Speaking With a Forked Tongue My regular readers will likely have noticed that I thoroughly enjoy chasing down the truth behind things which are commonly accepted as facts.  I am fortunate to…

In 1974 there appeared the book A Bridge Too Far, which, tells the story of Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied attempt to break through German lines at Arnhem across the river Rhine in the…

The International Astronomical Union, which declared itself the arbiter of names for the entire universe, is in hot water with "Star Trek" fans. A social media campaign, including endorsements by…

One of the sillier arguments regarding gender inequality (and most of them regarding the developed world are pretty silly in 2013) is that Wikipedia, with anonymous editors of suspect credibility, is…

From the perspective of a power user who games on Windows what is Windows 8.1 like? Here is my answer to those questions in the form of a video. A word of caution do not use this preview unless you…

Martian micro-organisms would be of extraordinary interest for the life sciences, especially if interestingly different from Earth life. In the past Mars was much more habitable than it is now, so…

Methane has been in water since man has been able to drink water from the ground - but when environmental activists sink their teeth into a fundraising issue, it suddenly becomes a cancer epidemic (…

In short particles with more mass lead to beams with more energy.  More massive particles reach these energies with much smaller machines. Interesting and fundamental physics would be possible…

This is an article I wrote for wikipedia to cover the diversity of published views on Mars Sample Return. Sadly it was deleted from wikipedia. So I present it here as background material for: …

Professor  Robert G Brown of Duke University makes a number of significant points at WUWT that I feel needed to be reposted here, with his permission. Let me set the stage. By Christopher…

So. We have seen lots and lots of research articles on how agonist can cause cell proliferation. Figure 1 is a nice dose-response graph showing how estrogen induces proliferation of breast cancer…

Jolts from Volts I have almost finished my translation of Volta's original article on his pile and his crown of cups. Most of the article is a straightforward description of his experiments, but I…

What happens if you are a Yogi living in Seattle (or Portland, or San Francisco - wherever progressive pseudoscience crackpots feel welcome and included) who discovers that 'proof' is more…

Petermann Glacier 2013 If the feature arrowed in the image below is not a processing artifact, then Petermann Glacier is setting itself up for yet another major calving event.  Further data is…

I have had my fair share of confusion and straightening out over the years, mostly something I accept as a challenge (life wouldn't be fun without challenges...) But it struck me as strange when I…

LHCb, one of the two "satellite" experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, is a detector focusing on the production of B hadrons in proton-proton collisions. It does so by looking at only one side of…

The clear star of this year's American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago was  the antibody approach to Programmed Death (PD-1) for solid tumors. Responses are greater than…

NPR has a trivia show called Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me and host Peter Sagal is surprised that they don't get Republicans on it. Well, it's a comedy program and on NPR you are only allowed to be funny…

The all electron full-potential linearized augmented plane wave plus local orbitals method was utilized to study the structural properties of ZnO (0001) ultra-thin films (nanosheets). From the…

"And why do we measure areas with square centimeters ?" "Because it would be much harder to fit in there round centimeters, silly!" (From a conversation with my daughter)