If you think about it a bit, it should be obvious that sexual reproduction is a bad idea, in evolutionary terms, i.e., we should never have evolved to reproduce sexually. Consider two species: H. sapiens (i.e., us) and H. amazonius: a hypothetical species entirely of women who can give birth without sex. Now, if we […]
Read more
It is summer, and one of things academics are supposed to do over summer is look back at how they thought the teaching went, and reflect on the student feedback on what they liked/didn’t like. Then in summer there should be time to fix things that didn’t work so well. I am very bad at […]
Read more
I work on how water droplets start form in the air but got distracted today by the other end of the process: Why don’t they grow to huge sizes? Why don’t you see rain droplets the size of your head? The maximum size of a rain droplet as it falls through the Earth’s atmosphere is […]
Read more
@PhysicsatSurrey follows NASA on twitter and a NASA tweet advertised science on the International Space Station (ISS). The project list is here. A whole series of the projects have a (ground based) lead of Paul Chaikin (a prof at New York University). I know Paul Chaikin a bit, we kind of work in the same […]
Read more
Scientists do experiments with all sorts: semiconductor lasers, low temperature helium, … babies. There is a paper in last week’s Science by Gweon and Schulz on reasoning in (16-month old) babies. Scientists can reason, at least I hope I can. If my mobile is inert, I check the battery isn’t flat by plugging it in […]
Read more
Comment