Today I was in the mood of cleaning up some areas of my labyrintic hard drive, after having performed a periodic backup of its contents. I thus came across some pieces of text that had been sitting…

In 1968, after CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite formally came out against the Viet Nam war, President Lyndon B. Johnson was apocryphally to have said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle…

A group at the University of Exeter used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology on the brains of 13 volunteers, all faculty members and graduate students in English at the school, to…

A new paper uses mathematical models to examine the effect of direct and indirect social influences, otherwise known as peer pressure, on how decisions are reached on important issues. The data taken…

In soccer, football in the rest of the world, a team is most vulnerable right after they score. That is why goals often come in pairs.  But there is also a more dangerous statistic relating to…

The Toby Jug Nebula, formally known as IC 2220, is an example of a reflection nebula - a cloud of gas and dust illuminated from within by a star called HD 65750.  The Toby Jug Nebula is located…

When you think about science leadership, you don't often think about United Arab Emirates. Dictatorships don't lend themselves to quality basic research but when they put their minds to applied…

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 was awarded jointly to Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel "for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems". While today,…

Grey literature in medicine has some valuable insight, according to a new paper. The authors say that clinical trial outcomes are more complete in unpublished reports than in publicly available…

Unusual impact craters formed on Mars feature a thin outer deposit that extends many times beyond the typical range of ejecta. Nadine Barlow, professor of physics and astronomy at Northern Arizona…

How bad is the funding landscape for scientific research in the US?  Bad enough that a research project can be good enough to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, but not good enough…

Scientists should be good at judging the importance of the scientific work of others - it's a peer review culture - but a new paper instead says that scientists are unreliable judges of the…

A study to see whether narrowing of the veins from the brain to the heart could be a cause of multiple sclerosis has found that the condition is just as prevalent in people without the disease. The…

America and the UK are sarcastic nations. Maybe they care too much. Children learn early to recognize sarcasm, especially if they have greater empathy, according to a new study. For children,…

A new paper analyzed organizational change in state health-related departments from 1990 to 2009. The researchers discovered that in many cases states kept the same organizational structure in…

If you visit the outside of a meeting regarding biology and policy today, you are sure to see protesters who all insist that they should be voting on the science.   They have reached their own…

A transgenerational study with female rats suggests that exposure to social stress not only impairs a mother's ability to care for her children but can also negatively impact her daughter's ability…

Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are primarily cultural but the search is also on for a biological disposition that would confirm it outside primarily middle-class white…

You've seen advertisements for brain training games, apps, and websites that promise to give your mental abilities a boost - even "Baby Einstein" videos for infants make the claim that they will lead…

Marijuana use continues to be on the upswing in the United States. A public relations campaign claiming health benefits while ignoring health risks have led to diminishing public disapproval and more…