Our planet had a bit of a scare last week: In two apparently unrelated incidents, pieces of the Solar System made incursions into our neck of the cosmic woods. The one that we knew about in advance, asteroid 2012 DA14, whizzed by at speeds in excess of 17,000 mph, well within the orbit of the synchronous satellites we all depend …
More Things Not Dreamt Of
Despite oft-repeated claims by the self-described cognoscenti, something new in science is being discovered all the time. As Hamlet opined, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” [Hamlet, Act 1, scene 5, 159–167] Today’s tidbit comes from the realm of physics and animal behavior, specifically this item that describes how bees …
When Junk Isn’t
I cannot document this, but ‘Way Back When, in the days when I was a graduate student studying the interactions between nucleic acids and proteins, I was firmly convinced that the then so-called “junk” DNA—which was comprised of all noncoding sequences in the genome—couldn’t just be junk. As much energy and resources were expended on maintaining its sequence as for …
Is So! Is Not!
Too often, I find myself in situation where I argue something that I know to be the case, only to find out afterward—in the face of incontrovertible evidence— that the opposite was true. How did I ever end up thinking one way, and finding out that what I had reported—and, worse, acted upon—was contrary to fact? A recent item may …