getting home late tonight we stepped out of the car and looked up Southward to behold the ominous (and luminous) sight of the Moon almost to the full against a backdrop of wispy clouds directly over the house. I quickly made plans with my eldest to meet in the backyard with the binocs for some im...
I was having a small meeting at my desk at about 5 minutes before 2 when I felt my leg wobble. I thought at first that I was having a muscle spasm and shifted weight in my seat. It didn't stop, and I lost track of the conversation when I noticed my monitors swaying. Mentioning it to those nearb...
OK, we're finally getting closer to the creepy merging of biology and technology that I've been speculating about for so many years. In this quick video, Scientists at the University of Reading describe how they are connecting neurological material (via bluetooth!) to a tiny robot with sensors to s...
It isn't often anymore that I run across a story which can elicit in me that special willingness to entertain a wondrous (and maybe preposterous) explanation for otherwise unexplained phenomena. Of late I find those moments of wonder few and far between with most inexplicable events quickly explain...
The land in Shoreham upon which Nikola Tesla's lab still stands is about to be cleared for sale. Tesla's "magic tower" (which at one time could be seen from New Haven, CT) is no longer standing but its concrete base is still there. There's a great article about the history of the property and Tesl...
Last month news broke that hackers had illegally obtained and released to the internet about 160MB of private email correspondences between scientists at the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The timing of the release was suspicious because it coincided with preparations for the Copenhagen...
Though somewhat dated, this BBC Horizon special on Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) is worth watching despite a short interview about half way through with a guy who seems a bit cracked. Tesla was an enigma. Born in Serbia, he eventually became one of America's greatest electrical engineers and inventors (...
Consider this a private mental note to the idiot I talked to a couple days ago who argued that "Evolution is just a theory": Evolution as a process that occurs in nature is a fact. More than that, it is an historical reality, much as the knowledge that the earth revolves around the Sun is now consi...
The New York Times has a story about how energy secretary Steven Chu says the US can easily save as much as 20% of our national energy costs for air conditioning. The solution isn't rocket science - just make sure that buildings in the south have white roofs. Since dark roofs absorb more sunligh...
I went on a field trip with my Structural Geology class (SUNYSB) in 2001 and Professor Davis passed out a collection of notes and diagrams for reference on the trip. Since I travel the Thruway often, I have carried these notes with me several times for reference to some of the more interesting road...
The SCI FI channel is trying to force the government to release details about a reported UFO landing near the town in Western Pennsylvania where I was born. The event made local headlines just about 9 months before I was born. I always wondered why I didn't look much like my parents. Read on for l...
I found the following links on http://slashdot.org tonight and thought you might find them interesting (as an aside, I found it interesting that the Journal Nature has a website and you can read it online)
Original Nature article [link dead, 2008]
Seth, Aron, Ned...
