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Here’s something that’s near and dear to my heart: News about the antikythera mechanism.
I studied ancient Greece and Rome at Uni and spent a lot of my time being baffled about how we could have invented things like, oh, indoor plumbing, multi-story building cranes and steam powered devices and then subsequently lost all that technology [...]

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11

Someone once told me that when Apollo 11 shot heavenward, there were still cars with crank-starts on the road. I didn’t know the world before space travel, but that sort of put things into perspective for me.
Now, on the 40th anniversary of the mission, someone is doing real-time Apollo 11 mission events on Twitter. You [...]

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Science and Baking

I once read that lots of the things we’re told to do by recipe books are like rituals, they’re things we do because our fore bearers did and when they did it that way, the recipe worked out. There’s a lot of mysticism in cooking, a lot of myths too, and as someone who (i) [...]

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Volcano

Underwater volcano in Tonga. The photos are astonishing.

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WTF

Canada’s science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won’t say if he believes in evolution.
“I’m not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don’t think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for [...]

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Unpopular

I feel like a bit of a hermit, having hardly been off the computer or off the bar for almost two weeks now, but I skipped a karate class I really wanted to attend in order to get the revisions to Bamboo done and get this weekend (at least partially) off. This morning, cup of [...]

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Wow.

On days like this, I’m glad I don’t write science fiction.
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor”
(via pinktentacle.com)

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From Nature

This stat, from Nature’s September edition:
25% of Americans believe in evolution.
74% of Americans believe in angels.
I am absolutely fascinated by the rise of hedge magic, superstition and faith-magic in the US. If anyone could recommend some reading on this topic, I’d be grateful.

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Giant Black Hole

The BBC is reporting that there is a giant black hole in the centre of the milky way. I have only one question: You say ‘giant black hole’, but honestly, is there any other kind?

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