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…

Party Like It's 1776 "These colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states" Employed in the service of my country abroad during the whole course of these transactions, I first…

There was a recent article discussing the observation of death and the chimpanzeesattitude towards it. Of course, this gave rise to the usual round of questions and points regarding human…

About 5 million children worldwide have been born by IVF since 1978, and 1.4 percent of total births in the U.S. annually and as many as 4.4 percent in western Europe result from the procedure,…

Is Law A Science ? In a recent article The Science Of Law I asserted that law, or more properly jurisprudence, is a science.  The basis for that assertion was that both science and law are…

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…

The transcription factor Nanog plays a critical role in the self-renewal of embryonic stem cells and is expressed in a manner similar to other pluripotency markers, according to a new paper This…

Gerovital H3, one of the "fountain of youth" miracles drugs that crop up once a generation, was banned in the United States in 1982, but the alternative medicine crowd that never let go of homeopathy…

The noses of industrial livestock workers in North Carolina containeddrug-resistant bacteria- livestock-associated Staph- while the noses of antibiotic-free livestock workers did not,…

A ten-nation analysis of media systems and national political knowledge funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the United Kingdom found that women living in the world’s most…

Over past centuries, the crews of ships regularly measured some basic properties of the waters through which they sailed, such as temperature and salinity.  Though their accuracy has to be…

How much money would you be willing to spend to find out if supersymmetry - SUSY - is real or not? It was always known that discoveries made by the Large Hadron Collider would require the…

The American FDA allows ingredients that are banned in other countries. Like in stories about bat boys living in caves, it's always best to use foreign lands few people visit (like West Virginia) in…

The Solar Impulse airplane, brain-child airplane of Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg (who co-piloted the entire journey) that can fly day and night without fuel or polluting emissions, has ended…

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…

The Qinling-Dabie orogenic complex, part of a large east-west mountain range in the heart of China, plays a key role in helping scientists understand the formation and breakup of the supercontinent…

A recent increase in polar mesospheric clouds - diffuse collections of water ice crystals in the mesosphere near the poles at altitudes of about 50 miles - could be due to a recent increase in…

Tropical Storm Sandy had the good fortune to hit New York City and the home of American media publishing during a presidential election. It thus became a Super Storm and a political rallying cry…

From 1975 on, the global surface ocean had shown a pronounced, though wavering, warming trend. Starting in 2004, however, that warming seemed to stall. Researchers measuring the Earth's total energy…