Sophisticated physicists appreciate the dance of abstract symbols. I need to build something. The abstract is more real when made out of clay and pipe cleaners. In this blog on the 1D Euler Lagrange…

Introduction Solar energy, accumulated under earth in the form of fossil fuels since the inception of life, accounts for more than 97 per cent of the world consumption of energy of which the share of…

In my ever-continuing quest to become an actual adult, I have recently begun to cook. I use a real oven and everything! In my usual encounter with the oven it takes just a few minutes of pre-heating…

What are the survival prospects for female characters in the James Bond movies? A new research project from Cleveland State University and Kent State University performed a quantitative content…

The Polywater debacle has been called ‘one of the most famous mistaken scientific research programs of the past half-century’. It was initially feared that the USSR’s discovery of highly viscous…

A research team from the Department of Biology at the University of Victoria, Canada, have, for the first time, investigated the  behavioural responses of domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) to the…

Those working on quantum gravity have to accept the fact they are unlikely to ever compete for a Nobel in physics. No matter how brilliant and how widely accepted the contribution, a Nobel prize in…

I'm stoked to be joining the blogging team at KQED QUEST--a Northern California science multimedia extravaganza! My first post went up yesterday. As you can see, it required extremely rigorous and…

Good news for flapjack junkies.  For 15 hours on February 28th,  you can get some free pancakes at IHOP and raise some money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. It's National…

There recently appeared on Scientific American Blogs an article by Jennifer Ouellette Don’t Be Dissin’ the Bohr Model! in which she deplores the frequent occurrence, among those who have recently…

Samsung wants to give away a lot of money for STEM projects in local schools and we all probably agree that is a good thing.  But there is no such thing as a free lunch so they want to give it…

There are two ways to determine the height of the tallest possible running, breathing organism on planet Earth – one is to measure it – the other to calculate it from scratch. The groundwork for the…

Mongolian Gerbil psychoacoustics have been under investigation for several years now - particularly by Dr. Joan Sinnott, Endowed Professor of Research at the  Psychology Department,…

I've just begun reading the recently released review book, "Connectome," from Sebastian Seung of MIT. The basic notion of the book is that you are the emergent result from…

The  6 minute YouTube video, available in high def, provides a walking tour of my private Pop Science art collection. One painting spent a summer month in Lancaster, PA as part of a juried show…

A French court on Monday said a French farmer suffered neurological problems including memory loss, headaches and stammering after inhaling Lasso weedkiller in 2004. Well, inhaling pesticides and…

Probably not. No one's ever heard a squid make any kind of noise, really, other than "splash" at the sea surface.But if you read io9's fantastic piece on the deep sea's mysterious sounds, you'll…

I've generally been supportive of Obama on science, although I realize that some folks have expressed legitimate concerns about Obama and argued that some of his policies are anti-science (e.g. Hank…

I had a new computer simulation. We set up each model from the birth of universe to the present, and calculated GPE using computer simulation in each level. As a result, we could verify that “pair…

Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Long Marine Laboratory at UC Santa Cruz, wrote a nice piece for the Santa Cruz Sentinel on the history and current status of California's…