As I reported two days ago, NIH head Francis Collins, an evangelical Christian, just nabbed the lucrative Templeton Prize, usually given to people who are both science minded and blather on about the “Big Questions”: metaphysical “why” questions like “Why are we here?” or “What is our purpose?” Designed to exceed the Nobel Prize in […]
Category Archives: awards and honors
Francis Collins, new Templeton Prize winner, pushes woo in a Scientific American interview
May 22, 2020 – 2:00 pm
Francis Collins nabs Templeton Prize
May 20, 2020 – 1:30 pm
Let it not be said that belief in woo isn’t lucrative, even if you’re a scientist who abjures woo in his or her daily work. Yes, Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and an ardent evangelical Christian converted from atheism by seeing a tripartite frozen waterfall (get it—the Trinity), was just awarded […]
Best and worst Oscar dresses
February 11, 2020 – 3:00 pm
Surprise—it’s my first fashion post! But I do pay attention to fancy dresses at awards shows (men are boringly similar in tuxedos, and when they deviate, it’s usually horrible). I didn’t watch the Oscars, but am a sucker for collections of red-carpet pictures on some websites. These are from Vogue, and I’ve looked at other sites […]
Another interview with Titania McGrath
January 13, 2020 – 12:00 pm
Titania McGrath, who is actually comedian Andrew Doyle, goes on Fox News—who else would have him?—to talk for 26 minutes about Titania McGrath, Her Wokeness. You can hear the show by clicking on the screenshot below Some of the stuff you might know from the talk by Doyle I posted before, but there’s also new […]
Vote for Science’s “Breakthroughs of the Year”
December 3, 2019 – 2:00 pm
I’m not sure what’s gained by having the public vote on what they consider to be the “science breakthrough of the year” except to see what people consider to be important. But the voters in this contest aren’t actually laypeople, because the voting is taking place on a Science magazine website, whose readers must surely be […]
No science in NYT’s list of year’s ten best books
November 22, 2019 – 1:00 pm
Here’s the New York Times‘s list of the ten best books of 2019. You can find the 2018 list here and the 2017 list here. I couldn’t be arsed to go back farther. There’s not a pure science book in the lot, though there’s a sort-of-science book on the Chernobyl disaster, which is more dramatic […]
Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to three who developed lithium ion batteries
October 9, 2019 – 7:00 am
From the Swedish Academy of Sciences, we have today’s Prize announcement (click on screenshot to go to page giving the details): And the tweets: Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionised our lives and are used in everything from mobile phones to laptops and electric vehicles. Through their work, this year’s Chemistry Laureates have laid the foundation of […]
Nobel Prize in physics awarded to three researchers in astronomy and cosmology
October 8, 2019 – 7:30 am
This morning, the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics was split between three men, with half of the award (a total of $910,000) split between Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz (25% each) “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star,” and the other half of the Prize going to James Peebles of Princeton “for […]
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine goes to two Americans and a Brit for work on adaptation of cells to varying levels of oxygen
October 7, 2019 – 11:30 am
0This just in: the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was awarded to the three people below (click on screenshot to go to the Nobel site): I don’t know these researchers, nor much about their work, but I’ve put an informative video below (which shows you how the Prizes are announced, and what garnered one […]
The 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes
September 13, 2019 – 10:30 am
Several readers informed me that the 2019 Ig Nobel Prizes, for research that is supposed to make you “LAUGH and then THINK”, were awarded yesterday at a ceremony at Harvard University. While yesterday’s ten awards aren’t yet summarized on the official website. Most of the publicity in the press was about the anatomy prize, which […]
