Tim Worstall

DOCTORS have uncovered the first evidence that fathers of test-tube babies may be passing on their infertility to their sons.
Genetically based problem passed on through genes. That’ll have the evolutionists perplexed, eh?

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Dr Frank Drake said the phasing out of analogue transmissions from television, radio and radar was making our planet electronically invisible from outer space.
While old style signals used to spread out millions of miles into outer space, even reaching some distant stars, digital transmissions are much [...]

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Conclusions Listening to Nellie the Elephant significantly increased the proportion of lay people delivering compression rates at close to 100 per minute. Unfortunately it also increased the proportion of compressions delivered at an inadequate depth. As current resuscitation guidelines give equal emphasis to correct rate and depth, listening to Nellie the Elephant as a learning [...]

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There’s a bit of a disconnect here. Yes, we know that (especially from the sub-Continent but also in other parts of Asia) the lighter the skin the better looking the woman is considered. Thus the proliferation of lightening creams.
We also know why:
Perhaps it was once a sign of social class: only poor people needed to [...]

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No, I know, this isn’t all of the story but it is at least part of it.
The places where people live long lives seem to be those places which people go to when they retire. Thus it isn’t that thy are places which make people live long lives: it’s that those living long lives go [...]

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Youngsters who most love sugar also have the highest growth rate, according to scientists in the U.S.

Stunning, eh?
Consumption of calories leads to growth. Who would have thought it?

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Only a little side note really:

Charles and Emma Darwin had ten children, of whom seven survived to adulthood. Although only three provided Darwin with grandchildren,

You can see why people had large families…..if only 30% of your children provide you with grandchildren then you need a pretty good number just to keep the genes being passed [...]

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The Iraq war was just the first of this century’s "resource wars", in which powerful countries use force to secure valuable commodities for themselves, according to the UK government’s former chief scientific adviser.
Sir David King predicted that with human population growing, natural resources dwindling and seas rising because of climate change, the squeeze on the [...]

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Science provides natural explanations for your existence – a map which tells us where you are and what you are. If you don’t think such explanations are important, existence is probably wasted on you.

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Or maybe yes.

The Formula AE car will use a solar-powered battery to get it moving but will then use the airflow passing over the vehicle to power a turbine.
It will be able to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in less than four seconds and is expected to cost around £100,000 when it hits the [...]

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A decent crop this year, although they do seem to have changed a little bit from honouring completely nutty research to honouring really rather good research which only sounds nutty at first.

Economics
Geoffrey Miller at the University of New Mexico for discovering that lap dancers get larger tips when they are ovulating.

This touches on something really [...]

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This is rather a good example of it.
Darwin looking into whether blondes were more or less likely to get married and have children than darker haired women. Thus, was the population going to become darker haired over time?
Now, from memory, this is before we (that is, the world in general) found out about Mendel’s work [...]

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No, not the results here:

Babies conceived through IVF are much more likely to die at birth than those conceived naturally, the results of a new study show.

The death of babies is never to be considered excellent.
No, rather, we’ve got a perfect example of two things: the state of science reporting and the much better state [...]

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Finally, I find out where this excellent phrase comes from.

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr.

It would have to be quantum, wouldn’t it?

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You can imagine in a few million years, when flatfish have finally got themselves sorted out and the eyes are beautifully symmetrical over a neat horizontal mouth, that future generations of IDers will be loudly demanding to know how such a creature could possibly have evolved from ordinary fish. Where, they’ll ask, is the missing link?
And the [...]

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Far from showing how swiftly the world is advancing, the Phoenix mission is another dispiriting reminder of how the pace of change in the world is regressing.

It’s 2008, for Pete’s sake. Weren’t we supposed to be taking holidays on Mars by 2008? When we watched Star Trek as children, didn’t we assume that by the [...]

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see more crazy cat pics

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This is interesting. Confirmation of something which has been seen in other species but not (at least as far as I know) in humans.

The first evidence that women can influence the sex of their child by what they eat before they become pregnant is published today.
The study, which links higher energy intake around conception to [...]

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The comment on this seems appropriate:

Why do scientists get paid for researching into the blindingly obvious? How much did this research cost the taxpayer?

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“Our result show that one of the main assumptions of current models and theories is, in fact, quite wrong."
It doesn’t matter what the subject is (in this case it’s how starlings flock, but it could be about meiosis, hormesis or haplotypes) that’s the one phrase that every scientist wants to be able to stand up [...]

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