It’s clear that things aren’t always what they seem. I’ve written on this subject before; see this link. But Particularly in scientific endeavors, all it takes is one experiment or reproducible observation to put things into the proverbial cocked hat. Take this item, for example, in which is reported an experiment that seems to show that the speed of light …
The Unexpected
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 …
Guidance Systems
Biology continues at the forefront today, with a recent report that dung beetles use the Milky Way to navigate. Really! The experiment done to determine this connection was rather elegant; I’ll leave it to the reader to find out about that by visiting the link, above. For the purposes of this post, never mind that I never would connect an …
Seemings
Biology is a long-standing fascination of mine, for many, many reasons. One such is evidenced by some photos here, which just left me dumbstruck—not an easy task, I assure you! As with all such things, it got me wondering about the application of such phenomena in personal and professional settings, thinking in terms of how things are either hiding in …
Assumptions
Take a look at this short video called, appropriately for this post, Assumptions: Entertaining, to be sure. But there’s more here than entertainment. As much as I try to avoid it, I find it virtually impossible not to go into a situation without preconceived notions or assumptions. Such poor going-in positioning may have to do with the person or people …
Overdesigning
SpaceX has done it again, albeit with a bit of difficulty. They launched a Falcon 9 rocket with a Dragon module to resupply the International Space Station (ISS). The launch itself was perfect off the pad, but just about 90 seconds into the flight, one of the vehicle’s nine engines malfunctioned. The Dragon docked successfully with the ISS today, but …
Do It Differently
I came across this interesting item last week, which describes how a person’s world view was changed by way of technology. It got me thinking about how wedded many of us are to doing things the way we have always done them, or how others have always done them, or, in some cases, not doing something at all because to …