Finns are not more liberal about education because kids don't have to wear shoes, they are really conservative - the last country in Europe to create mandatory education and their spending on it is…

If the distribution of dark matter in the region near Earth is lower than it is usually assumed then the interpretation of null results of direct detection efforts must be reconsidered.…

Professor Anne Glover, the first Chief Scientific Adviser to the President of the European Commission, has been sacked.  Well, not technically, the European Commission is simply not extending…

I am using my blog to advertise the opening of PhD positions in Padova University, to work at several research projects and obtain a PhD in Physics. These are offered to Chinese students through the…

Low standards breed poor results. I have been waiting for the biological revolution for quite a while now, and it always seems to be just around the corner.  Synthetic biology, genomics, protein…

Wired magazine devotes a special issue each November to a "What's Next?" for the upcoming year - and that means it is time to think about what will happen in the world of science in 2015. Wired…

Relativistic quantum field theory does not apply to everyday life.  It doesn't apply to one beam circling the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).  When two beams traveling in opposite directions…

On the eve of establishing its own space agency, Poland is showing off its rebirthed ambitions to explore the final frontier. The new European Space Agency (ESA) member state will host a space…

Open access journals charge a fee to publish an article and make the content free to read. Traditional journals charge a subscription - they say the cost is needed because of 'added value' and that…

"In space no one can hear you scream" was the tagline for the movie Alien. I finally created a Twitter account, but in Twitter, if you have no followers, no one can read your tweets. You are…

Opioid-involved overdoses in the United States have dramatically increased in the last 15 years, largely due to a rise in prescription opioid (PO) use. Emerging evidence suggests the increase is…

In modern times, academia in America is far out of the political mainstream, The humanities were for decades but science had held strong until a generation ago; the theories for why that happened are…

Just... WOW. I did not expect this to happen in my lifetime (and no, I do not expect to die tomorrow either). The Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile has pictured a forming planetary system in a…

Blame Jack Kirby and Stan Lee for the word "formuloop".  They did not devise it.  They made a comic book about four people who went into space and then returned to Earth with magic super…

Open Access Post Publication Peer Review as done on the Winnower is a bold experiment which my new model for reconciling General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory has tested.  The model I…

Curiosity rover has its own selfies snapped on Mars, ESA’s Rosetta probe photographs itself with a comet on the background, so it’s high time for the six-person Space Station crew to take an orbital…

The explosion of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is stirring up mixed emotions as scientists, astronauts, space agency officials and others involved in the industry worldwide, express their sadness…

In 1752 in the British city of Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin did something that horrified the superstitious people of the day - he captured a lightning storm in a jar with nothing but a piece of…

There is a culture where 98 percent of the people eat red meat, 50 percent of the people are obese and 45 percent of people smoke cigarettes. Yet they have incredible longevity. All of those…

Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, after arriving at the SpaceShipTwo in Mojave Desert, California on Saturday, acknowledged that his dream of commercial space tourism may have ended in the…