Men's World Record Times - 2007 to 2010 Sep 28, 2008 - Men's World Record Haile Gebrselassie (Ethiopia) - 2:03:59 Berlin Marathon, Berlin, Germany Haile Gebrselassie (Ethiopia) clocked 2:03:59 to win…

Nature columnist David Goldston love to bash the supposed political naivete of science community leaders, and this week is no different (subscription required): Can anyone cite any decision that has…

Gulf Coast residents were alerted today -- jelly in the grass. Not only in the grass but also in the swimming pools! A man's net scooping out quarter-size buttons left an indelible impression in my…

Climate change, stem cells, drug research and regulation, nuclear proliferation, biological terrorism agents, alternative energy technology, nanotechnology, personalized genetics, new computing…

Eli Lilly and Merck are going to start reporting payments made to physicians. How would you feel if you found out that your physician, who just prescribed you (or your child)that expensive new drug…

Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health since 2002, is resigning his position at the end of October. Zerhouni has led the NIH through an interesting period, and my take is that…

Recently I was lounging at an on campus coffee shop, melting into a plastic chair, tired around my eyes, and grimacing at the ache in my arms that I was convinced signified the flu. Only three weeks…

You've probably heard that saying, 'if your only tool is a hammer you tend to see every problem as a nail.' So it goes with culture too. People who have an agenda jump on every opportunity to…

Who wouldn't want a map of all the known yeast metabolic pathways on the wall? Download your copy here (PDF). The catch is you have to print it out yourself. This poster offers a birds-eye glance at…

American Physical Society (APS) published on 16 September 2008 its energy report entitled Energy = Future (Think Efficiency) -- A Different Kind of Energy Efficiency Report. To facilitate discussion…

The recent announcement that Sergey Brin, the multibillionair co-founder of Google, has discovered that he possesses a genetic mutation that predisposes him to a form of Parkinson's disease has…

Sex with robots available in five years!(1) Not so fast -- do we love robots? How about -- do we understand how we love each other? Let's limit the subject even further to just the science of love…

Today, Sept. 19, 2008 is the major sign that NASA finally gets it! Risk understanding has arrived at NASA with the move of the Space Shuttle Endeavour to the launch pad. This is the first time that…

A current news piece announces the end of scientific secrecy. Scientists can "forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and…

Two years back, the US Congress passed the NIH Reform Act of 2006 in an effort to get the NIH to adapt its structure to the new landscape of biomedical research, and to institute more transparency…

Public access for studies paid for by taxpayer money seems like a no-brainer. There's no reason peer-reviewed journals should get to charge researchers (paid for again by taxpayers) and then have a…

I usually like Nicolas Wade, but this very first sentence of a piece in this week's NY Times science section is not right: The principal rationale for the $3 billion spent to decode the human genome…

In 1970 the anthropologist Robert Ardrey published “The Social Contract, A Personal Inquiry into the Evolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder”. The theme of the book was that the modern concept of…

The only thing I get tired of more than crazy people invoking Galileo as their defense against criticism of whatever bizarre science 'theory' they are foisting on the world are people on the other…

David Foster Wallace committed suicide last Friday. The NY Times has an appraisal here. No more novels with inimitable passages like this: Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine…