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Lightning Rod

Historian: Voyager spacecraft marked new age of discovery

By Faye Flam

May 17, 2013

Some are baffled and others saddened by the fact that humans put footprints on the moon more than 40 years ago and have not ventured a fraction of that distance from home since. Have we lost our spirit of exploration? More »
Is there hope for math-challenged scientists? Temple Grandin, E.O. WIlson speak out.

By Faye Flam

May 7, 2013

Shock and outrage were bound to follow when the famous biologist-writer E.O. Wilson proclaimed that many scientists are at best "semiliterate" in math. When this heresy appeared in an op-ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, Slate responded with the bluntly headlined, Don't Listen to E.O. Wilson and the Huffington Post with Why E.O. Wilson is Wrong. Wilson's work on ant coloni... More »
Coelacanth DNA analysis illuminates a time when fish crawled

By Faye Flam

April 25, 2013

If you look back far enough, humans evolved from fish. Anyone doubting this aspect of our ancestry must contend with a growing wealth of DNA evidence. Among the fish living today, we share a particularly close relationship to a rare deep-sea dweller known as the coelacanth, which is more closely related to us than it is to other fish. More »
A primate expert speaks on atheism, apes and the evolution of virtue

By Faye Flam

April 17, 2013

(Note to readers: I wrote this story last week, before any of us could imagine someone would deliberately set off bombs at the Boston Marathon. But if anything, the event reinforces the prevalence of virtue and caring in our species. The malevolence of a small group or perhaps a single individual was answered by a wave of assistance, comforting of victims, blood-donation, well-wishing and life-sav... More »
My top Philadelphia Science Festival pick

By Faye Flam

April 16, 2013

Addendum: I made a small change to acknowledge that the proceeds for this event go to the James Randi Educational Foundation. This week, Philadelphia kicks off its third annual science festival. After perusing the program, the top pick goes easily to the April 20 event titled Science, Pseudoscience and Nonsense by James Randi. How can a famed magician and escape artist addressing science be anyt... More »
What this speckled oval says about our cosmic origins

By Faye Flam

April 12, 2013

What is this oval thing and why to physicists find it so inspiring? It came from a European satellite called Planck, and scientists have been raving about it since it was released earlier this month. Why? We all feel the inspirational quality of those Hubble pictures showing distant galaxies swirling through the blackness of deep space. Intuition doesn't lead us to marvel at this blotchy ima... More »
Darwinian process helps explain less-than-intelligent design of male genitalia

By Faye Flam

April 9, 2013

Faye: When a new study came in the journal PNAS dealing with female preference for longer male members, I thought the topic might be a sensitive one for some readers. So I decided to hand this over to a male friend who says his sexual conquests were countless, despite being far from well-endowed by anyone's standards. — Higgs: Hi. Higgs here. I've just finished reading this new study... More »
Scopes trial lecture April 3d and more upcoming science-related events

By Faye Flam

April 2, 2013

Philadelphia is a great place to be for anyone interested in history, science, or the history of science. Nearly every week there's something of interest going on at Penn, or the Wagner Free Institute, the Academy of Natural Sciences or one of the many other historic institutions. This Wednesday, April 3, anthropologist Janet Monge will speak at the Penn Museum on the famous Scopes trial of ... More »
News stories claim “Reverse Evolution” is a surprise. Biologists disagree

By Faye Flam

March 26, 2013

According to a slew of news reports last week, a study of dust mites has just proven that evolution can reverse. One headline in the Daily Beast even declared that "Evolution Bites the Dust". Cute, but wrong. The scientific paper that prompted these stories was based on a study showing dust mites evolved from free living to parasitic to free living again. Evolution seemed to have taken ... More »
“The Bonobo and the Atheist” author to says we underestimate our fellow animals"

By Faye Flam

March 23, 2013

In a fascinating op-ed piece in todays' Wall Street Journal, primatologist Frans de Waal poses a provocative question: Why, he asked, do we humans assume that other animals lack cognitive abilities until we test for them? When we do start giving animals fair tests, we are surprised to find that some chimps can outperform college students in memory tests, and elephants can use tool, solve prob... More »
Lightning Rod

The twisted history of cosmic microwaves

By Faye Flam

March 22, 2013

What was that "baby picture" of the universe that was all over the news today? The image is a false-color map of cosmic microwaves. Yes, the same type of radiation that cooks food fast also permeates the universe and reflects something about its structure during the first fraction of a second after the big bang. More »
Will Haiti’s Frozen Frogs be Resurrected Through “De-Extinction”?

