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…

Twice a day I get an email from someone offering me the outstanding opportunity to carry their infographic, press release or puff-piece interview with someone who has invented a new Miracle Cure and…

In a paper posted to the arXiv a few days ago Stephen W. Hawking the preeminent expert on black holes argued quite effectively that given what we know about quantum gravity they don't exist. Quantum…

Those familiar with the Lord of the Rings will remember the Huorns.  According to the Lord of the Rings Wiki: Mostly the Huorns stood as dark trees in the deepest forests, gnarled and…

"The most important task at hand is experimental. Based on our considerations of dynamical symmetry breaking through preons and the assumption of universal size for all quarks and leptons, we are led…

I must say I feel proud of myself tonight. In Italy a unified procedure to rank candidates to the position of associate or full professor has been launched last year, and I of course participated to…

Would you want to live on a "snowball planet", covered with ice sheets and glaciers all the way to the equator? Mars only looks warm because the photos are digitally adjusted to match brighter…

"Statistical power does not corrupt" Leland Wilkinson, "Statistical Methods in Psychology Journals", in American Psychologist, August 1999. [Note: "power" in the context of statistical tests measures…

I was checking out my trusty Cotton Physiology Handbook and have to admit that I got a bit blown away.. What is a xylem? Plants have vascular systems just like people, but for plants,…

I was checking out my trusty Cotton Physiology Handbook and have to admit that I got a bit blown away.. What is a xylem? Plants have vascular systems just like people, but for plants,…

In Trouble with Terraforming Mars, I looked at many things that could go wrong with such a project. But setting aside those issues, Mars terraforming takes us far into the realm of magical thinking…

In the introduction to Science Left Behind, I wrote about a bizarre effort by MoveOn.org-sponsored (think Tea Party, but of the left) progressives who helped gain control of Congress in the 2006…

We haven't found life on Mars yet. That's not too surprising, though disappointing. You can see its surface geology from orbit, plain to view, but any life is likely to be hidden inside rocks, under…

How do we estimate the confidence range about an estimate?  In normal probability theory, we take a distribution and directly measure the dispersion within the data.  This…

While writing my series on the Science Play and Research Kit, I hoped to survey chemistry sets that are already on the market. I was able to get a reviewer’s sample of the Chem C3000 and you can…

In Italy the debate over the escape of brilliant young scientists to foreign countries has been going on for decades now. Italians like to debate, much less to solve their own problems. So although…

The surface of Venus is totally hostile to Earth life, a dim, hot furnace, with temperatures well over 400°C. But conditions are different at the Venus cloud tops. Temperatures are ideal, with plenty…

I will try to keep my Newtonian wig on. Digressions will be in well-defined sidebars. Time to serve the meat and potatoes. The Action for the Newtonian Gravitational Field Two things go into this…

This idea dates back to the Russians in the 1970s. The surface of Venus is far too hot, and the atmosphere too dense, for Earth life. However, our air is a lifting gas on Venus, with about half the…

The 14 year old kid in the picture on the right was named Aitzaz Hasan Bangash. His name is a difficult one to remember for westerners, but that is a pity, because he ended his life as a true hero.…