In this age of open discussion about the penises of a supreme court justice and the nation’s president, perhaps it’s no surprise that people as freely try to draw parallels between a man’s behaviors and the size of his penis. Many of us have seen—and perhaps had—a similar response to seeing images of a man […]
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently unveiled a “Better Health” campaign to combat obesity. The announcement was prompted by Johnson’s bout with COVID-19, which included a stint in intensive care in April. Johnson is convinced that his reported Body Mass Index of 36 (30 is considered obese) was responsible for the severity of his infection […]
STARS ON THE MOVE In “New View of the Milky Way,” Mark J. Reid and Xing-Wu Zheng state that they “find that the sun circles the Milky Way every 212 million years. To put this in perspective, the last time our solar system was in this part of the Milky Way, dinosaurs roamed the planet.” […]
In college, I learned about the myriad logical fallacies that pervade our world. Good logic, it turned out, was pretty restrictive. It consisted primarily of modus ponens—“If A is true, then B is true. A is true. Therefore, B is true”—and modus tollens—“If A is true, then B is true. B is not true. Therefore, […]
Today an e-mail chain I’m on, where contributors swap wacky physics theories, veered into wacky political theories. Chinese communists, one physicist insisted, are orchestrating protests that have been roiling U.S. cities. China wants to make Donald Trump look bad so he loses the fall election to Joe Biden, who is a Chinese puppet. Others on […]
Another epidemic besides COVID-19 stalks the land. This one takes a heavy toll on the young. It has been raging ever more lethally for the past 20 years with no flattening of the curve in sight: an American epidemic of suicide. Between 1999 and 2017 the age-adjusted suicide rate in the U.S. climbed 33 percent, […]
Yousuf El-Jayyousi, a junior engineering student at the University of Missouri, wanted guidance and reassurance that it would be safe to go back to school for the fall semester. He tuned into a pair of online town halls organized by the university hoping to find that. He did not. What he got instead from those […]
Hundreds of millions of years ago, reptilian predators called ichthyosaurs swam the seas. Their fossils look fearsome. But paleobiologist Ryosuke Motani of U.C. Davis says they may have looked more like friendly dolphins. “Maybe in life ichthyosaurs would have been cute—at least the smaller ones.” Motani’s team studied one such specimen found in southwest China. […]
With the economy tanking, unemployment skyrocketing, schools slamming their doors and the Big Ten and PAC-12 conferences canceling fall football, America is a country looking for an answer to COVID-19 yesterday. And one might be available—if you can handle instant coffee rather than espresso. The coffee analogy is one used by Michael Mina, assistant professor of […]
This past May, Harvard University (where I teach) issued a report on its relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was an admirably forthright mea culpa highlighting three areas of concern. The first was the contradiction of addressing sexual assault and harassment on campus while accepting money from a man who had promoted […]