Last week on Fossil Friday, I presented you with a fossil—and very little information about said fossil. I told you it was found in modern day Nevada, and hails from the Miocene. But beyond that, you were on your own. Was it a piece of dino-poo? A strange and warty blowfish? An early gambling…
A creationist group is organizing an event at a major university (unnamed, since I certainly don’t want to promote the event), and some scientists there wanted advice on how to respond. One approach we discussed was using humor to push back. I love the idea, but it's not as simple as you'd think.…
A car company is not something I’d usually criticize for a lack of understanding evolution. But watching television last night, I saw an ad for the Mercedes GLA that made me yell, to no one in particular, “OH PLEASE!” It was just so bad I had to share. Here’s the first part of the voiceover:…
This week on Fossil Friday, I share another mystery fossil about which I’ll tell you very little. Hailing from the Miocene, this specimen was found in Nevada. It looks like a blob of some sort. Was it a single living blob or many smaller blobs, blobbed together? A piece of dino-poo? A very warty…
In my last post, I told you that NCSE is collecting stories from scientists, elected officials, journalists, and anyone else whose interest in science, and commitment to great science education, was sparked by a terrific teacher. I began with the story of Stefano Bertuzzi, executive director of…
I suppose, with my taste for gobbets of recherché historical trivia, that “Seven Myths about Ussher” is as close as I can come to composing a headline with a lot of clickbait appeal. But at least because today is October 23, 2014—marking the beginning of the 6018th year since the creation of the…
I’m in the middle, just about the exact middle in fact, of summarizing a Hungarian play, Ferenc Herczeg’s Majomszínház (1925), a comedy in three acts. Why? Because, as I noted in part 1, The New York Times for January 2, 1927, claimed that Herczeg “is probably the first…
Last week on Fossil Friday, I told you nothing! Was it an animal, vegetable, or mineral? I asked. Was this even a fossil from a living creature or a drip of sloth snot? You had to tell me what genus it came from and whether we could find something similar today. And it was….a needle…
Proposed social studies textbooks get climate change wrong, distort facts, deny science CONTACTS: Robert Luhn, NCSE, 510/601-7203 Dan Quinn, TFN, 512/322-0545 Lisa Hoyos, Climate Parents, 510/282-0440 The results are in! Over 24,000 Texans, together with parents and education supporters…