Ken Jennings In Outer Space
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...
Overcoming Space Obstacles
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...
Lynn Sherr on Sally Ride
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...
Another Embarrassment for Dr. Oz
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...
Taking On A Climate Change Denier
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...
Best Thing I’ve Read Today
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...
More Bad News For Anti-Vaxxers
Yet another report says there is absolutely no proof that vaccines cause autism. But there will still be parents who, instead of paying attention to scientists who have researched the question ad nauseum, listen to know-nothing celebrities who quote a long-debunked...
Overcoming Fear In Space
Astronaut Chris Hadfield proved his public relations value when the video of him playing guitar and singing David Bowie's "Space Oddity" onboard the International Space Station went viral and racked up something like 22 million views on YouTube. Since then, he's had a...