And you are here why?

Every heard of the   Social Intelligence Hypothesis ? Put simply, it sez. that the more social activity you engage in, the more intelligent you are (ok, not   you , it’s   your species . Whatever). It’s not a particularly controversial idea, but it’s been kinda hard to actually prove, with numbers and stuff. Part of the reason being that society size isn’t exactly dispositive — i mean, Wildebeest are   dumb , but lords, do they every have large societies. Anyhow, Ashton et al., in a recent paper, have done stellar work in fleshing this out with real data in   a recent paper in Nature . They studied magpies, and conclusively demonstrate that group size amongst magpies is associated with the cognitive abilities of the magpies (•). The larger the groups, the better they are at cognition. Yes, there were exceptions, but no more so than you would find in any normal distribution of intelligence (MIT graduates are not all brilliant   ) Mind you, we need ...

A NASA camera aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a unique view of the moon as it moved in front of the sunlit side of Earth last month. The series of test images shows the fully illuminated “dark side” of the moon that is never visible from Earth.   The images were captured by NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), a four megapixel CCD camera and telescope on the DSCOVR satellite orbiting 1 million miles from Earth. From its position between the sun and Earth, DSCOVR conducts its primary mission of real-time solar wind monitoring for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Check out all the details here

Lord knows I've wasted too much time on the fuckwads inhabiting the anti-vaccination ecosystem, but every now and then something opens a +3 Bag Of Egregious Stupidity , and sets me off. In this case, its the Wasington Post (motto: " Yeah, we used to be a newspaper "), with a profile of some numbnut named Wolfson who appears to be a doctor of some kind, though I have no idea how his anti-vaccination beliefs jibe with the Hippocratic Oath Oh, don't get me wrong, its not that they justify his goofy ideology - its just that they're pretty much playing into his shtick by reporting this as "news". ITS NOT NEWS YOU IDIOT!  You don't do feature articles on the nutjob standing at the street-corner!  You know why  Because, ITS NOT NEWS! If you want to write about ballistic ignorance, write about it properly , with none of this " opinions on the shape of the earth differ " crap! To see how it should be done, go check out Albert ...

/via CommitStrip

Don't believe me? Check out this awesome correlation! And since correlation implies causation, it must be true! This, and other spectacular spurious correlations  are available at TylerVigen.com Be thrilled at the link between Dying by becoming tangled in their bedsheets  and the Number of lawyers in Georgia Marvel at the correlation between the  US spending on science, space, and technology and the Number of lawyers in Tennessee ! Remember kids, you too can practice bad science with the best of them!

Because...Engineering! also

Remember last year when Indian had the measles thingy ? And before that, when in 2005 they had another  measles epidemic ?  All because a bunch-a idiots of the Jenny McCarthy vein decided that science was for shit?  Well, guess what - it happened again, in Texas this time.  From Forbes A measles outbreak in Texas traces to a congregation of a megachurch whose leader,  Kenneth Copeland , reportedly has warned followers away from vaccines, advocating for faith healing and pushing the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. One of Copeland’s churches, Eagle Mountain International Church in North Texas, is the epicenter of the outbreak, which now has hit at least 20 people Just as Wales is  paying the price  of the autism-measles vaccine panic begun 15 years ago, so is this Texas community. In the wake of the outbreak, the church’s pastor and Kenneth Copeland’s daughter, Terri Copeland Pearsons, was  urging congregants  take advantage ...

Did you know that since 2500 B.C., only 1042 meteorites have actually been seen hitting the earth? Even though 34,513 have been recorded? Go here to check out a wicked interactive visualization of each and every one... (The below is a screen-grab...)

John Kovalic with a brutal riff .  Mind you, the ongoing whack-a-doodle attempts to push Creationism in schools, and insisting that Vaccines are Bad,  (why? for god's sake, why? ) don't exactly help...

Ever wondered what a Hanging Curveball was? Nope, me neither. More to the point, I *knew* what one was, till I saw this and realized that I actually didn't ... Interactive Curveball Illusion. A disk descends vertically from the top of the screen to the bottom. If the observer tracks the disk in the periphery (i.e., if the observer looks to the right but attends to the motion of the disk), the disk appears to descend obliquely. The lever allows the observer to adjust the angle of descent. Experiment 1 measured the physical angle of descent at which the observer perceived the disk to descend vertically when viewing the disk in the periphery. Lu explained that batters tend to switch from central to peripheral vision when the ball is about 20 feet away, or two-thirds of the way to home plate. The eye's peripheral vision lacks the ability to separate the motions of the spinning ball, Lu said. In particular, it gets confused by the combination of the ball's velocity and s...