Some subjects I try to avoid in this blog. But this one seems to become increasingly difficult to escape. Since my interview at Philosophy-To-Go, I regularly get questions about the physics of free will. These questions range from

"Does free will exist given that the laws of physics are deterministic?"

to the more suggestive

"Is our free will based on quantum indeterminism?"

and the more confrontational

A new study accepted for publication in Chemical Geology says deep saline groundwaters in South Africa's Witwatersrand Basin may have remained isolated for perhaps millions of years.

The Witwatersrand Basin covers approximately 400 kilometers, some of which is subcrop of the Witwatersrand Supergroup sedimentary and sub-ordinate volcanic sequences and is well-known for tourist expeditions to search for gold.

The researchers found the noble gas neon dissolved in water in three-kilometer deep crevices and the unusual neon profile, along with the high salinities and some other unique chemical signatures, is very different from anything seen in molten fluid and gases rising from beneath the Earth's crust.

One of the fairly common things out of the "pro-safe" vaccine crowd insists is that there's inadequate research on vaccines. What better way to look at how information has grown over time than to look at the evolution of a vaccine textbook and how it has grown over five editions.

In 1988, Vaccines was one third the size of the present edition, published 20 years later.

Product Details (from Amazon)
"Hardcover: 656 pages 
Publisher: Saunders (W.B.) Co Ltd; 2nd edition edition (August 1988) 
Language: English 
ISBN-10: 0721619460 
ISBN-13: 978-0721619460"

“Yesterday night I was in my office in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge packing my stuff, resolved to not go back to research again …”

This sad story is another warning to all those enthusiastic about getting into science. One more outtake:

Science and religion have always been in something of a conflict.   Science seeks to explain the world according to natural laws while religion leaves larger questions as articles of faith.    There is some overlap - 40% of AAAS member scientists in their recent survey are also religious - but AAAS covers a broad cross-section of scientists whereas biology is ground zero for a conflict with religion over man as we exist today and how we came to be.  So there is less overlap in the life sciences but there have been ongoing attempts to reconcile the two camps, usually with scientists conceding that whatever 'sparked' life has no basis in current data so it is left to philosophy or religion as well.

Balancing the demands of work, parenting, blogging, autism advocacy and more can at times be daunting. My mind is a whirring jumble of thoughts, pinching worries that eat away at me, and an apparently failing memory. I'll start with the failing memory, as it, at least, is amusing in a terrifying "oh you might have more on your plate than you can handle" way.

If you've been to Bible study classes, you know the story of Jericho.   Actually, if you're an atheist you may know it even better, since on quizzes atheists seem to know The Bible better than many religious people.  In the story, Joshua, successor to Moses, led the Jews across the Jordan to what would be their land.   Jericho was clearly sitting on it so using trumpets for seven days and finally their voices they were able to take out the walls of the city and kill most everyone inside.

Wait until the Mythbusters try and tackle that one.
  

Today I spoke at a conference on "QCD advances" which is being held in Les Houches, an amiable small town near Chamonix, on the french slopes of Mont Blanc. The content of my talk is accessible from the conference web site, but I guess that I should provide here a summary of what I discussed.

Researchers have discovered a genetic variant that allows a fish in the Hudson River to live in waters heavily polluted by polychlorinated biphenyls - PCBs. In their report,  they show that a population of Hudson River fish apparently evolved rapidly in response to the toxic chemicals, which were first introduced in 1929, and were banned fifty years later. PCBs were once used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications, especially as electrical insulators.