Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
A couple of days ago the UK’s Independent, and several other media outlets, have promoted this claim … Religious people are, on average, less intelligent than atheists, researchers claim. To be clear, this posting is not simply a dig at the Independent. Other outlets ran with the same story. The International Business Times very explicitly … Read more
A formal study entitled “Selective Exposure to Misinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign” has been published this month. Just to be totally clear here, the term is a reference to misinformation – news that is presented as true, but is instead partially or wholly false, and so … Read more
A new paper has been published by the Chinese International Center for Climate and Environment Sciences (That’s part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences). Within it they present their analysis of data gathered from all around the earth’s oceans and demonstrate a very clear ongoing ocean warming trend. There is a short clip that visualises the data … … Read more
It’s an exciting new discovery, evidence that humans wandered out of Africa far earlier than has been previously appreciated. The media is quite rightly all over it, and has been trumpeting the details. For example … Washington Post – Scientists discover the oldest human fossils outside Africa BBC – Modern humans left Africa much earlier NPR – New … Read more
Eduardo Porter has an interesting article within the New York Times. The title, which is crafted to provoke readers, is “Fighting Climate Change? We’re Not Even Landing a Punch”, and yet it is something that is also rather important to appreciate. Starting with 1988, he basically lays out the specific actions that have been taken to … Read more
2018 has been designated the International Year of the reef. This is in fact the 3rd “International Year of the Reef”. The first was in 1997 in response to the increasing threats Coral Reefs then faced and was designed to increase awareness of that. It worked well because over 225 organisations spread across 50 nations … Read more