InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network
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…
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…
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…
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…
An invitation to explore the archive of talks from the recent ASA annual meeting.Read more…
I have a lot of respect for the Japanese team that spent 12 years culturing bacteria from a group called Lokiarchaea.Read more…
[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…
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…
Twenty nineteen has been a banner year for glimpses at the elusive and previously unseen.Read more…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
[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…
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…
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…
We wander a bit outside the usual science themes, but we are not lost; we are with Tolkien.Read more…
Termites feature prominently, but it’s one of those “it was really about us all along” kind of stories.Read more…
What heals all wounds is healing.Read more…
How the Body of Christ Talks by C. Christopher Smith is an invitation to deeper conversation for Christian congregations, although organizations of all sorts will likely find value in Smith’s observations and advice.Read more…
Highlights from Francis Su’s webinar “The Integration of Faith and the Academic Calling.”Read more…
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the BioLogos conference in Baltimore, MD. Although there is a healthy dose of science, their conferences have a different feel than American Scientific Affiliation meetings, or at least the one I attended.Read more…