A key question in ecology is: who eats whom? This can be fairly straightforward to answer, by observing predatory or grazing activities, by opening up stomachs or sifting through feces, or even by…

Because of environmental problems with huge piles of plastic garbage, biodegradable plastics are still widely studied. Personally,  I thought this was a relatively easy problem to solve…

Writing in Blood, a group says that a 2007 adult stem cell transplant cured a patient of both his HIV and his leukemia.   Up to 33 million people worldwide have HIV/AIDS. How did it work and…

New Scientist tells us that the encryption between electronic key fobs and car ignition systems has been cracked in many cases. The reason is that most car manufacturers are using weak and/or home-…

Suppose you want to measure how inherent intelligence is distributed amongst the population.  That is to say, you want to get a sense for how many are born with the potential to be very smart,…

Big squid news, in California at least: the state Department of Fish and Game announced that the fishery for California market squid is hitting its harvest limit and is scheduled to be closed on…

If you think people in your family can't cook, imagine how bad the soup must have been to bury it and leave it untouched for 2,400 years.    Chinese archaeologists say a bronze cooking pot…

There's an interview of me up on UniverseToday today.  Interviewer Nancy Atkinson chose some really nice quotes, which of course make me sound much smarter and more clueful than I really am.…

All this talking I've been doing about those nasty ol' sperm whales hunting down and devouring poor defenseless squid (okay, they're not quite defenseless, but still) might make you think I'm a whale…

 Birth of the Universe from the Zero Energy State 1) There was a pair creation of positive and negative energy in the early universe. 2) The total energy of universe is 0. Stephen Hawking and…

In the past weeks I have been writing a piece about the Large Hadron Collider for a science popularization magazine, and I found myself squeezing my brain for a good analogy to the work of particle…

This blog is in response1 to Patrick's excellent M.A.D. 2.0 article. It started as a comment, but I thought, what the heck, let's make it my first blog. I've got to make the leap at some point…

In October an official from NASA leaked a military secret. NASA is doing a study intended to launch military star ships toward other nearby stars. The leak caused a lot of speculation in the news. In…

The National Cancer Institute says 200,000 American women will get breast cancer this year and 20% will die from the disease. A lumpectomy is a common treatment but up to 40 percent of women see the…

Just saw a PR blurb about a new iPhone game called Squid Kid. Squid Kid lets the player swing in any direction, cut corners, find short cuts and capture the most notorious villains the ocean has ever…

What is the basis of distinction in each of the four steps? This is the five kingdom classification given by scientist Whittaker (1969).This scheme was based on - Structure of Cells - {prokaryotic…

... India, actually. Today, Wikipedia flagged up a new article, Coffee production in India, with a interesting piece of history.  Quoting in full from the article: Coffee growing has a long…

Recent research proposes that 40,000 years ago a series of massive, volcanic eruptions caused drastically cooler, dryer climate change, which was then responsible for driving Neanderthals to…

Teaching a subnuclear physics course is a quite refreshing experience. In general, much of the stuff that one has learned through years of sweating on books slowly degrades and becomes "fuzzy". That…

Okay, this is really cool. It's an interdisciplinary project between biologists, mathematicians, and engineers to understand and, eventually, mimic cephalopod skin. One of Hanlon's many discoveries…