It’s been a decade since Ken Jennings appeared on 75 consecutive “Jeopardy!” shows and won $2.5 million (and more in several return visits for special tournaments). He writes a weekly trivia quiz for Slate, compiles the Kennections puzzle for Parade, and is the best-selling author of “Brainiac,” “Ken Jennings’ Trivia Almanac,” and “Because I Said […]
Regarding the explosion of Antares and the crash of SpaceShipTwo last week, Bob Robinson e-mails: I was discussing the two latest tragedies related to space travel with a co-worker, and an article questioning whether the space program could survive two accidents in close succession came up. He and I are in complete agreement that this […]
Here’s my conversation with veteran journalist Lynn Sherr about her biography of Sally Ride who, in 1983, became the first American woman to go into space. I started by asking why it took so long (the Russians put Valentina Tershkova up there 20 years earlier) and how Ride was treated inside NASA and by the […]
The green coffee bean extract that he promoted on his TV show as a “useful tool for weight loss” suffered another setback last week when the authors of the study who made the original claims about it retracted their paper. The company that sold the extract has been fined $3.5 million by the FTC, whose […]
Yesterday, the US Senate took up a resolution by Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar that would have simply said that climate change is real and that humans are responsible. Resolutions like that (a “sense of the Senate,” which carries no force of law) require unanimous consent, but this one didn’t get it because of one guy, […]
Donald Prothero explains how Hollywood consistently gets the science wrong in movies — “since nearly everything the general public thinks they know about science seems to come from bad Hollywood movies and TV shows, it’s not surprising that these myths are perpetuated, and our scientific literacy is so abysmal.”