Carl Sagan, astronomer and scientist: “What is faith? It is belief in the absence of evidence. Now I don’t propose to tell anybody what to believe, but for me, believing when there’s no compelling evidence is a mistake. The idea is to withhold belief until there is compelling evidence.” Mark[...]
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
November 14th, 2024 - 10:27 pm § in Science
Are we alone in the universe?
A famous formula, the Drake Equation (explained here), argues there must be life elsewhere in the universe, based on probability principles. But Columbia University Professor David Kipping (profiled here) says, “Not so fast.” The devil is in the details. The moral of his 26-minute lectur[...]
October 11th, 2024 - 1:43 am § in Science
U.W. professor wins Nobel Prize
Prof. David Baker, of the University of Washington School of Medicine, shared the 2024 Nobel Chemistry Prize with two other scientists “for their use of artificial intelligence in predicting protein structures from their amino acid sequences.” Their work may enable humas to “design[...]
UFO metal is man-made
A metal fragment purportedly from the 1947 Roswell “flying saucer” is man-made, according to a lab report. The report concludes that “despite claims it was an alloy not found on this planet,” the piece of debris “was not extraterrestrial in origin” (read story her[...]
July 4th, 2024 - 4:56 pm § in Environment, Science
10 earthquakes in 2 days near Vancouver Island
Is the Cascadian fault shifting? There have been “10 earthquakes of at least 4.0 magnitude in the waters west of Puget Sound in the past 24 hours,” including a 4.4 quake yesterday and a 5.7 quake this morning, a Seattle TV station reported on Thursday, July 4, 2024 (read story here). All[...]
June 23rd, 2024 - 1:46 pm § in Environment, Science
Washington’s dangerous mountain
Building communities on top of old mudflows (photo below) was never a good idea. But the housing was needed, so permitting officials allowed it; and there was money to be made, so developers build it. If the mountain abruptly erupts, many people will die (read story here). But it’s closely mon[...]
Politicians can’t wish UFOs into existence
“Key members of Congress delivered an astounding rebuke to the Pentagon’s UFO analysis office last week, doubling down on whistleblower allegations of secret U.S government UFO programs,” The Hill reported on Tuesday, June 11, 2024. “Last July, Air Force veteran and former intell[...]
Let’s see the spaceships and alien bodies
A breathless op-ed in The Hill on Friday, June 9, 2023 (read it here), claimed “the intelligence community inspector general found ‘allegations that there is a [UFO crash retrieval] program [to be] urgent and credible.’” I certainly hope the Pentagon has a UFO crash retrieval pro[...]
May 30th, 2023 - 11:27 pm § in Science
Could AI cause human extinction?
Experts are raising alarms about artificial intelligence (AI), saying it threatens human existence. A group of scientists and tech industry insiders rate the risk of “extinction from AI” as being on a par with “other societal-scale risks” like pandemics and nuclear war. They [...]
May 26th, 2023 - 10:17 pm § in Science
Technology: Lightning in a bottle
Modern technology is making a lot of age-old dreams come true (e.g., we can now make diamonds and gold), and while no one has figured out how to plug a cord into lightning, scientists are getting closer to making their own clouds and pulling electricity from them. Electricity from thin air — h[...]