TOP 100 CAMPING SITES
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| Why People Believe Invisible Agents Control the World Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns [More] rss.sciam.com |
Save the giant spitting earthworm The three-foot long, giant Palouse earthworm has only been seen a few times in the last century, for which many people are probably grateful. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Is That Rocket Fuel Contaminating Your Water? Perchlorate seems to be everywhere these days. It is in a lot of water supplies, in fruits and vegetables, in Chile's Atacama Desert, and even on Mars.That is good and bad news for the Defense Department and military contractors battling accusations that they have polluted groundwater with perchlorate, a primary component of rocket fuel. [More] rss.sciam.com |
Readers Respond on "Obama's Science" Tax Dollars at Work Despite Barack Obama appointing scientists to top posts, I hardly think this qualifies him personally to be named in the “ Scientific American 10 .” His inclusion pales beside the favor bestowed to the others on the list who have actually done some real work for science and humanity. [More] rss.sciam.com |
World Changing Ideas: December's Scientific American Scientific American Magazine's editor-in-chief Mariette Dichristina and editor Michael Moyer talk about the World Changing Ideas feature, as well as other contents of the December issue. [More] rss.sciam.com |