Last month news broke that hackers had illegally obtained and released to the internet about 160MB of private email correspondences between scientists at the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The timing of the release was suspicious because it coincided with preparations for the Copenhagen climate change summit. FOX News and affiliates, followed soon thereafter by right wing and conservative radio personalities and bloggers took up the chant that the emails proved that there was a massive conspiracy and that global warming was now debunked as a fraud. Several sentences in the thousands of emails were taken (out of context) and repeated over and over again as proof of a cover-up. I downloaded all the emails as soon as I could find a site hosting them and started searching through them myself.
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The Mars rovers are now going on 6 years of crawling around the Martian surface looking for evidence of life. Of the two, Spirit has had the toughest time of it, losing the use of one of it’s six wheels forcing it to continue its trek backwards since 2006. In April it got stuck again, and scientists have been working on figuring out how to extricate the robot from some soft sand around a small crater ever since. There has been some good to come out of the ordeal as Spirit’s spinning wheels have revealed more evidence of the past presence of water and conditions that might have supported life. More information about the findings can be read in this more recent article at Physorg.

Originally designed for a 3 month trek, the little robots that put the term ‘remote controlled’ into cosmic perspective have proven very sturdy and well designed providing a number of interesting discoveries over the years. I’ve been following the rovers’ trek since they were just being planned and was lucky enough to catch a great lecture at Stony Brook 3 years ago given by one of the members of the Rover science team, but a quick look back through the posts on this site reveals that I never wrote about that, and have only mentioned the other rover (Opportunity) once. [edit: oops, make that twice]

Though somewhat dated, this BBC Horizon special on Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) is worth watching despite a short interview about half way through with a guy who seems a bit cracked. Tesla was an enigma. Born in Serbia, he eventually became one of America’s greatest electrical engineers and inventors (becoming a naturalized citizen in 1891) . An obsessive/compulsive, his many eccentricities left him isolated, with few friends and without the glorious legacy we’ve grown accustomed to with major scientific figures. He didn’t commercialize his ideas, or even publish his work. He didn’t associate with academics, but instead gave sensational interviews with journalists and speculated on the future of science for science fiction rags (ultimately getting labeled a “mad scientist”). From work on AC (a far better source of power for long distance transmission than Edison’s DC) and the Tesla coil (think spark plug) to flourescents, wireless remote control over tuned (specific) frequencies, X-ray photography, a bladeless turbine (impeller-less pump), and the only recently re-visited concept of wireless transmission of electricity, Tesla was an inventor at least a century ahead of his time. Some of the parallels between the lives of Tesla and Leonardo DaVinci may be obvious.

Consider this a private mental note to the idiot I talked to a couple days ago who argued that “Evolution is just a theory”: Evolution as a process that occurs in nature is a fact. More than that, it is an historical reality, much as the knowledge that the earth revolves around the Sun is now considered more than “just a theory”. The idea that humans evolved from less complex forms is a Scientific Theory, which is different from a “theory” as used in the vernacular (in common speech). A Scientific Theory (capitalization is mine) is the highest level of scientific proof available which takes into account all the observable physical evidence and explains every tiny bit of it. While it is possible to disprove (or falsify) a Scientific Theory if evidence is found to contradict it, generally the scientific community is reluctant to raise any possible explanation to the level of a Theory unless there is a huge body of incontrovertible evidence available and the vast majority of scientists the world over agree with it. Even if some evidence arises to disprove the current Theory of human evolution, it will not remove the *facts* that have been uncovered in support of it, so another Theory would need to explain all of those finds scientifically (and without just appealing to the caprices of nature or the will of nature’s God).

There are several other Theories that you might wish to expend your energy disproving if you think you’re up to the task of battling wits with some of the smartest people in the world: the Theory of Gravity, the Atomic Theory of chemistry, the Newtonian Theory of mechanics, or my favorite mysterious theory: Quantum Theory.

Hans Rosling, a physician and professor of global health from Sweden recently gave a talk at the US State Dept. entitled Let My Dataset change your midset illustrated by the free software he and his son developed called Gapminder. He explains how the data (which he thanks the US for compiling and releasing so generously) shows a convergence around the world (ala Tom Friedman’s Flat Earth) and warns us that some problems are more complex than a simple static chart or graph will reveal. Only by looking at (good) data with an analysis tool like this can you begin to see what is really happening. For instance, he shows that the HIV crisis in Africa isn’t really an “African” problem, as there are many very poor countries in Africa that have done a good job of reducing the problem, where other richer African countries have done a terrible job. Solutions to global health problems need to be tailored to the individual case.
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