By Faye Flam

March 19, 2013

Last week National Geographic hosted what sounded like a fun, gee-whiz conference on "De-Extinction", a term referring to the use of cloning and other biotechnology tricks to resurrect passenger pigeons, wooly mammoths and other extinct species. The event had the jaunty title TEDxDeExtinction. But my feeling about this topic will always be colored by a somber experience I had returning ... More »
Physicist explains what he means by a “boring” universe.

By Faye Flam

March 2, 2013

It wasn't quite clear what physicist Joe Lykken meant earlier this week when he suggested that our universe could be overtaken by expanding bubbles of a more boring kind of universe. I wrote to ask him and he jusr got back to me. It turns out that according to current measurements of the Higgs boson and other fundamental particles, there could be a more stable state of things called the &quo... More »
Physicist says expanding bubbles of boring space may destroy universe. Higgs explains

By Faye Flam

February 26, 2013

Several readers of Lightning Rod have suggested we address the surprising news that surfaced earlier this month when scientists announced a new way the world could end – a scenario informed by the discovery of the Higgs Boson last summer. The issue seemed like a natural one for Higgs, and he has cordially agreed to step in. Higgs: Hi, Higgs here. For a long time, you humans equated the end of y... More »
Lightning Rod blog

Post Darwin Day rebuttal to reader comment regarding Intelligent Design

By Faye Flam

February 14, 2013

Every day is Darwin day here at Lightning Rod. I spent my day Tuesday attending a seminar by physicist James Glazier of University of Indiana on the evolutionary biology of cancer cells. In his view, the medical community could benefit from thinking of cancer cells as living things subject to natural selection. Certain courses of treatment might help patients and others might inadvertently tip the... More »
Lightning Rod blog

Darwin Day Brings out Evolution’s Friends and Foes

By Faye Flam

February 12, 2013

As we celebrate another Charles Darwin birthday on February 12, friends of Darwinian evolution will pick up on things he got right, and enemies on what he didn't. Darwin was a prolific, wide-ranging thinker and writer, so it's no surprise that a few things he wrote don't ring true a century and a half later. More »
Does Cold Weather Induce Bad Newspaper Climate Coverage?

By Faye Flam

February 9, 2013

When Sandy hit last fall, a number of scientists were quoted in the press voicing concern that heat-trapping greenhouse gases are contributing to bigger, more powerful storms. And while scientists can't prove that greenhouse gases directly caused Sandy or the more current Northeast snowstorm dubbed "Nemo," there's overwhelming evidence that human activity has changed the atmosp... More »
How Scientists Think About the Limits of Evolution

By Faye Flam

February 7, 2013

Darwin's theory showed how natural processes could give rise to a diversity of life that had previously appeared inexplicable – even magical. With natural selection, scientists suddenly had a unified framework within which to understand the anatomy and behavior of living things. But a couple of looming questions remain unanswered even today. How did life begin? And how and why did cells give ... More »
Kavli Meeting: Moving Beyond Darwin

By Faye Flam

January 27, 2013

In his talk last week, biologist Mike Lynch started by telling the audience he didn't like the term "Darwinism". I don't either, and I've written several posts on the misleading way that creationists label people as "Darwinists" to make science look like ideology. We don't call physicists Einsteinians or astronomers Hubbleites, though they, like biologists, ... More »
Dung beetles navigate by starlight

By Faye Flam

January 25, 2013

The image of the dung beetle just skyrocketed thanks to some scientists from Sweden who wanted to understand how these insects roll balls of dung in surprisingly straight lines in the dark. So they designed little hats to see if the beetles were using the night sky. What the researchers found was the first known use of celestial navigation among insects. Their results, published in the journal Cu... More »
Biologists, Physicists Cooperate on the Mystery of Cooperation

By Faye Flam

January 24, 2013

For the next few weeks I'll be writing from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at U.C. Santa Barbara. I'm on a fellowship here, and while some of my time will be focused on theoretical physics, I'm concentrating on a cross-disciplinary program they're holding this month and next on the evolution of cooperation. The full title is "cooperation and the evolution of ... More »