A collection of 371 posts
Overly broad masking requirements are at best useless, and possibly harmful, since they can cause confusion and prompt at least some to rebel against masking if the practice is too onerous or impractical.
The developments of the search engine and social media follow the usual path of innovation: incremental, gradual, serendipitous, and inexorable; few eureka moments or sudden breakthroughs.
Charles Murray believes in the values of Enlightenment: science and knowledge, truth and progress.
Biological sex in humans is a binary system.
Ridley presents an inspiring view of history, because we are not merely the passive recipients of thousands of years of innovations. We can contribute to this endless chain of progress, if we so choose.
The chaos of any moment, especially of a moment that requires one to spend a great deal of time alone, is an opportunity to engage with this deliberative way of living.
Dr Jemma Geoghegan, a virologist at the University of Otago, talks to Jonathan Kay about how viruses evolve and the lessons we can learn about social distancing from fish, dogs and rabbits. She is the co-author of several papers in evolutionary virology, including ‘Hidden diversity and evolution of viruses in
It was only after coronavirus proved so much more deadly in China and Italy that governments outside of Asia took dramatic actions including radical social distancing and stay-at-home orders.
The blind struggle against infectious diseases began to end when the microscope allowed for the discovery of the bacilli responsible for anthrax, tuberculosis, and cholera in the late 19th century.
To plan for problems ahead, such as droughts, was a better survival strategy than expecting an eternity of bountiful harvests.
Do we have the right to supplant Martian life with our own? Yes—because a human life has more value than that of a bacterium.
There is also a wide range of literature regarding sex differences in interest, which is also complicated, and which may explain a larger portion of the sex discrepancy in STEM careers.
Everyday fudging of experimental data in laboratories cannot exclusively be explained by researchers’ desire to get an intuited result in a better-than-perfect form, as was the case with Mendel, or to distinguish themselves through the accuracy of their measurements, as with Millikan.
The International Rice Research Institute developed numerous different Golden Rice strains back-crossed into commonly grown varieties, behind tough security barriers because of constant threats from activists encouraged by Greenpeace.
Government and policy would be better off if they were presided over and/or dictated by technical experts.