This morning the Planck 09 conference started at the Auditorium Altinate (see picture, right) in Padova. For a week, theorists and experimentalists will discuss hot topics in a variety of fields,…

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval…

Some UCSB researchers managed to infiltrate the command-and-control system of a botnet, and got lots of information out of it, which they wrote up in a paper. Their results are interesting to read.…

Harry Benjamin Syndrome, at first a uncontroversial and innocuous idea that transsexual brains are different from other brains, has morphed into a platform for some to denigrate others under a cloak…

I Just Hate it When ... I just hate it when other people blog about or link to a topic when I'm half-way through writing an article on the very same topic.  You know who you are. Hate! Hate!…

For every complex problem, there is a simple, easy to understand, incorrect answer. - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, quoted in Robert Pennock, Tower of Babel, p. 367

Solving Problems in the New Math Generations of schoolkids have been puzzled by this problem:If it takes 10 workers 10 days to fill in a hole,how many days does it take 5 workers to fill in 1/2 a…

//YOU CAN CHANGE these game parameters var __geewa_game = {}; __geewa_game.id = 'chess' __geewa_game.language = 'en' //DON'T CHANGE!!!!!!!! document.open(); document.write(''); document.close();

Ethics, Expertise and LawDear reader: please excuse the style of this article.  I am dealing here with observations in law.  I have chosen a legalese style so that any student of law…

The question of what the major current problems of Biology are cannot be answered, for I do not know of a single biological discipline that does not have major unsolved problems... still, the most…

This week's PhD Comic lists the 4 'research topics guaranteed to be picked up by the new media': Chocolate Robots Unrealistic Sci-Fi gadgets Experiments that might blow up the world So far I'm at…

I just saw over on Science Daily that they have found lots of new Green Flourescent Proteins in Amphioxus, aka the lancelet (which is the closest invertebrate relative to our phylum, Chordata). The…

Ignorance is not just a blank space on a person's mental map. It has contours and coherence, and for all I know rules of operation as well.- Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner, p. 15

The Beauty of Justice Some celebrities use their status to promote the most idiotic ideas. Fortunately, there are many more, who use that status to help make the world a better place.   In…

Systems biology is a trendy field right now, but, despite the fact that it's hyped as some amazing, new, holistic approach to biology, the questions systems biologists are asking aren't new. Check…

At this point it will be useful to examine some of the selection pressures that will also affect a species. The obvious ones are the need for resources to maintain the day-to-day activities…

Over the years, some global opinion surveys and analysts have estimated that as many as 10% of Muslims worldwide hold violent extremist religious views. A recent polling study by the Gallup…

The birth of twins is a genetic oddity in itself - only happening in about one out of  every 90 births.  But adding a large twist of unexpected to an already unlikely event - this week it…

"I seldom enjoy competition in real life. I find it fun only when I am up against somebody who takes things more seriously than I do." QDS

It is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the…