Posted inScience Sustainability

Global warming is real. Debate over.

If you have any doubts that global warming is real, read the April 3 TIME magazine cover story and “Be Worried, Be Very Worried.” The evidence is in. The debate is over. Global warming is happening. Humans are the major cause of it. And we’re heading for disaster. Yes, there are still global warming deniers like Oregon climatologist George Taylor. But he’s been outed by Willamette Week and I haven’t heard any “global warming is a myth” craziness from George lately. Maybe he’s turned to arguing that creationism and intelligent design are fact, while evolution is fiction. Or that the…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Transitional fossils do exist, you creationist crazies

Thank God for science, which came up with Prozac. I’m going to need a prescription soon if anti-science zealots keep getting me so anxious about where this country is heading. Three disturbing news items bit into my brain in the past 24 hours: (1) Last night “60 Minutes” had a segment on the FDA’s religiously-based decision to reject an application to let Plan B, the morning after pill, be dispensed without a prescription. Scientific experts overwhelmingly voted to make Plan B over-the-counter. The religious right objected. Guess who won? (2) On CNN this morning I read “Priests urge stem cell…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Intelligent designers are out to Christianize America

Advocates of intelligent design aren’t really scientists. They’re theologians. And they’re determined to root every last vestige of non-Christianity out of American culture. That’s the conclusion I’ve come to after reading the first three chapters of a book that has been sitting on my “to read” bookshelf for three years. I picked up “Signs of Intelligence” a few days ago, wanting to learn from intelligent design proponents—not critics—what this movement is all about. An editor of this collection of essays is William A. Dembski, one of the few real scientists who believes in intelligent design. He’s a professor of Science…
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Posted inScience

Estrogen, it’s what men lust for

Science has confirmed the obvious: “Men just want someone young and pretty.” So says evolutionary psychologist Nick Neave about research which found that women with higher levels of estrogen were rated as more attractive, healthy, and feminine-looking than those with lower levels. A feminine face is rounder with gentle features, big eyes, small nose and big lips. It’s an indicator of reproductive fitness, according to the researchers. Evolutionarily speaking, beauty helps men identify women who will bear them large numbers of children. Not that this is Bill Maher’s conscious motivation. But his inner caveman is wordlessly screaming, “Reproduce! Pretty and…
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Posted inScience

Listen to the Big Bang

Thanks to astronomer Mark Whittle, you can listen to the Big Bang’s first million years of primordial sound, compressed into ten seconds and shifted up 50 octaves into the human range of hearing. Click on this page’s first sound file. Even on my tinny laptop speakers, I got a chill up my spine hearing this reproduction of what Whittle calls the universe’s primal scream (this link is a fine non-technical description of his scientific work). The universe was born in silence and soon grew into an awesome roar. Whittle says: Have you ever wondered what the "Big Bang" actually sounded…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Listen to the Dalai Lama, science-fearing Christians

This is my fantasy: that fundamentalist Christians will read the Dalai Lama’s new book, “The Universe in a Single Atom,” and be converted to his enlightened attitude toward science and spirituality. James Dobson, just say the word and I’ll be happy to mail you a copy. I bought this book to give to myself on my birthday, which was last Friday. I’ve just started reading it, but by page three I already was cheering the Dalai Lama’s words: My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of…
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Posted inDogs Science

Animal instinct

Yesterday some neighbors were treated, if that’s the right word, to a display of our dog’s kinky sexual behavior. Well, probably “kinky” isn’t the right word either. It was just instinctual sexual behavior. Heck, leave out “sexual” too, because it seems that female dogs who hump other dogs (male or female) are motivated by a desire for dominance, not sex. Regardless, it still was disconcerting to be talking to a man and his pre-teen daughter while our dog and their yellow Lab calmly sniffed each other at first, then to look down and see that Serena had mounted Ginger and…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Science

Kansas is to evolution as Oregon is to global warming

I’ve been proudly wearing my “Kansas Museum of Science” T-shirt that ridicules the Kansas School Board’s attempts to put creationism on an equal footing with evolution. But in the area of global warming, Oregon also is a poster child for faith-based science. I can envision a mocking “OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences” T-shirt showing an ostrich with its head in the sand saying, “What global warming? I don’t see any global warming!” For the Oregon Climate Service is based at Oregon State University. It is headed by the state climatologist, George Taylor, who—as I’ve written about before—is a…
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Posted inPhilosophy Science

Me and the Milky Way

I’m trying to put my problems into perspective. New Scientist magazine is helping me out. The current issue has a great article on the Milky Way galaxy. This is where I live. You too. When I consider the big picture, really big, of what surrounds us, earthly aggravations look a lot less immense. In my saner moments, I’m able to juxtapose what gripes me with the galactic point of view. Then I see how miniscule are the mole hills that I’ve been regarding as mountains. [All quotes are from the New Scientist article.] I’m going to be fifty-seven this year.…
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Posted inEntertainment Science

“What the #$*! Do We Know?!”

