Science

Evolution was on the march last week, crushing the creationist crazies and intelligent design dogmatists. Will they now give up their anti-science jihad? Not likely. Unfounded religious beliefs are addictive, like other drugs. They relieve the anxiety that comes from living in a complex, mysterious, uncertain world. When the unknown can be banished with the wave of a faith-filled hand, that’s damn appealing. It's wrong. But still appealing. Myself, I prefer reality. And that’s what evolution is: real. More evidence of this has arrived via two breakthroughs: a transitional fossil that shows how fish evolved into land animals has been…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…