Now on ScienceBlogs: Will Quantum Fusion Save the Day?
"Eat the Sun": Sun-worshiping fantasy versus reality Almost exactly a year ago, I came across a bit of woo so incredible, so spectacularly stupid and unbelievable, that I dedicated one of the last segments I've done in a long time of Your Friday Dose of Woo to...
A very good documentary about human brains and brain evolution
Some Very Cool Card Magic I recently attended the Gathering for Gardner conference in Atlanta, held every two years to honor Martin Gardner. Gardner was a prolific writer on a variety of topics, especially mathematics, magic and pseudoscience. Since those just happen to be three...
"Proof" is not what most people think it is Proof. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. That thought kept running through my mind as I perused an article appearing on an antivaccine website. Another thought that rant through my...
Looking for Jesus in all the wrong places I have a soft spot for pareidolia, as regular readers know. It amuses me to no end to see Jesus and Mary popping up on freeway underpasses, tacos, toast, pieces of sheet metal, Lava Lamps, and the like. I thought...
The antivaccine movement resurrects the zombie that is the "autism epidemic" If there's one thing that I've learned that I can always--and I do mean always--rely on from the antivaccine movement, it's that its members will always be all over any new study regarding vaccines and/or autism in an effort to...
Booze and Brain Damage There are many factors that can drive an organism to drink. Some might have a genetic predisposition—others might want to poison a parasitic wasp before it consumes them from the inside out. On ERV, new research shows "the epigenetics of...
Mooney now agrees with us - Denialists deserve ridicule, not debate He had to realize Nisbett's framing was worthless and write a whole book on defective Republican reasoning to realize it...
LSD, Hangover Cure? Alcoholic Anonymous founder Bill Wilson put forth the controversial idea of using LSD, yes, LSD to reduce alcohol abuse. Is there any scientific evidence for this?...
Insight into Science and Spirituality with Festival Performer and "Time Warp" Host Jeff Lieberman This April, Jeff Lieberman, artist, scientist and host of Discovery Channel's "Time Warp", will be performing at the 2012 USA Science and Engineering Festival with his show "Beyond Your Imagination". In "Beyond Your Imagination", Lieberman will give you a tour like no other - a tour of yourself. Using advanced technologies and scientific discoveries, we will see just how amazing you are - beyond anything you could imagine! Lieberman explains that "Science doesn't just tell us about the world outside -- it also reveals a deeper understanding of who we are as human beings, and how we see the world around us."
Are Liberals really more likely to accept science than conservatives Part II? About a month ago I asked if denialism is truly more frequent on the right or is it that the...
Psychic Sent to Prison for 5 years for Fraud - So can we jail them all now? Via Ed I find out about a Psychic in Colorado sentenced to 5 years for fraud. BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4)- A...
I'm Too Sexy for Your... Virus? Or, Immunity as it Relates to Peacocks News reports: "Higher testosterone makes your immune system better! Higher testosterone is sexy! Women are attracted to a better immune system!" As you might suspect, it's a good deal more complicated than that.
Time For Another Chess Post... Me and my homeys got together last week for one more run at the US Amateur Team East: The fellow in the Rocky Balboa hat is Ned Walthall. In the middle is Curt Kimbler, followed by Doug Proll on the...
Vaccines and autism: Same as it ever was If there's one thing I've learned during the last seven years about the antivaccine crowd invested in the idea that vaccines cause autism, it's that it reacts with extreme hostility to any sort of studies that cast doubt upon their...
Chess in Parsippany! Well, I'm off to sunny Parsippany, New Jersey to participate in the annual chess extravaganza known as the US Amateur Team East. It's the best tournament of the year, and, frankly, pretty much the only one I still play in....
Genetics Guard Against Alcohol-Induced Brain Damage MRI scans of mice reveal that heavy drinking can cause lasting damage in genetically vulnerable brains. Without a specific dopamine receptor, critical regions of the brain shrank over the course of the study.
Placebo versus the Law of Attraction Since 2012 was rung in a month and a half ago, I've been writing a lot more about placebo medicine than I have in a while. Specifically, I've written a lot more about placebo effects than usual. This proliferation of...
Happy Valentine's Day Everyone A song about that creepy-uppy kind of love...
Headless Man Found in Topless Bar Mystery Solved? Imagine the killer from the infamous "Headless Man Found in Topless Bar" murder was convicted using a photograph of the face of the victim, with reliability rivaling that of DNA analysis. Impossible?...
Just in Time for Valentine's Day: The Science Behind the Kiss It's both funny and remarkable how some of the most simple and natural acts we do each day are teeming in science.
How to improve learning There is a learning technique pioneered in language studies by Pimsleur which makes sense: You learn a word (or some other thing) and over time forget it, and the "forgetting curve" is steep. But, if you re-encounter that same information while the curve is descending...
Modern Neuroscience Verifies a Peircian Idea I know some of you are Piercians, and some of you are interested in Neuroscience. So, without comment I give you this abstract of a recent paper: Past experience provides a rich source of predictive information about the world that could be used to guide...
Beauty and Brains Tease Sources: PetaPixel and Photo Vatika (Sony India) No, I'm not the first to discovery this extraordinary brain trick. I did want to share this, though, as an example of how our brain processes and stores images. Give it a...
Placebo effects are "proof" that God exists? A couple of weeks ago, I made the observation that there seems to have been a--shall we say?--realignment in one of the central arguments that proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine" (IM) make. Back in the...
“The average Russian male, however, seems to be vacillating between wanting to be with with the Russian female and wanting to be with the Italian male, while the Russian female is slowly moving away from him...This graph is 'dancefloor, viewed from above', right?” Phillip IV on Another Reason for the Russian Bride Phenomenon
Orac 04.13.2012
PZ Myers 06.17.2009
Orac 04.30.2012
Tim Lambert 09.12.2011
ERV 11.26.2011
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Some engineers use cranes and steel to make their designs reality, but synthetic biologists engineer using tools on a different scale: DNA and the other molecular components of living cells. Synthetic biology uses cellular systems and structures to produce artificial models based on natural order. Read these posts from the ScienceBlogs archives for more:
Pharyngula May 30, 2007
The Loom January 31, 2008
Discovering Biology in a Digital World July 2, 2006