Florida’s First Hurricane Warning in 4 Years as Hermine Intensifies to 65 mph.

Tropical Storm Hermine is gathering strength as it steams north-northeastwards at 10 mph towards the Florida Panhandle, and appears poised to give Florida its first hurricane strike in nearly eleven years when it crosses the coast late tonight or early Friday morning. A NOAA hurricane hunter aircraft was in Hermine early Thursday morning, and found top surface winds of 65 mph to the east of the center, and a central pressure that had fallen to 992 mb.

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Why Science Needs Philosophy: Consciousness and Iconic Memory

One of the main claims of this blog is that a science of consciousness can’t exist without a proper philosophy of consciousness. That may seem a forgone point, but I stumble several times on researchers and authors who undervalue the contribution of philosophy on consciousness topics. I will present here an example that shows how the simplest set of data can’t be effectively understood without a solid theoretical

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SpaceX rocket explodes at Cape Canaveral ahead of launch

A rocket operated by the aerospace company SpaceX explodes on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral where it was being test-fired ahead of a launch.

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You Can Thank These Depression-Era Workers for Your National Parks

Daily life in the Civilian Conservation Corps is preserved in a new National Park Service archive. By Erin Blakemore.

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The Pitch Drop Experiment

Begun 82 years ago, this science experiment keeps on going, ever so slowly

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The Oldest Fossils Ever Discovered

Scientists have just unearthed what they claim to be the oldest fossils ever found on our planet. They're so ancient they predate the next oldest finds by roughly a quarter-billion years. These newly uncovered fossils are 3.7-billion-year -old traces of ancient microbes, and were found under recently melted perennial snow in southwest Greenland. The fossils were discovered by a team of geologists and paleontologists led by Allen Nutman at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

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New Alzheimer's drug gives hope after breakthrough trials

An antibody that can almost completely clear the visible signs of Alzheimer’s disease from the brain has been discovered in a breakthrough that left one scientist “trying not to get too excited”. Researchers scanned the brains of people with the degenerative condition as they were given doses of the drug, which is based on an immune cell taken from the blood of elderly people aged up to 100 who showed no signs of the disease.

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