Tag Archives: science

Right-wing ranters in my Twitter timeline are pooh-poohing the whole climate discussion without doing their homework. So, here’s a little reader to aid and abet (sorry, early retired teacher and that all).Let’s start at the beginning:1. CO2 is measured at the Manua Loa station. Results are clear, robust, and stark: CO2 is increasing. And no, CO2 is not ‘following temperature’ as the latest lazymeme from the lazyright wants to have it. It’s following us. We’re causing it. A ‘mass...

Evey day, I get an array of emails in my In-Box offering up articles or what they think can be interesting reads. Some are hawking subscriptions too. I like to subscribe to news letters and magazines. The problem being, I never get a chance to finish them all. Law Why the Supreme Court rejected a case about LGBTQ+ conversion therapy bans, slate.com, Dahlia Lithwick and Joseph Stern. SCOTUS refused to take up Tingley v. Ferguson, a First...

Few doubt that the mid-fourteenth-century Afro-Eurasian plague pandemic, the Black Death, killed tens of millions of people. In western Asia and Europe, where its spread and mortality are best understood, upwards of 50% of the population is thought to have died within approximately 5 years. …The regionality of the plague’s mortality is particularly underexplored, owing to the availability of written sources and the limits of traditional historical methods. Here we pioneer a new approach, big...

On Tuesday I pointed to research that the Green Revolution might be the greatest antidote to poverty and poor health in human history. The revolution continues, with more and better crops and techniques available every year. Today, however, the main hurdles aren’t technology and logistics, but rather regulation and politics. One follower, for instance, sent me to this tweet: A modern variety of Golden Rice, GR2E, is safe, high-yielding and rich in beta carotene. That hasn’t stopped anti-GMO...

There’s a pattern that we frequently see in the development of a new technology. Initially, the practical functionality is limited by the technology itself – what’s built and used is close to the limit of what the technology is physically capable of doing. As the technology develops and its capabilities improve, there’s a divergence between what a technology can physically do and what it can economically do, and you begin to see commercialized versions that have lower performance but are...

The universe was born in light. If modern cosmology is right, for the first forty thousand years or so after the Big Bang the most important component in the young, hot universe was electromagnetic radiation, a situation that continued until the universe had cooled sufficiently for the first hydrogen and helium atoms to form. Temperatures were still high enough at that point for the cosmos to be filled with an opaque, glowing plasma. After a few hundred thousand years, as the universe...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action. A quick note, my posting frequency has slowed down in 2021, thanks for sticking with it. One reason has been that I’ve been co-authoring another set of links with my brilliant IPA colleagues, Luciana Debenedetti & Rachel Strohm, every other week focused on new research on COVID and social protection (this week’s is here). Among other, I think I also hit what I now realize was a quarantine burnout. If it’s helpful to anybody...

In the last few days, there have been quite a few reports of studies suggesting that the number of people who have been exposed to Covid-19 is far larger than previously thought. These studies have been based on testing for antibodies against coronavirus (it is unclear whether they are specific to Covid-19, or might reflect exposure to other coronaviruses). I’m finding it difficult to square these estimates with inferences from direct testing, which (as I understand it) tests...

Guest post by by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action Chris has been threatening it for a while but looks like he’s finally done it (click through to see the full thread and description of why his answer’s not what you might expect): Set your 2-year clock for my book: Why We Fight. Everything you need to know about why gangs, nations, and other groups go to war, and how to stop it. Just signed with editor Wendy Wolf @VikingBooks, an imprint @PenguinUSA! Huge credit to agent...

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action J-PAL North America has released a pretty spiffy-looking toolkit for doing evaluations in North America, covering conceptual things like assessing feasibility as well as technical things like power calculations, with links to code and more resources (most of the info isn’t specific to North America).It’s been a big few weeks for open science:It is the policy of the American Economic Association to publish papers only if the data...