I thought this was very innovative and worth noting: a floating electricity-generating power plant, a “power ship” that can be parked by any shore and used to generate part of that country’s electricity needs. There is currently a Turkish “power ship”, the Fatmagül Sultan, parked off Beirut that is producing 188 MW of electricity daily, the [...]
The sleazy Versace clad Turkish “Islamic” cult leader Adnan Oktar has built a fat-wallet franchise around selling creationism to the idle rich sons and daughters of the urban Turkish elite. I’ve interviewed him and written about him here on this blog. He was in prison for blackmailing female followers with films of them having sex [...]
A post by Salman Hameed on his excellent blog Irtiqa about science and religion, particularly in the Muslim world: There are a lot of things that are overall going well in Turkey. The economy is overall good (see this earlier post: Pew Survey – Turkey’s positive economic outlook) and scientific publications in Turkey have been steadily increasing [...]
I’ve discussed the introduction of American Bible-belt style creationism to Turkey on this blog before (see the entries under ‘Science’). The Muslim version doesn’t accept that humans descended from primates, but otherwise leaves the science intact. (click here) The fundamentalist Christian version, on the other hand, is based on a reading of the Bible and claims [...]
Turkey might have a young population, but the country’s youth are largely insular and ignorant, posing problems if the nation wants to run a globally competitive, knowledge-based economy, leading sociologist Nilüfer Narlı says. Internet penetration is low, while many young people don’t know a second language, she says. (click here for more)
On December 29, 2011, warplanes struck and killed thirty-five Turkish, many of them high school students and all of them civilians. The attack was based on drone-generated intelligence showing a group of people advancing along Turkey’s southeastern border with Iraq. The young men were smuggling products across the border. (click here for full text of an [...]
Salman Hameed writes on his blog Irtiqa that some Muslim countries are showing an increase in scientific publications. (Hameed blogs about the interrelation of science and religion, particularly in the Muslim world.) This week’s Nature has a nice map of top 40 countries in terms of the number of scientific publications. Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Malaysia [...]
A recent ruling allows the government to appoint members of the prestigious Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) in Turkey in place of the usual method of election by existing members. The reason given for the change was that the academy membership was a closed club, with members voting in only those in their own circles. Members say [...]
The New York Times today published a review (click here) of Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker’s new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. The book presents evidence that our era is less violent, less cruel, and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence and tries to figure out why. What variables had to [...]
My startling interview with a well-known molecular biologist about what cancer is, really. Click here for the full interview. An excerpt: I’m a faithful reader of the New York Times Science Section, cover to cover, because I want to know about things, not be caught flatfooted. Somehow it seems necessary for survival to know about quarks [...]