John Tierney asks, why not bring a neanderthal to life?". With today's technology, we could probably completely reconstruct a physical neanderthal genome. Tierney sees no reason not to do it.…

Want to know if your discipline is in over-hype freefall?   Look at all the empty seats in your session.   For "The Science of Kissing" session I talked about yesterday it was standing room…

The Higgs field isn't the only thing the LHC might unearth.  A while back Sean Carroll posted a great discussion of other possibilities including supersymmetry, dark matter and something not yet…

The interesting thing about being in a meeting like this is seeing some outstanding science and then seeing something that makes you wonder if people really know what they are doing.   Day 2 was…

Shortly after the Second World War, the famous naturalist, Gerald Durrell, was collecting animals in Cameroon.  While he generally got on well with the locals wherever he went, one frustration…

--- ---WARNING--- --- THIS IS RAW UNEDITED CONTENT --- it essentially amounts to stream of conscious and I have not gone back over it since I wrote it. I have included it because it contains some…

AAAS bills its annual meeting as 'the world's largest general science conference', which sounds just narrow enough to be true and since I am a patron member and we're a science community (indeed, we…

Just a little weekend tidbit, art from the science world. Sometimes, during talks, I'll see art where others see just a data or figure. Here are two cases from a recent conference that I love.…

One subject I love to explore is how everyday technology depends upon some very deep theories either in pure or applied sciences that in their abstract form might be viewed at best as academic or at…

Today is Darwin Day. I didn't think I'd participate in this particular internet adventure. It looked like a lot of fun, Hank and Adaptive Complexity made sure of that, but it would be a long…

Man, I love it when scientists discover and publish things on a schedule that matches my state-mandated curriculum!  It really makes my job a lot easier.  (Also, the joke in the title line…

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While in no way sexy, paleomagnetic dating stands the test of time for being useful. You probably remember a demo from science class where a sheet of paper is laid over a bar magnet, and iron…

Economic, environmental, political and supply issues dictate that reliance on fossil fuels will be ephermeral on the scale of human history.  While developments in telecommunications and the…

Economic, environmental, political and supply issues dictate that reliance on fossil fuels will be ephermeral on the scale of human history.  While developments in telecommunications and the…

One of my readers (via Facebook) said he loved my blog but still had no idea what I did.  Good point.  While most career scientists hyperspecialize, I've moved among multiple fields of…

“As a young boy I was always very curious. My parents didn't like to leave me at home alone, because they knew I would dismantle the radio. . .” So begins an interview with Ghana's rocket man who is…

A problem arises with abstract representational thought where we imbue more significance to the symbol… the word… than to what that word is a symbol of. This is the major failing of most established…

There are some big things happening this week so I will just take a minute to fill everyone in.   Of course, you must know by now Darwin Day is tomorrow and we are doing everything we can to…

The central dogma of Molecular Genetics is that information flow is unidirectional:  DNA to RNA to PROTEIN.  That is, DNA holds the blueprints, RNA is the messenger, and Proteins are the…