Gordon's Notes

My prediction for 2013 - the American Right will effectively drop Climate Change Denialism by April of 2013. They'll never admit it of c...

I haven't done a Drake/Fermi Paradox post for ages. A lot has happened in the meantime; in particular estimates of the number of potenti...

Biologists study evolutionary "strategies", such as r and K selection . These are the strategies deployed the Great Programmer as...

When did physicists first begin to suspect that what we experience as time emerges from quantum entanglement, much as we experience heat fro...

A research vessel diverts course to avoid a 9 mile long floating island of volcanic rock : "the raft was already about 15 kilometers (9...

The weather is unusual, but is the climate truly different?  How would we know? I toss a fair coin 10 times. Which of these patterns is mor...

In a most excellent overview of the Higgs(es?) news, The Economist manages the best concise summary of the Standard Model that I've read...

I ate lunch at my favorite diner . Great food, but too much . Sometimes I put enough aside; but not today. I ate the whole thing. After lu...

Speaking as a physician, and as someone who was involved in a genomics project two years ago, I find this astounding. It's a snapshot of...

Unsurprisingly, given the current state of the GOP presidential primary, people who'd prefer to vote GOP are advocating third party equi...

Newt Gingrich has written many Amazon book reviews . One of them was on a physics book I'd read, maybe Greene's The Fabric of the Co...

While it's true that we can cure just about anything in mice (at least once), this is still remarkable ... BBC News - Alzheimer's ...

Under some conditions, researchers are able to translate brain electrical signals into concepts/sounds which can be expressed using English ...

The canine whipworm ( Trichuris vulpis ) is a common dog parasite. The juvenile form of the parasite develops in dirt; it's transmitted...

Firstly, the age of menarche in Western nations has been declining... Secular trends in age at menarche... [Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol. 20...

We've always had crazy fads in medicine. I fell for a few when I had wet ears. Magnesium Sulfate post-MI is the one I remember best. Th...

"With great power comes great responsibility." Gingrich's inner geek smiled at that one. Certainly they had the power. The Dem...

The good news is that it's still hard to design a lethal plague. The 'cost of havoc' is higher than I once thought. Yes,  influ...

Brains have a big return on investment ... Tiniest of Spiders Are Loaded With Brains, Researchers Find - NYTimes ... In the smallest spid...

(I wrote this 9/2011, but I was mistakenly left as a draft until now.) Six years ago I read that new world dogs (canis familiaris) died in...