Monthly Archives: September 2018

Plomin is and always has been careful not to talk about questions outside his immediate research, because they’d get him in trouble. He reaps more than enough trouble just doing his job.  So much so that he sometimes says ridiculous … Continue reading →

Now up in Quillette. You can order it here.

They’ve found a Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid.  But they should have been rare, very rare, less than one per generation: if not, the two groups could not have accumulated  lots of neutral-genome differences, which they did. Possible explanation:  hybridization was happening in … Continue reading →

When I was a senior in high school, I wrote a little essay in which I noted that things had gone too easily for the Western allies after the first couple of  years of WWII.  We often surprised them, they … Continue reading →

Using his usual analytical methods, Ron has discovered that the Jews of Europe, during WWII, were sent off to live on a farm in the country.

Sometimes rare experimental outcomes tell you a lot, as when a few of the alpha particles impinging on a gold foil were scattered straight back [Geiger-Marsden experiment] , implying that most of the mass and positive charge of an atom … Continue reading →