Recent Posts
- Daylight Saving Time: A Century of Moving the Hands and Getting Nowhere
- Take the Extra Minute to Rest: The World, Upside-Down
- Bologna: The Meat That Sounds Like a Lie
- The AI Gold Rush: What Happens When Everyone Strikes the Same Claim?
- Why Are the Oceans Salty? Because People Have Been Peeing for 10,000 Years, Obviously.
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Tag Archives: science
Daylight Saving Time: A Century of Moving the Hands and Getting Nowhere
Every year, twice a year, we participate in one of the strangest government sponsored rituals of modern civilization. We change the clocks. Today, we fell back to Standard Time, dutifully moving the hands of our clocks backward one hour. Somewhere, … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Science, Society
Tagged accident, agriculture, Biel Mean Time, Congress, daylight, Daylight Saving Time, debate, DST, energy, heart attack, history, school, science, Standard Time, Sun, Swatch Internet Time, technology, time, time zone, UTC, War Time
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Bologna: The Meat That Sounds Like a Lie
There are foods we celebrate because they represent the pinnacle of human culinary achievement. There is chocolate. There is pizza. There is a perfectly cooked steak. Then there is bologna, the meat that looks like a giant pink hockey puck. … Continue reading
Posted in Culture
Tagged bologna, cancer, devon, fleischwurst, food, fritz, health, history, lunch, lyoner, mortadella, National Bologna Day, nutrition, October 24, parizer, polony, sausage, science, World Health Organization
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Why Are the Oceans Salty? Because People Have Been Peeing for 10,000 Years, Obviously.
My wife and I were sitting in a restaurant when the kid at the next table asked a perfectly reasonable question. “Why are the oceans salty?” It’s a good question. It’s the kind of question that has occupied geologists, oceanographers, … Continue reading
Posted in Education, Science
Tagged biology, chemistry, geology, hydration, hydrology, nephrology, ocean, oceanography, pee, salt, science, water cycle
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The Two Elephants in the Room
In response to my SMR article, I received a one word message from a reader: “Fusion?” Okay. That’s fair. When we talk about nuclear energy, there are really two elephants wandering around the room. One is fission, where we split … Continue reading
Posted in Economy, Energy, Technology
Tagged Arthur Eddington, Big Bang, Chicago Pile-1, cold fusion, Enrico Fermi, fission, Fritz Strassmann, fusion, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Lise Meitner, magnetic confinement, Martin Fleischmann, National Ignition Facility, nuclear energy, nuclear waste, Otto Frisch, Otto Hahn, physics, plasma, science, Stanley Pons, stellarator, tokamak, University of Chicago, University of Utah
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Immortality: The Hidden Subtext
A friend of mine recently asked me a question. “You’ve been writing a lot about longevity, immortality and life expectancy lately. Is there a hidden subtext?” I stopped for a moment. I had to think about that. I didn’t think … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged aging, biology, death, DNA, future, immortality, lifespan, longevity, mirror life, mortality, mRNA, science
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Gravity Didn’t Turn Off (and sadly, neither did the internet)
I recently met up with a friend for lunch to catch up. He mocked me. “It didn’t fail,” he said, struggling to contain himself. “What didn’t fail?” I asked. “Gravity. It didn’t turn off.” Then he laughed uncontrollably. This was … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Science
Tagged Albert Einstein, August 12, conspiracy theory, Erwin Schrödinger, general relativity, geodesic, gravity, Isaac Newton, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Philipp von Jolly, physics, relativity, Richard Feynman, science, spacetime, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli
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The Future We Have Yet to Build
I like science fiction, but not all of it. A great deal of science fiction is little more than technological window dressing wrapped around a familiar story. Somebody gets a spaceship, somebody else gets a laser gun, somebody discovers a … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Society
Tagged Alexander Belyaev, Arthur C Clarke, Dune, entertainment, Eragon, Fermat’s Last Theorem, future, Gene Roddenberry, Harry Potter, Isaac Asimov, Jules Verne, Robert A Heinlein, science, science fiction, space opera, Star Trek, Star Wars, technology, The Last Starfighter, The Lord of the Rings
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Paleolithic Software and Molecular Magic: The Biohacks of 2126
In response to my A Second Look at Life Expectancy: What the 1918 Flu Tells Us About the COVID-19 Pandemic, I received a fascinating question: “The 1918 flu had no ICU, no mRNA platform, not even a flu shot. We … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged 1918, 2020, 2126, biohack, biology, COVID-19, epidemic, flu, future, history, immunology, immunotherapy, influenza, longevity, medicine, mRNA, pathogen, psychology, science, Spanish Flu, vaccination, virology, virus
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The Retirement Problem: What Happens When You Don’t Have to Die?
Recently, we waded into the deep end of the genetic pool to talk about extreme human longevity. We looked at how medical engineering is steadily rewriting the limits of human life, and what happens to a finite planet when humans … Continue reading
Posted in Science, Society
Tagged compound interest, compounding, death, economy, employment, generational wealth, immortality, longevity, retirement, science, Social Security, wealth
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Beyond Death: When Longer Lives Meet a Finite Planet
One of the comments I received after writing “The Age of Re-engineering: How Science Is Rewriting the Limits of Human Life” sparked a fascinating, if sobering, question. It was both simple and profound: “What happens if we actually succeed? What … Continue reading
Posted in Science
Tagged birth rate, death rate, Dyson Sphere, Dyson Swarm, Earth, elves, environment, generational spacecraft, homesteading, immortality, JRR Tolkien, lifespan, longevity, Mars, medicine, Moon, mortality, overpopulation, population decline, population explosion, recycling, reproduction, science, space, terraforming, Venus
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