Glastonbury - Britain's Oldest Glass Town According to Wikipedia and many other online sources the origin of the name Glastonbury is unclear.  On the contrary, it could not be more clear. While…

I have decided to rescind this model because it is not logically consistent, the great gap was between the field equation and equations of motion. I completely accept that scalar gravity models as…

Let's see what would be needed to make Earth as uninhabitable as Mars? This disaster would need to  Remove 99% of the Earth's atmosphere, and all of its oxygen. Remove all the water in the…

ESA, the European Space Agency, is my favorite space organization. Yeah, I said it. The guy whose favorite movie is "The Right Stuff" and who could write a whole book on the Mercury program prefers…

I've already written about how Mars is great to explore, but NOT a great place to live. Nor is anywhere else. The best place to live and to shelter from cosmic or human created disasters is on…

For THE WIRED WORLD IN 2013 annual prognostication issue, predictions for the year by some of the luminaries in science media, I predicted that one of the Big 5 organs would be created. The benefit…

The fifth international school of Science Journalism will be held in the small town of Erice, in Sicily (Italy) between June 9th and 14th. The event is organized by the INFN, and I wish to publicize…

Goodbye Ohm - Hello Heisenberg Research reported earlier this month shows that electrical resistance in nanoribbons of epitaxial graphene changes in discrete steps following quantum mechanical…

The origin of life remains a great mystery in biology. Continental drift has erased most of the record, until all that's left of the first half billion years of evolution are some millimeter…

You've probably seen movies of orbital space habs spinning for artificial gravity. But did you know, that nobody has ever tested this to see how it works out in practise? We know that weightlessnes…

You've probably seen movies of orbital space habs spinning for artificial gravity. But did you know, that nobody has ever tested this to see how it works out in practise? We know that weightlessnes…

The origin of life remains a great mystery in biology. Billions of years of continental drift erased most of the record, and all that's left of the first half billion years of evolution are some…

One of the difficulties of judging the ways of people is the fact that highly intelligent individuals can at the same time be in the grip of a totally cockeyed ideology.  One reads things like…

Yesterday I visited a high school in Treviso, a small centre in north-west Italy. The students of the last two years participate in a program called "masterclasses" which includes lessons on particle…

When President Obama took office in 2009, among his first priorities was to cancel the Constellation program, mostly because it had George Bush's name on it, though that was behind a veneer of 'too…

There is a great deal of rhetoric and propaganda about "threats to the Internet" floating around the ethernet these days.  It's mostly political talk, in my opinion.  The majority of people…

In my article Our Spacecraft Could Look Straight At an Extraterrestrial Microbe - And Not See a Thing! we found out that present day extraterrestrial microbes in our solar system would be sparse and…

Sociologists and psychologists know how to get attention - make a crazy claim based on correlations in population data or surveys of college students, use terms like factor analysis and p-value and…

As a mathematician I'm used now to the proofs of scientists, which can seem puzzlingly non rigorous at first. But the mathematics of Planetary Protection are particularly eccentric, even bizarre.…

It's easy to see geological features in our wonderful photographs of the solar system. Life though is more elusive. We could look straight at one of its habitats and see nothing.This is a photograph…