I have written often, as has my friend Phil Plait, about the dangers the anti-vaccination movement has caused. Today on his blog, Phil has the sad story of how there have been more than 3 dozen cases of pertussis (whooping cough) in Boulder so far this year — 30 of those were under 18 years […]
I’m about to start reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Space Chronicles,” an anthology of essays in which he makes the case for continuing to fund (and increasing funding for) NASA and the manned space program. I saw him talk about this at The Amazing Meeting last summer, and he’s made multiple media appearances to promote the […]
I have written often about the danger of parents who refuse to allow their children be vaccinated. It’s almost always because they are misinformed or refuse to believe scientists who have time and again proven that vaccines don’t, for instance, cause autism, and that we need as many people vaccinated as possible to ensure herd […]
Newt Gingrich was mocked this week for saying, as president, “…by the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.” Forget the fact that we have an international treaty prohibiting any nation from declaring the moon “ours.” What about the whole moon base […]
As a child of the dawn of the space age, I still get a little excited seeing a NASA launch, like yesterday’s liftoff of the Mars-bound Curiosity rover. How cool is that we’re sending a a nuclear-powered mobile laboratory to gather and analyze the Martian soil, with a drill to dig into the planet surface […]
This was one of the highlights of this summer’s James Randi Educational Foundation Amazing Meeting 9. It’s a panel discussing our future in space and, in particular, whether humans should continue exploring in person or stay on the ground while our technological marvels do the dangerous job of traveling beyond Earth gravity. The panelists were […]