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- The Earth is not the center of the universe. We’ve had more than 400 years to get used to the idea, but it’s still a little unsettling. Anyone can plainly see that the Sun and stars rise in the east, sweep across the sky and set in the west; the Earth feels stable and stationary.
- The microbes are gaining on us. Antibiotics and vaccines have saved millions of lives; without these wonders of modern medicine, many of us would have died in childhood of polio, mumps or smallpox.
- There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now. Paleontologists have identified five points in Earth’s history when, for whatever reason (asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions and atmospheric changes are the main suspects), mass extinctions eliminated many or most species.
- Things that taste good are bad for you. In 1948, the Framingham Heart Study enrolled more than 5,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, to participate in a long-term study of risk factors for heart disease.
Aug 3, 2016 · 49 health 'facts' you've been told all your life that are totally wrong. Dave Mosher. Updated. Aug 3, 2016, 6:24 AM PDT. Carrots give you night vision. Swimming after eating will give you cramps ...
- Dave Mosher
- COVID is caused by glyphosate or 5G. Of the many conspiracy theories out there regarding COVID-19, none are dumber than the notion that glyphosate (a pesticide) or 5G wireless technology caused it.
- Anti-vaccine activists smell a coronavirus conspiracy. Children's Health Defense, the ironically named organization founded by anti-vaxxer RFK, Jr., believes that the COVID pandemic is little more than a conspiracy by elites to immunize the world and make Big Pharma wealthy.
- Politicians keep blaming the opioid crisis on prescription drugs. We know why people are dying from opioid overdoses: The drugs they are taking, such as heroin purchased from the neighborhood dealer, are laced with illegal fentanyl.
- Michael Shellenberger, a prominent environmentalist, was called a "white supremacist" for debunking myths about climate change. Mr. Shellenberger is an ecomodernist, a person who believes that technologically savvy humans can fix big problems, like climate change.
Jan 30, 2016 · 101 things you thought were true, but have actually been debunked by science. ... Twinkies are less than optimal to eat after about 25 days on a shelf, and burgers go bad within a day. However ...
- A Weird Form of Life
- A Weird Form of Water
- Neutrinos, Faster Than Light
- Gravitational Waves from The Early Universe
- A One-Galaxy Universe
- A Supernova’S Superfast Pulsar
- A Planet Orbiting A Pulsar
- Age of Earth
- Age of The Universe
- Earth in The Middle
A report in 2010 claimed that a weird form of life incorporates arsenic in place of phosphorus in biological molecules. This one sounded rather suspicious, but the evidence, at first glance, looked pretty good. Not so good at second glance, though. And arsenic-based life never made it into the textbooks.
In the 1960s, Soviet scientists contended that they had produced a new form of water. Ordinary water flushed through narrow tubes became denser and thicker, boiled at higher than normal temperatures and froze at much lower temperatures than usual. It seemed that the water molecules must have been coagulating in some way to produce “polywater.” By t...
Neutrinos are weird little flyweight subatomic particles that zip through space faster than Usain Bolt on PEDs. But not as fast as scientists claimed in 2011, when they timed how long it took neutrinos to fly from the CERN atom smasher near Geneva to a detector in Italy. Initial reports found that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds sooner than a ...
All space is pervaded by microwave radiation, the leftover glow from the Big Bang that kicked the universe into action 13.8 billion years ago. A popular theory explaining details of the early universe — called inflation — predicts the presence of blips in the microwave radiation caused by primordial gravitational waves from the earliest epochs of t...
In the early 20th century, astronomers vigorously disagreed on the distance from Earth of fuzzy cloudlike blobs shaped something like whirlpools (called spiral nebulae). Most astronomers believed the spiral nebulae resided within the Milky Way galaxy, at the time believed to comprise the entire universe. But a few experts insisted that the spirals ...
Astronomers rejoiced in 1987 when a supernova appeared in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the closest such stellar explosion to Earth in centuries. Subsequent observations sought a signal from a pulsar, a spinning neutron star that should reside in the middle of the debris from some types of supernova explosions. But the possible pulsar remained hidden...
In 1991, astronomers reported the best case yet for the existence of a planet around a star other than the sun. In this case, the “star” was a pulsar, a spinning neutron star about 10,000 light-years from Earth. Variations in the timing of the pulsar’s radio pulses suggested the presence of a companion planet, orbiting its parent pulsar every six m...
In the 1700s, French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffonestimated an Earth age of about 75,000 years, while acknowledging it might be much older. And geologists of the 19th century believe it to be older still — hundreds of millions of years or more — in order to account for the observation of layer after layer of Earth’s buried histo...
When astronomers first discovered that the universe was expanding, at the end of the 1920s, it was natural to ask how long it had been expanding. By measuring the current expansion rate and extrapolating backward, they found that the universe must be less than 2 billion years old. Yet radioactivity measurements had already established the Earth to ...
OK, we’re going to name and blame Aristotle for this one. He wasn’t the first to say that the Earth occupies the center of the universe, but he was the most dogmatic about it, and believed he had established it to be incontrovertibly true — by using logic. He insisted that the Earth must be in the middle because earth (the element) always sought to...
Jan 20, 2000 · Two decades later, in 1982, McBride published a report about a morning-sickness drug called Debendox that, he claimed, clearly caused birth defects in rabbits. Merrell Dow took the drug off the market amid an avalanche of lawsuits. But there was a problem. McBride had altered data in research carried out by assistants.
Jul 1, 2021 · Science is a process of learning and discovery, and sometimes we learn that what we thought was right is wrong. Science can also be understood as an institution (or better, a set of institutions ...
