When Whole Foods announced it will require all of the products on its shelves to have their GMO contents labeled by 2018, the company framed it as an issue of transparency.  ”People have the…

Iconic RSS Feed Icon I have been a regular user of Google Reader, and I was quite disappointed when I got to know about it's impending shutdown. Google Reader has been my information dashboard…

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio has been chosen as Pope Francis, leader of the Holy See in Rome. That's all well and good, it's nice that heavily-Catholic South America is getting its due and I found…

Am following the Neutrino Telescope conference in Venice, which started yesterday in the beautiful setting of Palazzo Franchetti. For once I am quite happy to walk to work -different from the usual…

In this article you will learn how to build an optical theremin using a 555 Timer IC. You will learn the functions of the pins on the 555 chip that are used in this build. You will learn that when…

The 555 Timer IC was introduced by a company called Signetics (later bought out by Philips) in 1972 and was designed by Hans R. Camenzind in 1971. The 555 chip has 25 transistors, 15 resistors and 2…

The 555 Timer IC was introduced by a company called Signetics (later bought out by Philips) in 1972 and was designed by Hans R. Camenzind in 1971. The 555 chip has 25 transistors, 15 resistors and 2…

A short note to mention that starting today, and until Friday, I will be blogging from the "Neutrino Telescopes" conference in Venice. This is a conference dedicated to the study of neutrinos, and…

The LHCb collaboration published on the Cornell Arxiv yesterday a preprint describing the observation of a rare decay of the B_c meson. In this landscape of failed SUSY searches,  no-shows of…

Let N be a non-zero natural number composed of n digits. Let us then both prepend and append the number 4 to create two new numbers, 4N and N4, that are both (n+1) digits long. For example, if N is…

The "Circles Stuck in a Triangle" problem I posted last week had a rather surprising solution to it. So much so that I had to rewrite the question so that text and diagrams made sense! So here is a…

I read with interest the recent disclosure that several biologists suggest they have proven Dollo's Law (that biological evolution is irreversible, a 1-way path through genetic change and time) is at…

I recently read an opinion piece that suggests that concerns about human population growth are grossly overstated and that nothing of consequence is going to occur. Consequently, no serious…

President Obama may have a thing for northeast academics but he at least stepped out of Harvard and Yale this time, tapping MIT Professor Ernie Moniz Monday to run the Department of Energy. Moniz, a…

Are you a science undergraduate or graduate student (or even a post-doc) who has discovered you love science but aren't crazy about the idea of doing research in a narrow field?  Science is a…

Planet Earth is a magnificent planet and that is an understatement! I think it looks particularly good from space, although I do appreciate the daily close-ups I am literally living in here at the…

The technical details of Big Bang, inflationary cosmology, and selected alternative theories are on offer.  Popular accounts of the big bang theory, cosmic inflation, and the creation of the…

Gas looks so pretty in space, don't you agree? This particular stellar gas is named planetary nebula ESO 456-67 . Do not get the wrong idea reading 'planetary'. This celestial object has nothing to…

I would like to start a new column of mathematical puzzles. Scientific American has one; New Scientist has one; so I hope Science 2.0 will be happy to host one! Preamble over, here's your "started…

My physics department in Padova is not a huge place, and yet I usually fail to be aware of what goes on around, since I spend all of my time buried inside my office. This morning, though, I had to…