The colonial era is over in the Seven Seas. Instead of being a territory of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans, the Southern Ocean is now independent. Read story here. Return to The-Ave.US Home Page[...]
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
June 15th, 2021 - 8:53 am § in Science
Testing Your IQ … with DNA?
DNA tests for IQ are coming, but it might not be smart to take one Abstracted from MIT Technology Review, Antonio Regalado April 2, 2018 A year ago, no gene had ever been tied to performance on an IQ test. Since then, more than 500 have, thanks to gene studies involving more than 200,000 test [&hell[...]
GOP rep. suggests changing earth’s orbit to solve climate crisis
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), colloquially known as “America’s Dumbest Congressman” (for good reasons, as will be seen below), said in a congressional committee hearing on Tuesday, June 8, 2021, “I was informed by the immediate past director of NASA that they’ve found that the moo[...]
May 26th, 2021 - 11:00 pm § in Biden, China, Donald Trump, Foreign Affairs, Health, Politics, Science
What if the lab leak theory is true?
“Last summer,” an Atlantic article (read it here) begins, “a University of Michigan virologist … published an essay on the need to ‘rethink’ some basic research-safety practices in light of the coronavirus pandemic. But he and his co-author—another biosecurity-b[...]
May 24th, 2021 - 12:17 pm § in Science
California forest ranger stumbles on fossil trove
“A trove of 5- to 10-million-year-old fossils of prehistoric species was discovered” last summer in California by a water district forest ranger, the utility announced last week. “Among the fossils were samples of species including a two-tusked mastodon, a four-tusked gomphothere, [...]
DNA solves airport monkey mystery
“For decades, a colony of wild African green monkeys has lived in a thick mangrove forest near the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport,” Forbes says. “But how on earth did these African monkeys find themselves in … South Florida … ?” “Earlier thi[...]
May 22nd, 2021 - 2:22 am § in Science
Mysterious fast radio bursts traced to spiral galaxy arms
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) from distant galaxies have perplexed astronomers since they were first observed in 2007, but an international team using the Hubble space telescope pinpointed the location of over a dozen of them — in the arms of spiral galaxies, CNN reported on Friday, May 21,[...]
55 years since criticality: The Blue Flash
THE DEMON CORE AND THE STRANGE DEATH OF LOUIS SLOTIN Abstracted and edited from article MAY 21, 2016 THE NEW YORKER Alex Wellerstein is a historian of science and an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, in New Jersey. He runs the blog Restricted Data. The blue flash was cle[...]
May 21st, 2021 - 1:31 pm § in Science
A scientist wonders, “How much time does humanity have left?”
That’s the question posed by a Scientific American article published on May 12, 2021 (read it here). The author adopts a statistical approach, which isn’t quite satisfying, because it doesn’t fully take into account the, well, human factor. Hard to tell, actually, because: “W[...]
Aldous Huxley was right
Scientists have figured out how LSD works, and Aldous Huxley nailed it when he wrote in 1954 that “psychedelic lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing the mind on the problems of life.” While Huxley was writing about mescaline, LSD works similarly, and The Guardi[...]