Erring on the side of excess
Better safe than sorry. That’s how we tend to think about health care decisions. But as a guiding principle, it’s often a huge and costly mistake. Here’s an example. While […]
Author Archives: joerojasburke
How cancer screening may fail to save lives
It could be that existing studies are simply underpowered to detect the overall benefit. But it’s also possible that the reduction in cancer deaths has been offset by increases in […]
Scientists’ clichéd superlatives
Scientists have discovered that everything they do is astonishingly robust, phenomenally novel, and groundbreakingly unprecedented. The authors of a new paper in the always entertaining Christmas issue of the British […]
Boars gone wild: Chernobyl edition
For wildlife, earth’s worst nuke disaster site continues to prove safer than living anywhere in range of humans. Ever since the 1986 Chernobyl accident, people have been almost entirely excluded […]
Pluto, then and now
This is a really fun look back at our attempts to visualize Pluto. I mean, look at even the most recent views acquired by the powerful Hubble space telescope. They […]
Graceful brutality
Photographer Martin Gábor captures the sublime moments of graceful brutality in Olympic wrestling. [Images: Martin Gábor/United World Wrestling]
When I hear bigots going on about gay marriage
They argued that marriage belonged under the control of the states rather than the federal government. They insisted that such marriages were “unnatural” and contrary to God’s will. They spoke […]
What turtles looked like before the evolution of shells
This one is 240 million years old, from the Triassic period, collected in Germany. The discoverers named it Pappochelys, which is derived from Greek words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘turtle’. These […]
Candid camera trap
These images, which I’ve edited a bit in Lightroom, are some of the gems from Snapshot Serengeti, a project that amassed 1.2 million sets of photographs from motion-sensor activated camera traps […]
A supernova in needlepoint
I hate to admit that I didn’t know a thing about the amazing astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin until I stumbled on an archival photograph of her less serious work with needle […]
