I am quite interested in people who have a significantly different world-view from me. Christopher Valentine is very much such a person. Watch as much of the following as you can bear. . He does seem to believe what he is saying – he certainly takes the trouble to write books about it so I am …
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Category:Scepticism
Faerie…
A little bit more about ‘selective breeding’ with reference to flower production in the video below. Please sit through it to the end as it contains a twist! Some pretty sound Mendelian genetics and a simple explanation of how breeders produce the strains of plants and animals we commonly see. Then the host fires in …
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A Quick Puzzle…
…from the New York Times. You must click on the link at the end of this post, attempt the test and then come back here to leave a comment. I don’t mean ‘must’ in the sense of… You simply must try the mackerel with pickles and mullet roe at El Celler de Can Roca. Yeah, of course …
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The Poetry Of Reality…
Someone left a comment that they liked the MelodySheep Game Of Thrones song. He is the guy who did all the Symphony of Science videos/songs. I have edited the posts so hopefully you can now see and play those videos too. . . This reflects my take on science pretty accurately; for me it the …
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Life, The Universe & Everything…
This is a repost of an old article from October 2011 with a few tweaks. The video below is from the BBC TV series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. It is based upon the novel by Douglas Adams, which in turn was based upon the radio series of the same name. I started to …
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OK Pinheads, How’d The Moon Get There?
One of the reasons I love science so much is that it gives you the tools to find answers to questions. Asking good questions is one of the most important skills a scientist will learn. A scientific question is one that can be investigated; one that has the possibility of being answered. A question that …
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Gravity Powered Light…
A pair of designers based in London has raised $200,000 towards developing their design for a gravity powered lamp – GravityLight. The idea is that these can be used in communities where access to electricity is restricted. As you may remember from our lessons spent running up flights of stairs, gravitational potential energy (Joule) = …
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Counting Dilemma…
I told 5C today, after we had watched a video about the brain (which I will also post here soon), that everything we see, hear or otherwise experience is generated by our brains and cannot always be trusted. The scientific method allows us to determine what evidence can be trusted by filtering out the biases that …
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Neuroscience & Magic…
Whilst listening to The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe on my way down to my house in France, I was particularly pleased that they interviewed Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde. They are a married couple who work at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, where they study visual, sensory and cognitive neuroscience. They are …
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