9-year-old Carissa Yip is probably better at chess than you. She is certainly better than me and already better than 93 percent of the 51,000 plus players registered with the U.S. Chess Federation.…

"Those among us who are anthropologically inclined tend to view a can or bottle of soda as an instantly recognizable symbol of everything that is wrong with Western civilization as we know it" is the…

I've long said that energy is the biggest issue we face in the 21st century - with energy, I can solve the problems of food and water and that helps solve poverty too. I can even turn lead into gold…

It would be great to study Mars "on location". You could do as much in a day or two, as our rovers could do in years. But there's a conundrum to face. Humans are host to hundreds of trillions of…

After reading another article by Alex Berezow ["The Arrogance of a Well-Fed Society"] insisting that there is absolutely no problem with human population growth, I couldn't help but be struck by the…

If there are fewer than 50% females in physics, that is a call to action, argues virtually ... everyone in academia. We need greater outreach for girls, we need to change classes to appeal to them,…

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has now traveled further from Earth than any previous launched object - 11 billion miles and counting. It is on the edge of our solar system and about to enter deep…

Is sex as addictive as cocaine or alcohol? It depends on who you ask. Obviously there is an entire industry built up around the idea that it is, just like there is an industry build around homeopathy…

Aplysia californica is a curious beast indeed. The California sea hare is a species of sea slug; a hermaphroditic gastropod mollusc that feeds on seaweed and occasionally squirts ink if you piss it…

Backwards is a nicely fitting description for how I have come to be who and what I am. This is my story. Many scientists go the traditional route of undergrad > master's/TA > Ph.D. >…

There is an interesting series of articles published by the Guardian discussing various aspects and opinions regarding the precautionary principle.  It has certainly been invoked sufficiently on…

For the first time, astronomers have measured the true colour of a planet in orbit around another star, and it is cobalt blue. This blue however, is probably the colour of a continuous rain of liquid…

In 1953, the lightbulb went on for Watson and Crick, who first published the famous double helix 3-D structure of DNA. Structural biology soon became a hot field. Using high intensity X-ray beams,…

This is a draft article I wrote for wikipedia. about the legal issues and requirements for public debate for return of a sample to a Mars Sample Return Receiving Facility. It is background…

About once a week I use some specialized chemistry and physics to blow up cars for movies.  Here's a little video revealing how that works, that I shot while creating a scene for Rooster Teeth…

Background material for How Valuable is Pristine Mars for Humanity - Opinion Piece? for those who want to research into the official studies on back contamination issues and design of the Mars Sample…

As I was reading the comment section to “Our Anthropomorphic  Bias” I was struck by the persistence shown by Sascha Vongehr in referring to humans as robots in 4 of the 5 comments he made in a…

One day, perhaps, brave astronauts will set forth to colonize the planet Mars. However human colonies can't be sterilized in the way a rover can be, so they may conflict with the desires of…

Like gems hidden in mountains of sand, I have sifted through vast amounts of data which have been gathered by surveys covering wide areas of the sky at particular wavelengths, and found likely star…

The American Chemical Society recently published its 2012 salary survey for Chemists and can be found here: http://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/careers/salaries/surveys/salaries-2012.pdf As Figuer…