If you chance to take part in a conversation with people arguing that they do not want their tax money to go into building huge science gadgets whose utility for humanity is doubtful and null to them in particular, you have better be equipped with a sound way to shut their mouth.
Of course, one way is to explain with patience the importance of basic science, the investment in the future, etcetera. You might like to insert well-learned quotes, such as "Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza" ("You were not made to live like beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge" - Ulysses in Dante Alighieri's "Inferno"). Well, good luck with that - I bet your argument will not go very far with the kind of opposition I have in mind.
In "Science Left Behind", the oft-regurgitated 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef' nonsensical metric is revealed for what it always was; a claim put into a book that was derived from an advocacy press release in the 1980s that had no scientific merit. Still, saying what advocates want is enough to make it into UN reports under 'gray literature' and
so a UN report dutifully included it and a whole bunch of hysterical statistics was derived from it. That is the magic of agenda-based scientization of politics.
“Anatomically modern humans” (AMH), or the first subspecies which bore the closest resemblance to modern humans, lived in Africa approximately 200,000 years ago (the exact time frame is a point of contention for most archaelogists, but we'll stick with this one). AMH inhabited a relatively small region of Africa until somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 years ago, when our ancestors suddenly became restless and began to venture out into surrounding areas, eventually reaching Europe and Asia 40,000 years ago.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Humans of the Upper Palaeolithic Age recycled and repurposed their stone artifacts to be put to other uses, according to a group of anthropologists after examining burnt artifacts found in the Molí del Salt site in Tarragona, Spain.
How could they make that determination? Finding that stone tools during prehistoric times were recycled is not going to be apparent in archaeological records.
James Madison - A Prescient President.
We are changing our planet's atmosphere.
It is widely known that G.S. Callendar warned of this in 1938.
It is virtually unknown that James Madison warned of it in 1818, in the form of a rhetorical question:
Gravitational lensing has found MACS1149-JD1, which was created less than 500 million years after the Big Bang, making it the most remote galaxy ever to be observed.
Our universe came into being approx. 13.7 billion years ago with a
Big Bang. 400 to 500 million years later, conditions in the cosmos allowed for the formation of the first stars but it was believed there was almost no hope of ever receiving a signal from any object of this time period; if there already were galaxies back then, their brightness would be far weaker than the light of a candle on the moon.
You have heard of biofeedback, controlling bodily responses using audio or visual cues to map performance. It may be possible to do that with learning, a kind of neurofeedback, according to research at Sandia National Laboratories. They show that it's possible to predict how well people will remember information by monitoring their brain activity while they study.
Early in the morning of September 12th the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), the most powerful sky survey instrument yet built, mounted on the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile recorded its first images of a southern sky spangled with galaxies.
An international team of scientists say they may have discovered why female killer whales have the longest menopause of any non-human species - it could be they worry about their adult sons. New research says that males over 30 have an almost 14-fold chance of dying during the year following the death of their mother.
A massive Roman mosaic, from the apex of Imperial reach and power, has been unearthed in southern Turkey.
