Consider that 60% of the energy expended by a resting baby is consumed by the baby's brain. A resting adult brain uses 25% of its energy. Compare this to the average ape brain, which uses only 8% of the apes energy. In short, having a big brain requires a lot…
All of your suspicions are true and you can now find them in an article that is intensely compelling and distressing. It’s the current edition (June 28, 2007) of Rolling Stone.
It’s not every day after all that the leading scientists from 120 nations come together and agree that the entire planet is about to go to hell. But the Bush administration has never felt bound by the reality-based nature of science–especially when it comes from international experts. So after the report became public in February, Vice President Dick Cheney took to the airwaves to offer his own, competing assessment of global warming
We’re going to see a big debate on it going forward,” Cheney told ABC news, about “the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man.” We know today, he added, is “not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy is going to” solve the problem.” Even former White House insiders were shocked by the vice president’s see-no-evil performance.
The Rolling Stone article argues that the White House has actively worked to distort the findings of climate scientists, playing down the threat of global warming. This investigation by Rolling Stone goes further, however. It reveals that
…these distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, and a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on environmental quality and enforced by none other than
In the June '07 issue of Scientific American, the article "A Simpler Origin for Life" discusses a new approach for figuring out how life could have spontaneously arisen. The views of evolutionary biologists have evolved over the last few decades from assuming that the extremely unlikely spontaneous formation of simple…
Just wanted to pass along this link to an article by one of favorite columnists. He goes over the edge some days, but most of the time he is spot on in his rantings! Enjoy -
Mechanical engineer and kids-show host Bill Nye the Science Guy spoke to about 1,500 Columbus-area students this Monday. I attended his talk, and found that the peppy, brilliant man who preached the fun of science during my childhood had come bearing a hopeful message of the earth’s future.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has helped to make climate change an enormous hot-button issue, and as the “future owners of the planet”, we college students hear about it a lot. Five separate school organizations have hosted five separate on-campus showings of An Inconvenient Truth in the past three months. The intent to inform and warn has gotten a little out of control.
With the media coverage of climate change in addition to this campus onslaught, most students get it. The close-minded may stick to their guns, but those moveable students understand. Yes, climate change occurs, yes, it will have grave consequences, yes, something desperately needs to change. Now what? The constant reiteration of Gore’s warning leaves all too many jaded and bored with the message.
Bill Nye, in his classically playful-yet-educational way, reframed the issues at the heart of global warming. He dispensed no Gore-like nay saying, he made no threats of the doom to come. Instead, he said this:
“People talk about how we have to ‘Save Planet Earth!’ But the Earth will be fine. The cockroaches will keep living; life on the planet will go on. It’s the humans I worry about.”
So, no forthcoming apocalypse after …