Great question. Great movie. Short answer: not much. Made in Portland, and starring the wonderfully expressive actress Marlee Matlin (an Oscar winner for “Children of a Lesser God”), “What the #$*! Do We Know?!” mixes together a fictional storyline with non-fictional expositions of quantum physics, neuroscience, and other findings from the cutting edge of science. Having written a book about the relation of the new physics and old mystics (“God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder,” which I’ve revised and am working to get back-in-print), this was a movie that I couldn’t miss. Unfortunately, lots of other people will. I only found two…
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Posted inScience

Putting things in perspective

A few nights ago, when I was just about at the peak of my feeling-sorry-for-myself bell curve, since we’ve had to put up with snow/ice/power outages for a couple of weeks now, I picked up two science magazines that helped me put things in perspective. In the November 22 issue of New Scientist (a great weekly science magazine published in Great Britain, so you get a continental, meaning liberal/anti-Bush, perspective in the editorials) I read the cheerily titled piece, “Doomsday Scenario.” Here I learned that all of humanity’s advances during the last 10,000 years have occurred during wonderfully temperate, and…
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Posted inScience

Still time to be part of the Elegant Universe

If you didn’t catch the first two hours of PBS’ “The Elegant Universe” with string theorist Brian Greene, the final third hour is coming up from 8-9 pm on Tuesday, November 4. We haven’t finishing watching the initial episode, but what we’ve seen has been great. I’ve read most of Greene’s book by the same name, and am passingly familiar with string theory. Still, there’s no substitute for special effects, and having complex physics/cosmology explained by an expert with a gift for communicating. Greene can write; he can talk; he’s likable and expressive; and he’s also a top-notch scientist—a rare…
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Posted inDogs Science

Serena renaming not in the works

At least, the past few days have convinced us that the family pet definitely shouldn’t be renamed Thor, a.k.a. the Viking thunder god. Notwithstanding Serena’s proud half German-Shepherd bloodline (the other half being Labrador, though her Lab DNA must be missing all retriever instincts, given how much time and energy I spend retrieving tennis balls), we’ve learned that she is a total dog-wuss in the presence of thunder and lightning. Here in the Camp Sherman environs of central Oregon, we’ve had some impressive thunderstorms the past few days. (A few trees reportedly caught fire on Black Butte last night, but…
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Posted inScience Writing/Weblogs

Chimps join we “Homo’s”

If you haven’t read the news about chimpanzees being even more closely related to humans than was previously thought, here’s a link to an article in the online version of Discovery magazine. Serious thought is being given to adding a species to the Homo genus, of which Homo sapiens currently is the only member. I love the idea of having chimpanzees join us in the Homo club. We humans need reminding that we are animals, and should be treating our kin with more respect. Like, by not eating them. Or hunting them. Or mistreating them in zoos and circuses. Reading…
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Posted inPhilosophy Science

Near-death experience and nothingness

Recently an acquaintance forwarded me an email message about a particularly amazing near-death experience. All near-death experiences are amazing, of course, because death is such: amazing, the mother of all mysteries. I've always been interesed in NDE's since I have a bit of a personal interest, as do we all, in what happens after we take our last breath. Death has a way of capturing your attention, thats for sure. But most NDE's bear a distressingly close resemblance to the nature of the person having the experience. Christians tend to see Jesus, New Agers a soul guide, and so on.…
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Posted inPhilosophy Science

Soulful science

For an interesting, if dense, scientific consideration of soul, consciousness, and Platonic truth, read "Morality at the Planck Scale," a chat with Stuart Hameroff. Reading this Metanexus posting, I recalled that Hameroff is the anesthesiologist whose work Roger Penrose cites in his equally dense (and much longer, being a book) "Shadows of the Mind." The basic notion of these brilliant guys is that teeny-tiny microtubules in the brain's nerve cells are small enough to involve quantum effects at the teeniest-tiniest level of physical reality, which is the Planck scale. This means that there is a connection between us, our brain,…
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Posted inScience

New sexual anxiety: length matters

Length of the index and ring fingers, that is. I learned this last night, watching a Discovery Channel program about the differences between men and women (I know, I know...you'd think, at the age of 54, I wouldn't need such education). One experiment with boys and girls was highly encouraging: they dumped a bunch of $100 bills from a balcony and filmed a group of young boys and a group of young girls separately trying to catch the bills before they hit the ground. The boys caught six bills, and the girls caught zero, nada, zilch, which goes a long…
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