Diverse perspectives on science and medicine
DANCING IN THE STREETS OVER NEARBY PLANET PROXIMA B It’s now perfectly respectable to talk about interstellar travel, says Cornell astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger. She’s coauthor of an unpublished paper speculating about how life could survive
A NASA BEST; JUNO SPACE PROBE HITS JUPITER ORBIT PERFECTLY Inserting the space probe Juno into Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, Independence Day, the US’s most sacred holiday, wasn’t accidental of course. NASA is always
IS POLITICAL SCIENCE REALLY A SCIENCE? The social sciences, especially psychology, have been routinely disparaged in this space, the reasons being chiefly lack of rigor and sloppy methodology. (There are also noteworthy cases of outright
Last Friday, On Science Blogs was given over to the many “best of science” lists of 2015. This week’s post is about what bloggers foresee for 2016–and beyond. THE CANCER MOONSHOT: WELCOME TO 2016 Vice-President
TOP SCIENCE NEWS OF 2015: CRISPR VS. PLUTO In the last On Science Blogs 2015 post, I quoted NASA Watch’s Keith Cowing complaining that, in the public voting for Science‘s Breakthrough of the Year, the
WATERY MARS AGAIN Emily Lakdawalla thinks everybody should calm down about NASA’s much-trumpeted latest discovery of liquid water on Mars. The discovery, which is probably not flowing water but rather something more like damp sand,
Even with Iran nukes, and Greece surrender, and Donald Trump to absorb you this week, you can hardly have escaped immersion in NASA’s New Horizons mission and the triumphant Pluto flyby. Still, here are some
The state of science and medicine in the State of the Union As David Malakoff observed at ScienceInsider, science is never the centerpiece of the President’s annual State of the Union speech. On Tuesday
Lords of the zings I don’t know why the new papers about the “hobbit,” the 2003 find of tiny ancient bones from the Indonesian island of Flores, have made such a splash. No, I take
Everything you ever wanted to know about Kepler 186f The planet Kepler 186f is 500 light years away, might have liquid water, and orbits a red dwarf star. Red dwarfs are cooler, yes, and