Banner
Seals Happy About Global Warming Sea Ice Loss

Though the developed world is concerned about greenhouse gas emissions implicated in climate change...

Stem Cells Get Practical - Liposuction And Breast Enhancement All At Once

There was once a controversy about human embryonic stem cell research - former president Bush put...

Everything I Need To Know About Science I Learned From Watching "The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra"

It's not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas about science or culture into simple...

Can I Back Order My Mr. Fusion Now?

If you were a young-ish science student in the mid-1980s there are two movies that remain in your...

User picture.
picture for Hank Campbellpicture for S Rpicture for Kimberly Crandell
Cash SimpsonRSS Feed of this column.

In his other life, Cash is a Formula One race car driver who solves mysteries on TV. His personal site is Science And Supermodels.... Read More »

Blogroll

Esquire magazine scribe Tom Junod recently wrote something that made me question my judgment and his sanity - namely that Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology

Now, the last time someone compared themselves to Isaac Newton it was ... well, okay it was me, but even I can't be serious about comparing myself to Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton is a serious guy in physics. A giant. Maybe the giant. It's one thing to make comparisons for dramatic effect, which a keen writer like Junod can do better than anyone, but another to make a serious case.

Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology. Hype? Maybe. But Tom Junod could endorse Hitler and vampire babies and I would probably agree. Plus, why don't we have any evolutionary biologists who write here that look like this? Anyway, this deserves consideration and a full article, which I wrote under the title Maybe, if hundred pound genius chicks are your thing, Franziska Michor is okay.

I'm usually a pretty patient guy about marketing. Unlike some, I am not educated by it and, unlike others, I don't look down on it. I know why it it exists and I appreciate its value but at some point in advocacy issues ( in this case the environment ) it invariably crosses a line from being funny to offensive and then it goes completely over the line into being the kind of junk science that needs to be ridiculed.

Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people.

I saw a few articles discussing an upcoming convergence between robot and human culture based on research by Netherlands student David Levy, who completed his PhD on the subject of human-robot relationships. Using the Artificial Intelligence ( A.I. if you are new to, well, everything ) curve laid out by Levy, humans and robots would be inter-marrying by 2050. Inter-marrying means sex and, of course, I am a specialist in the science of sex.

Who knew that the sex lives of African bat bugs could be so interesting? Males with female genitalia, female bugs with 'paragenitals' on their abdomens that guide the males to the right spot by basically impaling them if they mess up, males trying to impregnate males.

It's Extreme Transexualism, coming soon to a species near you.

Why is it necessary in these bugs? Males tend to get overanxious and just start stabbing away anywhere in the abdomen but they really need to go into a special warm place that some men on the internet know nothing about - though it's still in their abdomen, in the case of female bat bugs.