By Dr. Robert Thorson Some will think I’m a heartless scientist. But I know a good opportunity for addressing a lingering environmental issue when I see one. When I saw my first images of the I-35W bridge collapse between the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, my thoughts went immediately to the human tragedy […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Seismologists are hearing a new snap, crackle and pop from terra firma. Fracking? Geothermal drilling? Coal gas? They are changing the planet in ways we’re not used to thinking about. Having changed Earth’s atmosphere by injecting carbon through tailpipes and smokestacks, we’re now changing Earth’s crust by injecting fluids in deep […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last week, I suggested getting rid of the U.S. penny. This week, I’m suggesting we get rid of fall. I do not propose to rearrange the tilt of the Earth or its revolution around the sun. Instead, I propose we replace the term “fall” in common speech with the much more […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson ‘I hate science.” In my nearly 30 years of teaching introductory college science courses, not a year has gone by without at least a few of my students making this claim. But disliking science makes about as much sense to me as disliking music. Why should a curious, intelligent young adult […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Last year, my Christmas column suggested putting a lump of coal into your kids’ stockings to signify the increasing rarity of coal, and to celebrate the success of the United Nations climate change conference in Paris. More so than toys or trinkets, this would be a “true gift to the children […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson This crescendo of the political season is an ideal time to present one of my favorite recent articles, “The Mismeasurement of Science” by Peter Lawrence (Current Biology, 2007). It compares with “The Mismeasurement of Leadership,” a paper I might have written had I been a political “scientist” rather than a natural […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Everyone seems to be going green. Schools, towns, corporations, George Bush and even the UConn football program are all going green. But they do so in connotation, rather than denotation, or perhaps by eating lower on the food chain, using bio-fuels or playing on artificial grass. Solar power isn’t green. It’s […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson Urban and regional planners have been wringing their hands over urban sprawl for nearly half a century. Perhaps because I moved here from Alaska, an enormously large place, it strikes me that New England is already sprawled to the max. What I mean is that you can live almost anywhere, grab […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson For the first time since 1983, the United States made a clean sweep of the science Nobel Prizes. Americans in general and scientists in particular are celebrating winning achievements regarding the cosmic structure of the universe, the structure of proteins, and the deactivation of genes. Whoa! Not so fast. Time for […]

By Dr. Robert Thorson As Hurricane Sandy bore down on the East Coast in late October, we in southern New England had a week’s worth of warning, including three days of increasingly accurate forecasts by the U.S. Weather Service. Now, imagine stripping away all that advance notice. Instead, it was Monday afternoon, Oct. 22, and […]