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How to Convince People WiFi Is Making Them Sick
All it takes is an antenna on a headband. If you've got a breathless video report on the dangers of wireless internet connections, that will help your case. It doesn't take much, though, to turn an...
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Poison for pain, the homeopathic way
At my local mega-grocery store last weekend, I happened to stroll down the aisle dedicated to homeopathic treatments. I saw shelf after shelf of brightly colored packages, all claiming health...
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Countries with a state religion also have fewer political and civil freedoms
It's fairly common for a national government to explicitly favour one particular religion or sect. This support can take many forms - financial, political, or legal - but the common factor is that the...
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Pollination success - waiting, waiting.
TPP's apple and pear trees have flowered, and it wasn't the absolute best weather for flowering, and we had a close call the other night with a low temperature near freezing, so now just waiting to see...
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A New Non-mammaliaform Eucynodont from the Ischigualasto Formation of Argentina
Martínez, R. N., Eliana Fernandez, E., and O. A. Alcober. 2013. A new non-mammaliaform eucynodont from the Carnian-Norian Ischigualasto Formation, Northwestern Argentina. Revista Brasileira de...
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Average weather
Weather people like to tell you how much below or above average the current weather is. Of course here in the great midwest of North America this is largely complete crap. You can average the weather...
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A Critical Period for Learning Language?
If you bring adults and children into the lab and try teaching them a new language, adults will learn much more of the language much more rapidly than the children. This is odd, because probably one...
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"Fool Me Twice, Shame on ME," Says Sea Slug
"Simple" is often a compliment in the human world, used to describe low-fuss dinners or closet solutions. When scientists use "simple" to describe an animal, they mean something more like, "That sac...
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Red bud fracking instead of hydraulic fracking
Hydraulic fracking is quite an issue just now in Lincolnland. One of the key issues is how much water must be used to fracture deep sediments. This is one of those things where industry wants to...
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An Ecotourism Vacation
The end of the school year has me thinking about summer vacations and I have just added a new location to my vacation wish list. The Cape Horn region of southern Chile and Argentina sounds like an...
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TMI Friday: Taking it to third base ..literally
The variety of foreign bodies in the rectum tests a surgeon's ingenuity to solve a myriad of geometric puzzles So begins Major PT Mcdonald's 1976 paper, in which he has to deal with a patient with a...
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Tacky is as tacky does
Garden gazing balls (even when the size of the one in Millennium Park), plywood cutouts of some one bending over in their garden, and, yes, especially, garden gnomes are tacky, as are plastic ducks and...
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Fiddling while Rome burns - climate edition
"So why are we behaving like this?" asks Martin Wolfe of the Financial Times."A second reason is opposition to any interventions in the free market. Some of this, no doubt, is driven by narrowly...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - Yellow tree peony and friend
Next to magnolias and other magnoliales TPP's favorite flowers are tree peonies, and among those nothing is better looking than my yellow tree peonies. This particular plant is about 4 feet tall and 4...
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Bioengineers go retro to build a calculator from living cells
Scientists in the US have developed a calculator from living cells, using old-fashioned analog programming. Their hope is that the technology could be used in the future to program cells to kill...
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Garden Sunday
Today May 19th, really seems like the first full-fledged day of summer. The temp is in the upper 80s; thunderstorms threatened half the day. Yesterday the daughter of long-time friends got married in...
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Religion is halfway between a fact and an opinion - according to kids and adults
Is it possible for two people to disagree, and for both to be right? Well it depends, of course, on what they're disagreeing about. If it's a matter of fact ('Dinosaurs are extinct'), then the answer...
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The Earlier discovery of Antibiotic Resistance
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how quickly penicillin resistance was discovered not long before it was distributed to the public, and how even Alexander Fleming noted his worries over penicillin...
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Open letter to a new president
Dear New President,Welcome. TPP has lost track of exactly how many presidents this university has had in his academic career here; that's because most of them were pretty forgettable. You always...
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Citizen Science at GamesWithWords.org: The VerbCorner Project
What do verbs mean? We'd like to know. For that reason, we just launched VerbCorner, a massive, crowd-sourced investigation into the meanings of verbs. Why do we need this project? Why not just look up...
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