Category: science
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In Evolution, Adaptability Beats Fitness
The longest continuous evolution experiment was started in 1988 and is still ongoing. The study, examining the “evolvability” of Escherichia coli (E. coli), has recently surpassed 52,000 generations and has had a sample of the population frozen and saved every 75 days (every 500 generations). The wealth of data obtained is fantastic and these frozen ancestors have been the…
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The Scientific Journalism Formula
In a near-perfect parody of science reporting in the popular press, Martin Robbins, The Lay Scientist, created “a news website article about a scientific paper“. In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding? […] This…
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Avoid Boring Writing: Tips (to Avoid) from Scientific Articles
Most scientific papers consist of “predictable, stilted structure and language”, leading to consistently boring journal articles. Kaj Sand-Jensen, writing in the ecology journal Oikos, decided to investigate this problem and concluded his research by providing a set of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific articles (pdf): Avoid focus Avoid originality and personality Write…
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Cosmic View to The Know Universe
In 1957, the Dutch educator Kees Boeke wrote Cosmic View, a essay exploring “many levels of size and structure, from the astronomically vast to the atomically tiny”. Boeke’s essay went on to inspire the 1968 animated short, Cosmic Zoom. Cosmic View and Zoom then inspired the more famous Charles and Ray Eames documentary, Powers of Ten,…
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The Science Behind Good Presentations
We know that cluttered presentations and those with paragraphs of text per slide aren’t good and that the 10/20/30 rule is a guideline generally worth adhering to, but why? Could there be a scientific basis for why some presentations are better than others? Chris Atherton, an applied cognitive psychologist at the UK’s University of Central…
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An Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs
Parts of Abraham Maslow‘s famous 1940s hierarchy of needs are outdated and thought of as quaint by the scientific community, according to a team who have revised the hierarchy to take into consideration scientific findings from the last 60+ years. Maslow’s pyramid is used to represent the hierarchy of basic human motivations, from basic physical…
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Irrelevant Neuroscience Jargon Increases Persuasiveness
The addition of “irrelevant talk about neuroscience” makes a previously bad psychological explanation much more persuasive and acceptable. Luckily experts are not fooled by this addition of spurious neuroscience, but as an in-depth look at the study shows, almost all non-experts (including neuroscience students) are fooled and persuaded by the addition of logically irrelevant neuroscience…
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Outliers, Regression and the Sports Illustrated Myth
By appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, sportsmen and women become jinxed and shortly thereafter experience bouts of bad luck, goes the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx myth. ‘Evidence’ of the myth comes in the form of many individuals and teams who have died or, more commonly, simply experienced bad luck in their chosen vocation shortly after…
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
The First Law of Fanfiction states that every change which strengthens the protagonists requires a corresponding worsening of their challenges. […] stories are about conflict; a hero too strong for their conflict is no longer in tense, heart-pounding difficulty. […] The Rationalist Fanfiction Principle states that rationality is not magic; being rational does not require magical potential or royal bloodlines…