I wonder what fraction of Civil War soldiers had fathers who fought in, say, the war of 1812. There might only be three lives between the present and the Napoleonic Wars.

You know, I actually take the opposite message from this image than Sagan did. He saw all of humanity enclosed in this 1/12 of a pixel blue dot. I see that we can now see all of the Earth from this incredible distance. Humanity is NOT limited to this dot. The work of our hands now extends all across the solar…

Thanks for mentioning that video! I hadn't realized that dirigibles could actually launch and retrieve aircraft. That would have been a lot more practical than the SHIELD heli-carrier...

Quite likely, one would think, if it was randomly assembled in some tiny vesicle in a clay matrix, which is what people think. The way to tell would be if different RNAs used different encodings from nucleic to amino acids, or if one had no sequences in common with the rest of life.

There are forms of life that don't use DNA, such as the RNA-only polio virus. Can we be sure that they came from LUCA? It's thought that the life originated as RNA instead of DNA, so there could have been multiple RNA origins.

I wonder if this will continue to be true. We're close to being able to synthesize cells from scratch. We could make some that, say, use a different encoding to go from nucleic acids in DNA to amino acids in proteins. The encoding appears to be arbitrary, and there may even be more efficient ones. A different…

Sure looks like they're using the same cargo bay as the Shuttle. Good for them! It also looks like it lands with no power and no pilot. That'll be popular if it comes down near an inhabited area. Better get that outback Australian spaceport ready!

Could this be done purely optically? That is, just have reflectors in space that would beam sunlight down to some ordinary PV array? Fixed solar panels only get 20% of their rated capacity because the sun moves, causing that pesky night problem. If they could always point at the same bright spot in the sky, they…

In this brave new world of Big Data we have a quantitative means of telling what's up and down in the movie world: IMDB. They make their keyword database publicly available! A while ago I was curious about this question of monster trends, and extracted the percentage of all movies that contained keywords like…

Every modern top predator can outrun us too. Even my fat, friendly dog can outrun me or anyone in my neighborhood. Forget about trying to outrun a big cat or a bear. This has been true for all 200,000 years of homo sapiens' existence, yet it hasn't helped them.

This is a pretty good list! It's mainly 20th century figures, and it's light on chemistry and biology, and there are a couple of people like Sagan, Tyson, and Maku who are mainly popularizers instead of contributors, but overall it's a strong group. And datazoid managed to find distinctive clothing for most of them,…

Sounds like the next frontier of colonization! Use the new Super Pressure balloons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpressure_balloon) that can stay up for years at a time, and cover their tops with lichen gardens. Have them descend into the upper cloud layers for moisture now and then, but spend most of their…

The Audubon Society is all over this. They've already been around for over a century, and naturally take a long view. Their mission is to protect bird species, but how can they do that when the entire ecology shifts in their preserves? You don't get the same birds when pines change to maples and then chestnuts. …

The quote "A hunter-gatherer who did not correctly conceive a solution to providing food or shelter probably died, along with his or her progeny." makes me doubt the intelligence of the author, frankly. We're talking about homo sapiens here, a species with thousands of behaviors that can affect selection. Abstract…

Well, sure. Americans happen to be depressed at the moment because they just lost two wars and got a lot of their money stolen by Wall Street, but things have been getting better in most of the world for several decades now. The 2000s were a pretty good decade for billions of people, especially those in China,…

The Soviets also appeared to be heading for dominance in the 50s and early 60s, when their growth rates were higher than the West and their technology was better, at least in spacecraft and assault rifles. The growth spurt turned out to be brief, over-stated, and based on over-application of capital to obsolete…

Apparently malaria didn't exist in the New World before Columbus, so places like the Yucatan and Amazon basin were major centers of population and culture. Not any more! The New World probably gave syphilis back, but it still doesn't seem like a fair trade.

Can it still be contacted? Is so, that would make it the longest functioning spacecraft! The oldest that I know of otherwise is ATS-3 from 1967, a geosync comm satellite. Robert Accetttura has put together a list here: http://robert.accettura.com/blog/2012/04/24/oldest-working-satellites/.

Last year I heard Prof Sallie Chisholm of MIT speak about this. She discovered the planet's most common lifeform, the tiny photosynthesizing bacterium prochlorococcus in the 80s. There are 100,000 of them in every milliliter of surface sea water, and they account for maybe 20% of the oxygen in the atmosphere. …

When I see a quote like "ranks 6th in spending per capita", I reach for my revolver. Rank is a terrible way to describe anything. Suppose that 5 people get 100% on a test and I get 99%, so I'm ranked 6th. What does tell you about how well I did? Nothing.