Riled Up

A large galaxy with a well defined spiral structure.

By Reilly Capps

If you want to know where the world is headed, you gotta talk to the kids.

After talking to the kids, I have no idea where the world is headed.

Mrs. Ananda’s eighth grade science classes in Denver’s Greenlee Middle School were both encouraging and terrifying, and it wasn’t just the smell of recently-dissected formaldehyded [...]

By Reilly Capps

Science tidbit of the day from Scientific American:

Researchers are stuffing lights into rats’ brains that stimulate certain areas, trying to affect the nerves and possibly control them by, for example, calming those that make Parkinson’s sufferers shake. They’ve already used lights in the brain to make rats run around in circles. I wonder [...]

Baby planets in the Orion Nebula, which is a birthplace of stars right here in our own spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. At the same time as the stars are being born, planets are too. Here’s hoping they develop life and decent Thai food.

Photo by NASA and the ESA.

Dear Grandkids,

You may never get this letter, because I’ll need to have kids before I can have grandkids, but I want to tell you before I forget about the guy I met the other day.

In 1969, he guided the lunar module to the surface of the moon, but now he flies commercial. In 1969, he [...]

By Reilly Capps

This kind of thing is HUGE news: the Department of Defense is going to list climate change as a threat to national security.

As more and more organizations that are not traditionally liberal or coastal come to agree that climate change is at least a possibility — like the military, like churches, like farmers [...]

By Reilly Capps

It’s a bad month for the environmentalists. During Copenhagen, a quick check tells you that most people think the presidents all flew there for no reason. If you search for “global warming” on YouTube, for example, the top results are all about how global warming isn’t happening. Six of the top 20 use [...]

By Reilly Capps

You ever see the fake Onion headline from July 21, 1969? “HOLY SHIT,” it said. “MAN WALKS ON FUCKING MOON.”

As synapse-snapping as the moon landing was, it’s possible we’ll see an even more stunning development in our lifetimes:

Martians.

Either dead or alive, little green men (very little green men) could be up there. If we [...]

The world will become a rain of fire! No, the world will become a ball of ice!

Oddly, this is what the news says. First hot and then cold, somehow.

People say the science on climate change is confusing, and it is. There are a baffling number of scenarios:

Earth could plunge into a sudden ice age, says [...]

Who here went to Catholic school? Let me see those hands. Ah, yes, I can still see the ruler-shaped scars on those knuckles. So you learned, like I did, about Pascal’s Wager. 

Pascal said he didn’t know if God existed, but that it would be worth our while to act like He existed, longterm-wise. After all, [...]