Can complex traits lost during evolution recur later?   It was an academic argument but now it has some more data.  Writing in Evolution, a study analyzes Gastrotheca guentheri , a…

"Lotteries are a tax on people who are bad at math" Anonymous

Well here I am again with an Earth-shaking update (for those of you who don't know me well I am extremely humorous). Demeter Design is well on its way to non-profitdom. I am winging this (mostly…

It seems that every time I open the newspaper there is something awful happening in the world, pollution being the least of our worries. But can the world stand us? Can we continue to break…

British photographer Graham Ekins snapped one of the rare photos of squid in flight: "Capturing the flying squid is one of the highlights of my photography career," he says. I can imagine it would…

You can read this story two different ways. Enjoy science and beer, the combination meant to be together. Or Unpaid scientists give lectures at pubs, and don't even get free beer. Science pubs?. Sign…

Boingboing science editor Maggie Koerth-Baker says everyone loves cephalopods because they are AWESOME. I agree 100%.

When it comes to pet positions, the more fundamentalist leftwing bloggers in science love to note how anti-science Republicans are, despite Pres. Bush doubling the NIH budget and increasing the NASA…

Usually, I don't think it is worth pointing out everything the media gets wrong.  I don't think it is particularly constructive concentrating on what's wrong, better to simply try and write well…

Eclipta grows abundantly in the tropics and is used with much success in Ayurvedic medicine. In India the juice of the leaves is used in the treatment of liver cirrhosis, hepatitis and infective…

In optimization problems, we often encounter second-order equations in which we need to solve for unknowns in order to determine suitable values that are economical for designs as in engineering, and…

My son just wrote an article for his 10th grade journalism class about a couple on their way to plan a Disney wedding in Orlando - their long-held dream wedding - who were hit by a truck driver that…

Has anyone else heard of a "massive 20ft. octopus" washing ashore in the Bahamas last week? I hadn't until this article, which also comments on a recent octopus stranding in Portugal (presumably the…

In a recent paper, by blah and blah, we have been asked to vote for an official definition of a galaxy. That's easy, I hear you cry: you proceed to draw me an S shaped squiggle on a piece of paper,…

This is the first posting on the Simulating Life's Origins column. Not much more to say here except to test whether this feature is working!

Ashwani Kumar1 and Sven Schubert2 Abstract Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (PEPcase) catalyzes the first step in the fixation of atmospheric CO2 during C4 photosynthesis. Under saline conditions,…

Just a quick post today, to show the invariant mass distirbution of pairs of opposite-sign muons collected by the ATLAS and CMS experiment. Such plots are incredibly rich in information, as they…

An introduction of Dye sensitized solar cell Energy resources: As we know there are some ways to get energy so that electrical can be generated, like fossil fuel, solar power, nuclear power, wind…

If you've ever been a grad student, post-doc, or a research assistant, surely there have been days when you thought, "This is the worst research project on the planet. Is this really science? Does…

I was contacted a few weeks ago by Bruno Arpaia, an Italian jornalist, translator, and writer of several remarkable novels. He explained that he had just finished a novel, "L'energia del vuoto" (the…