Researchers from Brazil's Universidade Estadual de Campinas used a computer simulation to confirm paleontologist Stephen J. Gould's prediction that it is evolutionarily advantageous for cicadas to emerge at intervals lasting a prime number of years.

The European Journal of Pharmacology has — against its will, it would seem — retracted a 2012 paper by a group of Chinese heart researchers embroiled in a what appears to be a rather messy authorship dispute. The article, “The effect of alendronate on the expression of osteopontin and osteoprotegerin in calcified aortic tissue of […]

I just read two very different science books, Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and Scott Aaronson's Quantum Computing since Democritus. Not much to connect the two except both deal to some extent about probability and computation and I want to write a blog post for each chapter, for much I disagree with both authors. But that's what makes them so much fun, so rare to find science-oriented books both worth reading that have the guts to say things that one can disagree with. In full […]

Required math: calculus Required physics: Schrödinger equation Reference: Griffiths, David J. (2005), Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, 2nd Edition; Pearson Education – Problem 5.11. The crude model of the helium atom ignored the interaction between the two electrons. As a result, the ground state energy of as predicted by the model was quite far off the […]

or How Fast Does Google Think We Drive?I picked this question up on Twitter a while back and really liked it. So, after we worked on making a plan, I thought it would be good to look at data.  Lots of data. And then coming up with ways to make sense out of it.ProcessSo, we took to Google.  Students went to Maps, entered starting location and destination (I didn't realize that I'd need to explain that you can't drive from California to China, but, whatever.) and then entered their data […]