Scholars say they are closing in on how ecstasy, 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA), produces feelings of euphoria in users and in a new paper say that it might be useful in the treatment of…

Tetraquarks are hypothetical particles made up by four quarks (two quarks and two antiquarks). Unlike mesons (quark-antiquark pairs) and baryons (three-quark or three-antiquark systems), the quarks…

Everyone's heard of microwave ovens by now.  These mass-market kitchen devices were a by-product of a much more narrow application - radar. During World War II, the magnetron, a tube that…

Are you obsessed with checking email? You could be damaging your mental health and that of their colleagues too, according to Kingston University occupational psychologist Dr. Emma Russell.…

UV-B radiation in sunlight is the most important factor for the production of vitamin D, and that is why some people suffer from low levels of vitamin D during the winter months. Many foods contain…

Male black widow spiders on the prowl to mate (and sometimes be victims of black widow cannibalism by females, thus the name Latrodectus mactans) shake their abdomens to produce carefully pitched…

Scholars writing in the Danish Journal of Archaeology say that "grog" dates back a lot farther than previously believed; to perhaps 1500 B.C. and in an area stretching from northwest Denmark to the…

Archaeologists working at  Abydos in southern Egypt have discovered the tomb of a previously unknown pharaoh named Woseribre Senebkay — and found the first material proof of a forgotten Abydos…

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…

While it's going to make government accountants cringe, 2,000,000 people in England could be eligible for weight loss surgery, according to a paper in JRSM Open. That figure far exceeds previous…

A wildfire started by three vagrants with drugs in their possession spread quickly in the foothills northeast of Los Angeles on January 16th, 2014. The plume of ash and smoke blanketed much of the…

U.S. President Barack Obama has been explaining the value of spying on the American public throughout history, as a way of deflecting concern about his administration and government overreach.…

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…

A new slave-making ant species from the eastern USA quite literally means 'to pillage'. The listing in Zookeys tell us of the new ant Temnothorax pilagens – pilere is plunder in Latin. Temnothorax…

Jon Entine is executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, where this article first appeared. The ethics controversy over Food and Chemical Toxicology’s decision in November to retract a…

Dependence between variables, even within their contemporaneous and extreme movements, are not limited to linear relationships defined through the Pearson correlation, ρ.  The …

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…

The pesticides that farmers use to protect their crops have changed a great deal over the last few decades While improvement is something we expect from technologies as diverse as pharmaceuticals to…

Follow me on Twitter: @SteveSchuler20. Back in the day, some chemistry sets came with a mechanical centrifuge. They were operated similar to those old-timey pump style tin spinning toy tops. This is…

Researchers have decoded the whole genome sequence of one widespread species and it turns out to be remarkably big -  6.5 gigabytes, largest animal genome sequenced so far.  The…