. . . and I just learned a new nickname for Doryteuthis opalescens, thanks to the Redondo Beach Patch. Market squid is referred to as "candy bait" because of its effectiveness on so many different…

Twitter, in its quest to supplant Facebook among literate people and stave off a threat (or not) from GooglePlus, seems to have recently made some changes to its image utility - namely, you can now…

Recently there appeared a Science 2.0 Article Algae-Based Polymer May Boost Li-Ion Battery Performance, and shortly afterwards I got an email drawing my attention to what I thought was the same work…

It took me several pages to examine what it will take for the US to address the pending space weather catastrophe, Brewster Rockit nails it in three panels: Until next week,Alex Tuesdays at The…

As I stared up into the dark the other morning, up before the alarm again, and already dwelling on the coming day and the need to fit everything on my to-do list into the day, my mind turned to the…

Although genetic sequencing sounded exciting - I'll send you a tube full of spit, you tell me what diseases I'm going to get - the reality was less thrilling, and less useful. There are diseases with…

Politicians throw out a lot of anecdotes, especially if it is one told by a constituent or potential voter, so Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann throwing forth a story told to her that the HPV vaccine…

Walter Bonatti died yesterday at 81 years of age. One of Italy's greatest "old style" climbers, Bonatti is especially famous for the first ascent to the K2, the extremely hard to climb, 8611-meter-…

Squid news has been kind of slow lately, but I hate leaving this blog empty! (The frequency with which it is meant to be updated is, after all, given away in the title.) So here are a couple of…

I've talked about how our Project Calliope picosatellite will burn up entirely upon reentry.  Larger stuff, not so easy.  UT reports in the cutely titled "Look Out Below!" that the 6-ton…

www.sciencecheerleader.com, an organization started by the dynamic and committed citizen scientist Darlene Cavalier, has a noble goal. It wants to demonstrate to young girls that it’s OK to be…

I don't like SpongeBob SquarePants.  I generally regard any parent who does like SpongeBob SquarePants with suspicion and derision; they probably watch "Real Housewives of Fresno" or…

   jklj;;

A group of people are joining together for the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center to discover whether their 'collective intention' can bring peace to the…

Here's a brilliant username I wish I'd thought of: Anthropoteuthis. The Spanish marine biology student who deserves credit spells it Antropoteuthis, since the "th" phoneme is foreign to Spanish. He…

When I create original 'op ed' or educational bits for Science 2.0 (the movement, not the website), I often start with a podcast of the topic (over at 365 Days of Astronomy).  Then, I post the…

There is a bloody and brutal battle being wagered in schools. Science departments are split down the middle. It's friend vs friend and the future of our children's education rests on the outcome. Or…

Once upon a time, journals were horribly expensive to produce and to read.  Your research might only be read by 200 people but those 200 people knew the work was vetted by reviewers.   It…

Despite the self-loathing of progressives in American science academia, America is a pretty good place to be, even after 15 years of onerous visa restrictions that have made it difficult to hire the…

A few years back, in my spare time, I had attempted to calculate the relativistic mass of a rotating disc as measured by a reference frame fixed at its center. I used only equations of special…