Monthly Archives: July 2009

Science? Pew!

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Pew Science Knowledge Quiz

To test your knowledge of scientific concepts and recent scientific findings and events, we invite you to take this 12-question science knowledge quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with the 1,005 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions. You’ll also be able to compare your Science IQ with the average scores of men and women; with college graduates as well as those who didn’t attend college; with people who are your age as well as with younger and older Americans.

I got 12/12, but I’d expect anyone with a science degree to do pretty well — this is targeted to a lay audience. And it sets the bar pretty low; numerous bloggers have discussed the poll results and implications. The poll is reasonable, I think, with two exceptions. One is a question that is not so much science as current events, and another is the type which becomes harder to justify when you know more about the topic. Look at the quiz first, though.

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Pass Me the *@#%ing Aspirin

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Or acetylsalicylic acid, generic. You can get six hundred tablets of that for the same price as three hundred of a name brand.

Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief

Although cursing is notoriously decried in the public debate, researchers are now beginning to question the idea that the phenomenon is all bad. “Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it,” says psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England, who led the study. And indeed, the findings point to one possible benefit: “I would advise people, if they hurt themselves, to swear,” he adds.

Not clear to me how swearing differs from just yelling something random, though.

There is a catch, though: The more we swear, the less emotionally potent the words become, Stephens cautions. And without emotion, all that is left of a swearword is the word itself, unlikely to soothe anyone’s pain.

Oh, shit.

I've Gotta Get Me Some

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Colored bubbles arise after 15-year quest

Zubbles

Standard food coloring or dyes have no effect; they simply run down the sides of the bubble, creating a drop of color on the bottom. Other dyes can stain bubbles, but when they pop they also stain clothes, dogs and eyes, as Kehoe discovered during one accident. Other tests, including one for a bubble dye that washed out, didn’t fare much better.

I don’t know about the food coloring running down the side — the dilution is so great that for amount I’ve added when I tried this, the effect is simply unnoticeable.

In this Corner …

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… weighing in at nil, the aether!

Skulls in the Stars: Lord Rayleigh vs. the Aether! (1902)

One of the most fascinating aspects of 19th century physics is that many remarkable ideas and ingenious experiments were motivated by a physical hypothesis which we now know to be incorrect: namely, the aether. When light was demonstrated to have wavelike properties in the early 1800s, it was natural to reason that, like other types of waves, light must result from the excitation of some medium: after all, water waves arise from the oscillations of water, sound waves arise from the oscillation of air, and string vibrations are of course the oscillations of string. The hypothetical medium which carries light vibrations was dubbed the “aether”, due to its unknown, “aetherial” nature.

If You Want to Speak Out, Speak Out

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Uncertain Principles: This Is My Job

Somewhere in the last fifty-odd years, though, we’ve picked up the notion that it’s somehow unseemly for Real Scientists to speak to a general audience– that, as “Jon” writes, the only job of a scientist is to hunker down and do research that will be read and used by other scientists. The messy business of dumbing things down for the person on the street is best left to English majors who couldn’t hack calculus.

It’s no coincidence that the public prestige and influence of science has decreased significantly over that period. As scientists have lost interest in communicating science to the public, the public has lost interest in science.