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Category: science
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10 GMO Myths and Realities
So I don’t have time for a post today – I’m fighting off the flu still, but was able to get back to work at last. Still leaves me absolutely wrung out, though. So you get this excellent article refuting some of the commonly used arguments against GMO and glyphosate. The science, time and again,…
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Being Moderate
There are times that I look at the world around me and wonder if my commitment to remaining moderate is in itself a radical way of life. Originally it wasn’t a life philosophy, just a bit of Bible verse ‘do all things in moderation’ but the older I get, and the more I see the…
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One Step Closer to Brain Ships
Who hasn’t read a science fiction story involving brain implants that allow the characters to control computer interfaces? The best known, I suspect, at least to me, is the Brain Ship series, where severely physically disabled people get the chance to have adventures through their interface with a starship. Now, current science has made strides…
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While I Lay Not Sleeping
While I’m writing this novella I’ve been using phrases from hymns and Bible verses as chapter headers. I wasn’t really sure why, until about halfway into it, and then I figured it out. But one of the header lines was ‘Morning comes, but also night” from Isaiah 21:12. I was contemplating that as I lay…
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Sugar Cookies: It’s Science!
The First Reader gave me a lovely Christmas present. When he told me about it, he apologized. “You’re going to have to do more work when you get it.” On Christmas morning when I unwrapped it, I understood. Cookie cutters, clever little science cutters with fiddly impression-making bits inside them. A test tube, microscope, Erlenmeyer…
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The Human Desire for Answers
Life doesn’t always have answers. Some of life’s greatest mysteries have been solved, yes, but many more have not. The human drive to seek out new knowledge, find answers, and lay to rest false ideas is a grand one. It’s a drive that will hopefully take us to the stars, and beyond. However, like any…
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Miasma
Bad air. Malaria. We fear what lurks in the dark, in the creeping tendrils of fog, hiding in plain sight… We humans used to flee the cities in summer, to get away from the bad air. Sicknesses ran rampant in the warmest times. In the times when the fog lifted off the river and ports and…
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Forensics at Your Fingertips
I’m actually not talking about fingerprints, today. Although that’s an interesting, and somewhat fraught, topic in forensics, for one very good reason: there is no established minimum. You can, in theory, take a mere three or four points of reference matching an unknown print to a known, and call it identified. That would be silly,…
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The Elephant’s Child
I was talking with a friend and was reminded of why I became a scientist. Why I have always wanted to be a scientist of some form or another, nearly for as long as I could remember. Well, except for those two years where I wanted to be a fighter pilot. But that didn’t even…
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Glyphosate and Science in the Courtroom
“glyphosate is unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk to humans from exposure through the diet.” — WHO and FAO Meeting, 2016 So why, in light of the above conclusion after extensive and repeated studies trying to prove that glyphosate is carcinogenic and genotoxic, (including an arguably fraudulent conclusion by the IARC that it was, later revoked…
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Efferia pogonias
The Robber Fly, with his characteristic facial hair, is an accomplished predator – the hawk of the fly world, preying on a variety of smaller insects. (identification based on Herschel Raney’s site)