A cool morning breeze keeps the mosquitoes down as we pack our kayaks and gear for today’s paddling journey.  It is day four of our holiday, with two days driving up from Vancouver to Cache…

Rita Levi-Montalcini celebrated her 100th birthday this week. The Italian scientist's experiments led to identification of the nerve growth factor (NGF) for which she and American Stanley Cohen…

I promised myself that I would try to do a regular Wednesday blog about some aspect of my researches.  I thought I would start out with something I've been considering for awhile --…

Hank is worried about people who want to take us back to the stone age in response to environmental challenges. For my Earth Day post, here's someone who's talking sense (no, I'm not implying that…

If your child has trouble with math, give her some gum and send her to school. Researchers at a Texas medical institution say gum-chewing improves math scores. Researchers at the…

Social media is a funny creature.   Try explaining it to someone in a third world country.  Heck, try explaining it to someone who lives next door and isn't on a social media site. We're…

I have recently been contacted by a friend who is worried at the decline in numeracy in the West.  He asked me what I thought of the following: In 2005, Newt Gingrich (who had been on the Hart-…

Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986, turns 100 years old today: she was born on April 22nd, 1909 -before World War I had begun! "Ok," you might say, "she's probably bedridden and…

At the European Geophysical Union EGU, Jochen Zschau from GeoForschungZentrum GFZ in Germany presented his Sergey Soloviev medal lecture, Meeting the Challenge of Earthquake Risk Globalisation:…

There are a lot of biologists out there with physics and engineering envy, and it shows in the occasional awkward and sometimes downright ridiculous borrowing of terminology. Take the term '…

Just in case you didn't know, Scientific Blogging geek fave Garth Sundem will make a guest appearance on The Early Show (your local CBS channel) tomorrow AM, in promotion of his new book.  …

For your Tuesday morning meditation:  what do you get when you cross the Mandelbrot set with Eastern religion? Buddhabrot: Melinda Green made this amazing picture, has more on her website, plus…

(I'm quite tired now, but just wanted to note this down.  This ain't science; it's just a diary.) As it says in my profile, I'm a volunteer part-time fossil preparator for the Dallas Museum of…

Star Trek We don't talk down to people, no worries about appealling to 8th grade kids or whatever the reading level is supposed to be.

I stumbled on this amazing set of videos: physics legend Hans Bethe giving lectures on theoretical physics to his retirement community neighbors. It's not as crazy as it sounds - a running joke…

Sigh - I was going to recommend this piece about recent human genome research in Scientific American, by a leading researcher in comparative genomics, Katherine Pollard, until I came to the last…

Drs. Fred Cross and Eric Siggia have produced a steady stream of outstanding systems-level studies of one of the most important biological oscillators: the cell division cycle. I'll have more later…

Down syndrome is one of about twelve identified chromosomal disorders- some of which are caused by additional chromosome, in whole or in part.  With Down syndrome, that extra chromosome is added…

Published on:  www.psa-rising.com The Unreachable Unavailability of Provenge *FDA’s mission statement:  To promote and protect public health. Terminal patients are those who are not…

Bringing together more than 9.000 geoscientists from all over Europe and the rest of the world into one meeting covering all disciplines of the Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences, the European…