Less than 8,000 years ago, evidence shows modern people suddenly appeared en masse outside Africa, on the shores of the Persian Gulf.  An odd event, to be sure.   Jeffrey Rose, writing in…

I have been again teaching two subjects where electric and magnetic phenomena are important (atomic physics and solid state physics) and met naturally new students. I always tell about the SI system…

As a form of encouragement for the first steps in the scientific publishing world, I am here taking the licence to draw your attention, dear reader, to the first article published here by my nephew…

This should not go out in anything but my own personal feed. Please let that work? :D :D :D

Many metals have special oxygen transfer properties which improve the utility of hydrogen peroxide. By far, the most common of these is iron which, when used in the prescribed manner, results in the…

NASA - 50th Anniversary of the Mercury 7 Press Announcement

My head was dizzy as the giant head loomed on the screen and told me things I knew could not be true.   But all around me, people were smiling and nodding. And they were close.  Really…

Researchers may have found a way to reverse damage to nerves caused by multiple sclerosis, according to a study by scientists at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh. A report by AFP said the…

Like puzzles?  Who doesn't? Long-time Science 2.0 contributor Garth Sundem - and by long time I mean loooong time, since 2006, during the beta period - is in the New York Times Science section…

Cephalove recently had a couple of lovely posts about that most famous of squid symbioses: the bobtail squid Euprymna scolopes and the bioluminescent bacteria Vibrio fischeri. It's become a model…

Chikungunya virus has been terrorizing some parts of the world by causing disease in humans through Aedes albopictus mosquitoes. They belong to a family called alpha virus. Virulence can be…

Almost nothing in the ocean can resist eating squid. That includes the macaroni penguin, which "live almost entirely on krill" but "do supplement their krill diet with up to five percent squid." I…

The semester is all over except for finals week, so this weekend and next week will have me busy grading all the papers I assigned. It's good work, busy work, and nice to see how much stronger…

Our body is a constant reminder of the fact that we share our origins with many other species, as Neil Shubin describes it so well in his book “Your inner fish”. The basic plan for members has…

DNA computing and storage has been on the horizon for most of this decade but never gone beyond the intellectual exercise stage.   Storage limitations were far too small to merit applied science…

It was hard to miss the arsenic microbe news last week.  Heck, I was in the woods of Pennsylvania with no cell phone access much less Internet and I knew about it.    The NASA hype…

The Humanity + @ Caltech conference kicked off this morning in Pasadena with a dynamic group of speakers, discussing how humanity is being defined by technology, media, and by us, the active…

More cephalopods in pop culture: not anime this time, but games! Mobile phone games, to be specific. "Squibble" sounds like a lot of fun: A mad scientist has captured your cutesy, albeit deranged-…

Not sure how all this works yet, but anyway, I found this nice presentation of world life expectancy and wealth over the last 200 years. The data is interesting in itself, but the presentation is…

Science 2.0 is making the cartoon circuit! One of my recent pieces on the brain, computers, and the vagueness of language (Why Meanings Must Be Fuzzy) motivated this comic strip at Calamities of…