I have blogged and posted interviews about the fight against anti-vaxxers, the science-deniers who have convinced far too many people that vaccines cause autism (listen to Dr. Phil Plait take on Jenny McCarthy). Much of this nonsense began when researcher Andrew Wakefield published a study in Lancet, the British medical journal, that showed a connection. […]
When President Obama’s budget was released on Monday, there was no money included to continue NASA’s efforts to send Americans back to the moon, despite the billions of dollars already spent on the effort. I talked about this sad scientific news with Homer Hickam, the former NASA engineer whose life story became the book and […]
Here’s a British ad for Toshiba that, its creators claim, was shot at a higher altitude than any other commercial — some 100,000 feet above the Earth. To get there, they attached a large balloon to an ordinary arm chair, rigged 8 HD cameras to capture the flight, and set the whole thing loose in […]
What was that weird light spiral in the sky above Norway? Some sort of cheesy time-tunnel effect from a 1950 sci-fi movie? A promotion for the “V” miniseries on ABC? A once-in-forever refraction of the Northern Lights? Some crazy photoshop job? It turns out there’s a simple explanation for it, which planetary geologist Emily Lakdawalla […]
I was going to write about Bill Maher’s naive conspiracy-nut denunciations of vaccines on the last two editions of his HBO “Real Time” show, but Michael Shermer (Editor of Skeptic magazine and columnist for Scientific American) beat me to it in this brilliant open letter to Maher: Dear Bill, Years ago you invited me to […]
A few days ago, NASA announced that they don’t have the funding to track all of the asteroids that could hit the Earth and wipe out life as we know it. Today on KTRS/St. Louis, I asked my friend Dr. Phil Plait, the astronomer and author of “Death From The Skies,” about the possibility of […]