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…

"To date, there is no evidence for SUSY particles and lower limits on the masses are more than 4 GeV for gluinos and more than 20 GeV for squarks and sleptons." D.H. Perkins, "Introduction to High…

Everyday, we hear about tragedies, some that hit too close to home for comfort, and our reactions range from "That just shouldn't happen!" to the belief that when it does happen, it must be someone's…

On TVO's The Agenda with Steve Paikin, yesterday's topic was "The Anti-Science Left" and it starts off with a quote from my book with Dr. Alex Berezow, called "Science Left Behind", about the feel…

Sometimes painful things end up being good; we recognize that.   But does it work in economics?  

NASA is hosting a news teleconference to announce black hole observations from its newest X-ray telescope, the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), and the European Space Agency's XMM…

I'm generally critical of raw milk, along with just about every microbiologist and all of the scientists in the CDC and FDA. The reason is simple; it has no beneficial value and foodborne illness…

With the Surface Pro Microsoft has made a statement on what a PC should be for the next five to ten years.   Rather than fading away the PC will become thin, lite, and easy to use while…

I believe in the wisdom of crowds. If I take one PhD in science and ask them to guess the number of pennies in a jar, it's not going to be close, but if I ask 1,000 regular people to guess, the mean…

A year or so back Carl Zimmer asked the science world if life could be defined in three words.I don’t think he would have been too concerned if the answer was in four or five or six words, the point…

My favorite star, our very own Sun, has a multitude of spectacular features she shows off with grandeur. In fact, the Sun was the subject of my thesis and so she is extra special to me. When you…

If I were a virus, I think I’d like to be Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV). What is that, you ask? Exactly my point. Our lungs are the only organ in our body that is exposed to the filth of our…

There are now many affordable and even out right cheap tablets - computers with touch screens - available, useful computers for even less than the famous $100 laptops were supposed to be. These are…

Bats are the stealth bombers of the animal kingdom. Equipped with radar-like echolocation, the dark form of the bat allows this creature to stay in the shadows before launching into attack on its…

Quick, which states have the most philosophical exemptions from vaccines, religious states or the more atheist states? Answer: the states with more atheists per capita - because in America they share…

My Heart and Soul is in space. There is not a shred of doubt about that. Since I was a little girl my head has been turned in an upward direction - often both physically and mentally. Come Valentine…

What a spectacular coincidence! A meteor hitting Earth on the day the asteroid 2012 DA14 is passing close by! When I was contemplating what kind of natural disasters I should throw in the scenarios…

Certain media sources have with the announcement of a possible black hole 26,000 light years away at W49B, mentioned the possibility of a wormhole. (I'm looking at you LA Times.) As a fan of many sci…

Famous problem, famous solution, but is that the whole story? How would you solve the problem of crossing the seven bridges of Konigsberg? Spiked Math proposes a number of other solutions that never…