Thursday, 9 February, 2012

It will never make it as a live network TV show, but there is such a thing as Saturday Night Science.

Communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations has always been a far out idea.

When scientists describe what they know about consciousness, their knowledge of the mysteries of the mind often seems rather meager and unsatisfactory — which would not have come as a surprise to Lord Kelvin.

If you’re a devotee of vacationing in strange places, you’ll surely want to visit the volcanoes in Hawaii, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and the canals of Venice, Italy (or, for stranger still, spend a day people-watching at Venice Beach in California).

Ask a historian about the laws of power, and you’ll probably hear two: 1. Power corrupts; 2. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Ask a physicist, though, and you’ll get some equations depicting what scientists refer to as “power laws.”

When you get tired of all the flap over The Da Vinci Code, you can always return to biology.

Whoever said “monkey see, monkey do,” wasn’t watching monkeys very closely.

People hoping to find life on distant planets might as well be asking for the moon.

It’s a terrible mistake, journalists are taught from their youth, to assume anything. If somebody says “what goes up must come down,” you should check it out.

For a patient that is 13.7 billion year old, the universe is in pretty good health.