Digging into the details of how this year’s Nobel-winning discoveries changed the world.Read more…
Science Corner: A Trip to ΘeoCon
There are still a number of great folks chatting with me about sci-fi films for our film festival, but those conversations are still in midstream so we’re taking a break this week. Instead, I’d like to tell you a little bit about an event I had the privilege to participate in last month: ΘeoCon.Read more…
Sci-Fi Film Fest: Talking I Am Mother with Sam Blair
Welcome to the first Emerging Scholars Network Sci-Fi Film Festival! I’ll be having a conversation here on the blog on various classic and current science fiction movies. Feel free to watch alonggh and join the conversation. This week’s film isRead more…
Sci-Fi Film Fest: Talking The Phantom Menace with Mike Beidler (Pt 2)
I continue my conversation with Mike Beidler about Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace as we chat about continuity, canon, and capitalism.Read more…
Sci-Fi Film Fest: Talking The Phantom Menace with Mike Beidler (Pt 1)
Welcome to the first Emerging Scholars Network Sci-Fi Film Festival! I’ll be having a conversation here on the blog on various classic and current science fiction movies. Feel free to watch along and join the conversation. This week’s film is 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.Read more…
Science Corner: Math Goes Sci-Fi & A Blog Film Festival
In the ten-day window when the dates are all palindromes (9 10 19, 9 11 19, etc.), let’s have some math news.Read more…
Science Corner: The Skinny on Genes
Biology is not fully reducible to genetics, and behavior is not fully reducible to biology. I’ve found myself using that adage more often in conversation, so I thought perhaps it would be helpful to mention and unpack here. As farRead more…
Science Book Review: Vessel
The setup is that astronaut Catherine Wells has returned to Earth after a nine year absence, the sole survivor of a interstellar mission written off as a complete loss years earlier. She has no recollection of the critical portions of her journey, and thus cannot explain where her crewmates are, why she was gone for so long, and how she got back.Read more…
Science Corner: In Case You Missed It (ASA 2019)
An invitation to explore the archive of talks from the recent ASA annual meeting.Read more…
Science Corner: The Patience of Science
I have a lot of respect for the Japanese team that spent 12 years culturing bacteria from a group called Lokiarchaea.Read more…
Science Corner: Trust the Scientist, Not the Science?
[A]ccording to the latest Pew survey results, public trust in scientists to act in our best interests is up in the United States.Read more…
Science Book Review: Slime – How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us
Since I’m at the beach this week, it seems like a good time to leave you with a review of Ruth Kassinger’s Slime, a broad survey of all the ways scientists and entrepreneurs are solving problems with algae.Read more…
Science Corner: Seeing is Believing
Twenty nineteen has been a banner year for glimpses at the elusive and previously unseen.Read more…
Science Corner: All That You Can’t Leave Behind
While I am convinced astronauts really did make the quarter-million mile journey [to the moon], I’ve found myself thinking about the sense in which they did not fully depart the Earth.Read more…
Science Corner: Predicting Periodically
The periodic table turned 150 earlier this year, or at least March 1 was the 150th anniversary of the publication of Dmitri Mendeleev’s version.Read more…
Science Corner: Methods Maketh Metaphor
If we cannot avoid metaphors, we can at least be transparent about how we use them and think critically to identify when they have reached the limits of usefulness.Read more…
Science Corner: It’s Life Jim, But Not As We Know It
I thought it might be a good idea to try to get ahead of the curve on a new story. This one involves a topic likely to be of greater interest to the science & faith community: life on Mars.Read more…
Science Corner: Finding the Levers in Biomedicine
Last week, NIH Director and BioLogos founder Francis Collins announced that he would no longer accept invitations to conferences with all-male panels.Read more…
Science Corner: In the Hot Zone
Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone was not my first introduction to emerging infectious diseases. … Still, Preston’s controversial best seller likely introduced me to the Ebola virus and to concepts like biosafety level 4 laboratories.Read more…
Science Book Review: The Big Nine – How the Tech Titans & Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity
[The Big Nine] reads like a blend of science fact and fiction as [author Amy] Webb tells us where we’ve been and imagines where we might go.Read more…
Science Corner: Welcome to the Human Club
We are already human, but not yet the human we are headed towards. The human experience is intrinsically one of becoming, not merely being.Read more…
Science Book Review: Complexity – A Guided Tour
Complexity introduces readers to the wide-ranging world of complexity science, with an emphasis on the computational side. Plus a robot that cleans up for you.Read more…
Science Corner: Portrait of an Emerging Scholar
We wander a bit outside the usual science themes, but we are not lost; we are with Tolkien.Read more…
Science Book Review: Underbug – An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology
Termites feature prominently, but it’s one of those “it was really about us all along” kind of stories.Read more…