Deng Coy Miel, Singapore

A friend (who is a female science professor) sent along this piece from The Chronicle News Blog: For women contemplating careers as science professors, the numbers are daunting. More than half of the bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering these days go to women, but they run into a high hurdle when it comes to securing academic jobs. Fewer than one in three science and engineering professors are female,...

WARNING! SCIENCE CONTENT! There’s actually a pun buried in the title of this column, but you might not find it amusing unless you have a pHd in advanced particle physics. The science community is abuzz over rumors that a research team in Italy may have discovered the long sought and highly controversial “dark matter” which some claim makes up a huge amount of the mass of the universe. Researchers...

Not all the global commentary about the Olympic torch relay is serious. Le Monde’s Robert Sole writes in this tongue-in-cheek op-ed, “Yes, clouds are threatening the Olympics in Beijing. But Chinese authorities have just given us some reassuring news: an arsenal is being prepared to make sure that it doesn’t rain during the opening ceremonies on August 8. Twenty-one teams are spread around...

Indianapolis Star: The Purdue Society of Professional Engineers knows how to make a hamburger. Before a crowd of more than 1,500 people Saturday in the Purdue University Armory, the team came away with first prize in the 2008 national Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. Advertisement The Purdue engineers beat six other teams from colleges across the country, including last year’s champions from Ferris State...

Here’s a story that proves that history eventually comes out in the end: Researchers recovered human DNA dating back 14,300 years from dried excrement found in Oregon’s Paisley Caves. Anthropologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon said the DNA is the oldest ever found in the New World, the university said Thursday in a release. Jenkins and an international team of scientists said the DNA...

Tierneylab Blog at The New York Times: Are Carbon Cuts Just A Fantasy? What if there’s no way to cut greenhouse emissions enough to make a real difference? That’s the question raised by a commentary in Nature arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been too optimistic in its projections for the technological possibilities of reducing greenhouse emissions. Their calculations are called...

I had just recently finished reading about the results of Earth Hour Chicago and the tons of carbon emissions which were not released into the atmosphere when I was suddenly put in mind of a sandwich I made recently – and my grandmother. The combination may sound strange, but programs such as Earth Hour nudge me to remain mindful of some efforts my family and I have undertaken recently to be less wasteful....

MORE HERE. Photograph by Gemunu Amarasinghe/The Associated Press

As WORLDMEETS.US regularly demonstrates, the U.S. election race is dazzling the rest of the planet. The U.S. correspondent for Portugal’s Jornal de Negocios finds America’s capacity to remake itself after the ‘reactionary’ George W. Bush to be ‘remarkable.’ Leonel Moura writes in part, ‘Just as in the person of George Bush, America has given us one of the most reactionary...

Did you see it last night? If you missed it, feel free to take a look at my Flickr set. Here’s one example – it was a beautiful, eerie sky.

Here’s another Guest film Review by Dan Schneider, who has this heavily-visited website and whose reviews for TMV have been highly popular. DVD Review Of An Inconvenient Truth Review Copyright 2008 © by Dan Schneider Let me state, up front, I have never been a fan of former Vice President Al Gore. He was a right of center Democrat who worked in an administration whose environmental record was considered,...

If you peruse this list of policy initiatives provided by The White House in relation to President George W. Bush’s State of the Union address last night (transcript is here; C-SPAN video is here), you may notice that two topics concern science and technology, two topics concern education and no topics concern the arts. [NB: The final topic on that list, about worldwide compassion, stands out to me because...

The Antarctic ice sheet, which covers about 98 percent of Antarctica, contains about 90 percent of the world’s total ice mass and about 61 percent of the world’s total fresh water. It is estimated that global sea levels would rise about 60 meters were it to melt completely. And it is melting. And melting quickly, according to an important new study: One of the biggest worries about global warming...

Does the future of humanity and a third of all living things rest in the hands of American voters in the 2008 presidential elections? According to this editorial from Brazil’s Estadao newspaper, George W. Bush’s failure to follow through with Bill Clinton’s commitments at Kyoto creates skepticism over whether U.S. commitments made at Bali can be believed. “At Bali, a step forward was...

Was Al Gore taking a cheap shot when he criticized his own nation as the primary obstruction to progress on climate change? According to this op-ed article from the Nederlands Dagblad, ‘The proceedings at Bali were taken hostage by Europe’s antagonism toward the U.S., enabling Al Gore to score in an open goal.’ By Jan van Benthem Translated By Meta Mertens December 17, 2007 The Netherlands...

Is the United States missing a chance to redeem its global reputation by obstructing a climate deal at a U.N. conference in Bali? Along with Al Gore, the editorial board of Saudi Arabia’s Saudi Gazette certainly thinks so. “Of course, Bush was bought and paid for by the time he was elected President in 2000 … when it comes to the Bush Administration, the word ‘moral’ is one that doesn’t...

So much for those who think chimps are dumb animals: Spend even a little time around chimpanzees, and you begin to realize how intelligent they are. But can they outshine humans in brain power? Most humans would scoff at that. Not really. I’ve watched the Democratic and Republican party Presidential debates and that doesn’t surprise me one bit. But researchers have shown that young chimps outperform...

From Middle Earth Journal’s Jazz Shaw: We’ve been doing a bit of background research here at MEJ, and a story that started out looking like yet another case of taxpayer dollars being shuffled into the hands of questionable private contractors has taken a few turns which have made the plot thicken. The first issue was this story stuck back on page 4 in the wapo about a $475M no-bid contract being...

An interesting article in The Economist traces the history of the erstwhile technological/scientific powers — China and India — “who have much to offer the world of technology, but more still to gain from it”. “TOWARDS the end of the 11th century, while tardy Europeans kept time with sundials, Su Sung of China completed his masterpiece: a water clock of great intricacy and accuracy…...

It can run for hours at 20 metres per minute without getting tired. It lives longer, has more sex, and eats more without gaining weight. Could the science that created this supermouse be applied to humans? asks The Independent. “The mouse can run up to six kilometres (3.7 miles) at a speed of 20 metres per minute for five hours or more without stopping. Scientists said that this was equivalent of a man...

French President Nicolas Sarkozy last night declared that his country would witness a “green” revolution which will cut the nation’s energy consumption and carbon emissions, reduce road and air transport and promote organic farming. The Independent reports: M. Sarkozy hailed the two-day national meeting as an ‘important moment’ in a shift away from a ‘production and consumer’...

You want to know just how crazy the Bush White House is? Do you? I know, there’s already an astonishing amount of evidence to back up that assessment, so much delusion, so much apparent insanity, but consider what White House Press Secretary Dana Perino said on Wednesday in response to allegations “the White House ‘eviscerated’ Center for Disease Control director Dr. Julie Gerberding’s...

(Note: I apologize for the link-heavy opening paragraph, but I’ve done a good deal of writing about the climate crisis over at my place, and these links will take you directly to some of those posts.) I haven’t blogged about the climate crisis in some time, except to comment on Al Gore’s Nobel win — as J. Kingston Pierce and J. Thomas Duffy did, too — but it’s been in the...

In awarding Al Gore with the Nobel Prize, has the Norwegian Parliament betrayed its pro-NATO, pro-war bias? According to this op-ed article from Mexico’s La Jornada, it’s time for the developed world to begin awarding “alternate peace prizes to compete creatively for world public opinion, rather than depend exclusively on the politically contaminated Nobel ‘Peace’ Prize.” “This...