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Category: Science/mathematics

Science, and government scientists, suffer under Trump

Science, and government scientists, suffer under Trump

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Joe Davidson writes: In an administration skilled in myth making, science suffers. Consider findings from the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy organization that surveyed thousands of scientific experts in the federal government. The first line of its new report paints a dismal picture of the place science holds under President Trump: “A year and a half into the Trump administration, its record on science policy in several agencies and departments is abysmal.” There are a couple of bright…

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The nastiest feud in science

The nastiest feud in science

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Bianca Bosker writes: While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the [dinosaurs’] extinction, [Gerta] Keller [a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton] remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978…

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Thinking about emergence

Thinking about emergence

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Paul Humphreys writes: If you construct a Lego model of the University of London’s Senate House – the building that inspired the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four – the Lego blocks themselves remain unchanged. Take apart the structure, reassemble the blocks in the shape of the Great Pyramid of Giza or the Eiffel Tower, and the shape, weight and colour of the blocks stay the same. This approach, applied to the world at large, is known…

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Anthropocene vs Meghalayan: Why geologists are fighting over whether humans are a force of nature

Anthropocene vs Meghalayan: Why geologists are fighting over whether humans are a force of nature

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Many scientists believe it is impossible to ignore the human impact on the planet when defining the geological age we live in today. Shutterstock By Mark Maslin, UCL and Simon Lewis, UCL The Earth discovered it was living in a new slice of time called the Meghalayan Age in July 2018. But the announcement by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) confused and angered scientists all around the world. In the 21st century, it claimed, we are still officially…

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Science and the Loss of Confidence Project

Science and the Loss of Confidence Project

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Dalmeet Singh Chawla writes: In September 2016, the psychologist Dana Carney came forward with a confession: She no longer believed the findings of a high-profile study she co-authored in 2010 to be true. The study was about “power-posing” — a theory suggesting that powerful stances can psychologically and physiologically help one when under high-pressure situations. Carney’s co-author, Amy Cuddy, a psychologist at Harvard University, had earned much fame from power poses, and her 2012 TED talk on the topic is…

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What are the limits of manipulating nature?

What are the limits of manipulating nature?

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In Scientific American, Neil Savage writes: Matt Trusheim flips a switch in the darkened laboratory, and an intense green laser illuminates a tiny diamond locked in place beneath a microscope objective. On a computer screen an image appears, a fuzzy green cloud studded with brighter green dots. The glowing dots are color centers in the diamond—tiny defects where two carbon atoms have been replaced by a single atom of tin, shifting the light passing through from one shade of green…

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The next big discovery in astronomy? Scientists probably found it years ago – but they don’t know it yet

The next big discovery in astronomy? Scientists probably found it years ago – but they don’t know it yet

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An artist’s illustration of a black hole “eating” a star. NASA/JPL-Caltech By Eileen Meyer, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Earlier this year, astronomers stumbled upon a fascinating finding: Thousands of black holes likely exist near the center of our galaxy. The X-ray images that enabled this discovery weren’t from some state-of-the-art new telescope. Nor were they even recently taken – some of the data was collected nearly 20 years ago. No, the researchers discovered the black holes by digging through…

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The Dreamtime, science and narratives of Indigenous Australia

The Dreamtime, science and narratives of Indigenous Australia

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Lake Mungo and the surrounding Willandra Lakes of NSW were established around 150,000 years ago. from www.shutterstock.com David Lambert, Griffith University This article is an extract from an essay Owning the science: the power of partnerships in First Things First, the 60th edition of Griffith Review. We’re publishing it as part of our occasional series Zoom Out, where authors explore key ideas in science and technology in the broader context of society and humanity. Scientific and Indigenous knowledge systems have…

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Should scientists advocate on the issue of climate change?

Should scientists advocate on the issue of climate change?

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Ingfei Chen writes: I was recently chatting with a friend who specializes in science education when we touched upon a conundrum: Researchers who study climate change grasp the dire need to cut planet-warming carbon emissions that come from burning fossil fuels, yet many of them shrink from voicing their views at public events or to the press. The stock-in-trade of scientists is their objectivity, my friend explained. The worry is that advocating for an agenda may diminish their credibility, hurt…

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Colossal cosmic collision alters understanding of early universe

Colossal cosmic collision alters understanding of early universe

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Reuters reports: Astronomers have detected the early stages of a colossal cosmic collision, observing a pile-up of 14 galaxies 90 percent of the way across the observable universe in a discovery that upends assumptions about the early history of the cosmos. Researchers said on Wednesday the galactic mega-merger observed 12.4 billion light-years away from Earth occurred 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang that gave rise to the universe. Astronomers call the object a galactic protocluster, a precursor to the…

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Gaia mission releases map of more than a billion stars – here’s what it can teach us

Gaia mission releases map of more than a billion stars – here’s what it can teach us

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Gaia’s view of our Milky Way and neighbouring galaxies. ESA/Gaia/DPAC, CC BY-SA By George Seabroke, UCL Most of us have looked up at the night sky and wondered how far away the stars are or in what direction they are moving. The truth is, scientists don’t know the exact positions or velocities of the vast majority of the stars in the Milky Way. But now a new tranche of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, aiming to map…

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China’s great leap forward in science

China’s great leap forward in science

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Philip Ball writes: I first met Xiaogang Peng in the summer of 1992 at Jilin University in Changchun, in the remote north-east of China, where he was a postgraduate student in the department of chemistry. He told me that his dream was to get a place at a top American lab. Now, Xiaogang was evidently smart and hard-working – but so, as far as I could see, were most Chinese science students. I wished him well, but couldn’t help thinking…

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