There was some feedback on Facebook and on our blog, re: the Day of the Dead Fossil Fridays have been a little too easy. In order to taunt you at your maximum capacity, I've limited the photograph this week to only include the teeth. And I've asked Eric Meikle, one of our house…
It was exciting to see the good news that Randy W. Schekman, a member of NCSE, was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2013. But it wasn’t unprecedented, of course. A number of Nobel laureates have been members of NCSE over the years, including the late Francis Crick and the late…
TOLES Copyright 2013 The Washington Post. Used courtesy of the creator and Universal Uclick. All rights reserved. When the Kansas Board of Education voted in June 2013 to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, I thought my former home state had finally broken free of its sad history of…
In the Roman Catholic Church, October 22 is the memorial or feast day of the late Pope John Paul II; indeed, it marks the 35th anniversary of his election to the papacy. He is a very significant intellectual figure among recent pontiffs due to his appreciation of the dialogue between…
The recent federal government shutdown involved not only furloughing federal employees but also restricting access to our national parks. From Yosemite to Yellowstone, from Bryce Canyon to the Bright Angel Trail, countless people were turned away from what, for some, could have been a once in a…
I really like book reviews. No, I mean, I really like book reviews. I like reading them—I subscribe to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and I read a number of on-line book reviews regularly (my favorites are those in the International History,…
NCSE is pleased to offer a free preview (PDF) of Donald R. Prothero's Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future (Indiana University Press, 2013). The preview consists of the whole of chapter 5, "Hot Enough For You? The Heated Debate over a Warming Planet," in which Prothero…
Last week's Fossil Friday was apparently a tough one. Only 4 guesses—and half of them were for sloths! The correct answer was quickly supplied by Joshua Vallejos. Says anthropologist Eric Meikle: "The fossil is usually referred to either Homo ergaster or Homo…
A Sorrowful and Foreboding Anniversary Saturday, October 19 marks the 22nd anniversary of the Oakland Hills Firestorm, one of the most destructive and costly wildfires in American history. Three thousand homes and twenty five lives were lost in a three-day tragedy compounded by…