It is true that we live in the 21st century but ghost stories are still one thing that seem to never depart from the personal recollections of people alleging their existence. Anecdotal experiences such as these, quite often, shade into age-old convictions that are kept alive by the tradition of spoken testimony. But, what evidence is there […]
Read more "Ghosts Almost Certainly Don’t Exist"Cupping is a medieval practice and alternative superstition that doesn’t work. Quite, unfortunately, such forms of occult pseudoscience still make their way into our present-day communities. The useless technique involves creating incision points along the body over which heated glass jars are placed, thereby creating a vacuum and drawing “humors” to the surface as the […]
Read more "The Quackery of Cupping"The unguided processes of nature quite often lead to an illusion of design – assembled products that seem to be perfectly suited for their environments and that give a certain sense of being deliberately calibrated. There is a reason why this illusion arises, and that is due to the process of natural selection, which so […]
Read more "The Illusion of Design"The ultimate goal of the scientific method is to falsify the closest approximations to reality. There are no absolute truths in science because all theories are liable to perpetual refinement and revision. In science, plausibility is established not by proving things true but in fact, but by demonstrating that they have not yet been shown […]
Read more "How do we know what is true?"In science, negative results, all too often, never see the light of day. Indeed, that is quite a problem because biasing results towards positive findings means missing out on a potential information source that could have otherwise been obtained through the negative findings. Such a case is often the result of a drive to squeeze […]
Read more "Failure in Science: The Story of William Perkin"Advancements in science have undoubtedly always been a driver for financial gain. But despite science’s primordial role in catapulting countries into economic preeminence, science has not had its fair share of spending. Most countries tend to spend 1-3 % of their GDP on R&D, the majority of which is constituted by private non-federal contributions. This is indeed […]
Read more "Why do we spend very little on science?"A classic problem in computational mathematics is known as the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). Suppose a traveling salesman wishes to visit a predetermined N number of cities. Each city is represented as a vertex of a given graph and each two vertices are joined by an edge. The traveling salesman must find the most efficient, cost-limiting […]
Read more "The Conundrum of the Traveling Salesman"Last Sunday on May 22nd, Mars reached its opposition, an astronomical phenomenon which happens every 2 years. Since the orbit of Mars is located outside the orbit of Earth, the Earth, Mars, and the Sun periodically occur in a straight line leading to opposition of Mars, wherewith it lies on the opposite side of the […]
Read more "Mars Closest to Earth in a Decade"Mark your calendars! An astronomical phenomenon of great significance will occur this Monday on May 9th. Mercury will cross the sun for the first time since 2006. The transit of Mercury occurs when Mercury passes between the sun and the Earth (inferior conjunction), since of course Mercury is closer to the sun than we are. […]
Read more "Transit of Mercury On May 9th"It is that time of year again where those “once in a lifetime” kind of astronomy hoaxes begin circulating on social media and wow an uninformed crowd. Here’s a hoax which I came across today purporting that Saturn will appear closer to Earth than the moon to offer an spectacular sight. Anyone with a basic understanding […]
Read more "Yet Another Facebook Hoax"
The BLOG of the cosmos 