Dear Readers: After today's post, I'm going to be taking a long-overdue break from Skeptophilia.  My intent -- lord willin' an' the creek don't rise, as my grandma used to say -- is that my next post will be Monday, May 13.  See you then! ************************** To further investigate our general topic of people giving woo-woo explanations to damn near everything, today we investigate: The Dark. First, a brief physics lesson. Things are generally called "dark" for one of two reasons.  First, there are objects whose chemical makeup results in their absorbing most of the l ..read more

One thing science teaches us is that just about everything is interesting if you look at it carefully enough.  Still, there's an ingrained human tendency to be overawed by superlatives -- the biggest, the heaviest, the brightest, the strongest, the most powerful. It's why a recent fossil discovery from Somerset, England has made the headlines.  The rocks in Somerset, in the southwest of England, are mostly of Triassic age; it's not far from the famous "Jurassic Coast," which begins around Exmouth with Triassic sedimentary rocks that gradually become younger as you head west.  It ..read more

Ever wonder if the universe is flat? No, I haven't taken Wingnut Pills and decided that the Flat Earthers make sense.  This is an honest-to-Einstein problem in physics, one that not only raises eyebrows about the supposed "fine-tuning" of the universe but has a huge effect on its ultimate fate. By this time most people who are reasonably scientifically literate (or at least watch Star Trek) know about curved space -- that the presence of mass warps space-time, a little like the way a heavy weight on a trampoline stretches and deforms the flexible sheet it's sitting on.  The trampol ..read more

Last Sunday (April 14) we had a series of thunderstorms roll through the region, kind of unusual for upstate New York at this time of year.  We're not particularly stormy in general, but most of the thunder and lightning we do get comes in the heat of midsummer.  On Sunday, though, a warm front brought in turbulent, moist air, and we got some decent storms and rain for most of the day. At 11:51 AM (EDT), though, something odd happened.  There was a deep, shuddering rumble that repeated three times within the span of about two or three minutes.  (The first was the strongest ..read more

Last night I dreamed that our local mall had been converted into a giant used book store.  (Something I would entirely approve of.)  We were going to to go shopping ("we" being my wife, me, and our younger son, who lives in Houston but was apparently up for a visit) but we realized that a bunch of other family members were unexpectedly going to descend upon us, and for some reason we knew they were going to walk into our house without knocking, which our dogs would not appreciate, so we had to get home fast.  But while trying to get out of the mall we were hindered by a bunch of ..read more

Since the news down here on Earth is not looking so good, today we're going to escape to my happy place, which is outer space. We've got three new studies of fascinating astronomical phenomena to look at, the first of which comes out of the University of Vienna.  A team led by astrophysicist Kristina Kislyakova has, for the first time, directly detected stellar wind from three nearby Sun-like stars -- something which may effect the stability of the atmospheres of any planets orbiting them, and thus, their potential habitability. Stellar wind -- which until now, we only knew about from stu ..read more

Aficionados of the Star Trek universe undoubtedly recall the iconic character Jadzia Dax.  Dax was a Trill -- a fusion of a humanoid host and a strange-looking brain symbiont.  The union of the two blended their personalities, resulting in what was truly a new, composite life form. Star Trek is amazing in a lot of ways, not least because of their attention to current science and an uncanny prescience about where science is heading.  It turns out that we're all composite life forms.  We carry around something like 39 trillion bacterial cells in and on our own bodies -- th ..read more

Today I'd like to look at the state of Arizona, where this week a 4-2 decision by the state's Supreme Court made abortions illegal in any circumstance except to save a woman's life -- practically speaking, making them illegal period, because few doctors will want to risk their livelihood (or their freedom) based on whether a court will decide a particular abortion was a medical necessity. This decision caused the state law to revert to a code passed in 1864 -- decades before women even had the right to vote.  It's an interesting historical filigree that the man who pushed the 1864 law thr ..read more

I was saddened to hear of the death of the brilliant British physicist Peter Higgs on Monday, April 8, at the grand old age of 94.  Higgs is most famous for his proposal in 1964 of what has since come to be known as the "Higgs mechanism" (he was far too modest a man to name it after himself; that was the doing of colleagues who recognized his genius).  This springboarded off work by the Nobel Prize-winning Japanese physicist Yochiro Nambu, who was researching spontaneous symmetry breaking -- Higgs's insight was to see that the same process could be used to argue for the existenc ..read more

I've wondered for years why certain pieces of music elicit such a powerful emotional response. Partly that's because I react powerfully myself, and kind of always have.  I vividly remember being about fifteen years old and being moved to tears the first time I heard Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis: Well, "moved to tears" is kind of an understatement.  "Sobbing" or "bawling" would be closer to the mark. Then, there's the first time I heard the moment when the sedate, tranquil "Quoniam Tu Solus Sanctus" in J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor suddenly launc ..read more