Today's Sunday Times reflects on the Western state of mind. The piece resonated with me, having grown up in an Eastern Ivy League town, but also having lived for seven years in three different…

Alan Guth’s Inflation Theory is a pioneering work. Hitherto, cosmologists had only defined what the big bang actually was without addressing the reasons for the event. Before, the inflation theory,…

Black holes have been a research concentration for a number of years now. Advanced telescopes like Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Swift Gamma Ray Burst Telescope make it easier to observe the…

War on Science STOP calling it the God's particle, already. I suffocate in all this God damn religious propaganda these days and have developed a severe allergy against all "God Bless" and "Thank…

The August 2008 issue of Integrative and Comparative Biology has the following papers in a special section entitled Evolution vs. creationism in the classroom: evolving student attitudes. Teaching…

Razib at Gene Expression and Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Dish discuss science vs. scientists. Razib: I bring this up because many scientists believe that because science is such a superior method of…

The latest in a string of cancer genome sequencing papers is now online at Nature. The Cancer Genome Atlas Research Network, a large consortuim of cancer researchers, has searched the genomes of 206…

Tomorrow's issue of Nature discusses the next steps in cancer research (subscription required for the full text): A tumour cell is a genetic disaster area littered with mutations that differ not only…

Welsh miners’ sons in physics Reading an article Death threat to scientists over Big Bang test, I learn that one of the leading figures behind the experiment is Lyn Evans, the son of a miner, whose…

If haven't yet listened to Ryan Gregory or Larry Moran (or me) on junk DNA, for the love of God, listen to Carl Zimmer before you ever use that term in a scientific paper, press release, or blog post…

Yes, I am putting my money where my brain is. The LHC is big news ... for about 24 more hours. Heck, watching The Today Show this morning, even Matt Lauer said he was going to Google Dr. Otto…

We can thank Mr. Spielberg and popular culture for the fact that most people think of dinosaurs when they think of fossils. The bone record is actually far less abundant that the plant record. While…

Safety has to be based on evidence. Should probing the secrets of the universe create a global threat? Is it relevant to bring up Marie Curie in safety arguments for unkown or complicated physics?…

The mediaeval western European church had hitched its wagon very tightly to the philosophy of Aristotle, and by extension to the astronomical model of Ptolemy. This caused Galileo no small amount of…

Is it eavesdropping when your ISP sells your web surfing habits to advertisers? Lawyers and legislators are debating whether such practices violate the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act,…

We know what's worse for your health (in case you were wondering: we know cigarettes cause cancer, and there is no reliable link between cell phones and cancer), but what about your sanity: Novelist…

The genetic code is the metabolic instructions by which the genetic information in the DNA is translated into a protein. The fact that almost all organisms use the same code is prime evidence that…

Death is one of the few fundamental inevitabilities of human existence. This event is both fear-invoking and inspiring. This understanding, it seems, shares a shadowy symbiotic relationship with our…

The Science 2.0 headquarters in Folsom, California, was raided by police Wednesday after an apparent feng shui violation. Federal law prohibits the 'feng shui jam factor' from being under five out of…

There is a lot of fuzz and even down right drama related to the forthcoming Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN. I have started to call it the Lovely Hadron Collider because I think the science…