The Environmental Protection Agency has always been a political beast - it is political appointees accountable to whatever administration is in power, not the electorate. President Richard Nixon…

Mark Bittman of the New York Times has never seen a paper about a miracle vegetable he didn't coo over - as long as it's about his friends in the $29 billion organic food industry. And he has never…

Mark Bittman of the New York Times has never seen a paper about a miracle vegetable he didn't coo over - as long as it's about his friends in the $29 billion organic food industry. And he has never…

Scientists in the UK, Portugal and Germany solved the structure of kynurenine 3-monooxygenase (KMO), a protein implicated in the neurodegeneration (destruction of nerve cells) seen in diseases…

Researchers recently studied the reaction of aphids when a parasitic wasp with genetic variation laid eggs in them and found that different genotypes of the wasp affected where the aphids went to die…

A traditional Balkan bedbug remedy has been shown stab and trap the biting insects, according to a paper in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Just in time, too. Bedbugs have made a dramatic…

Male and female birds often show differences in body size, with males typically being larger. Some birds, like many ratites – large, flightless species such as emus and cassowaries – are the opposite…

New research has questioned the reliability of neuroscience studies, concluding that most had an average power of around 20 percent – a finding which means the chance of the average study discovering…

Many factors can push a wild animal population to the brink of collapse and ecologists have long sought ways to measure the risk of such a collapse. Last year, MIT physicists demonstrated that they…

Violent crime is undercounted or overcounted, depending on who you ask. Some statistics count gun violence twice, for example, as a criminal getting shot and a police officer doing the shooting. On…

Our sun will one day become a faint white dwarf star - but prior to that, for a few tens of thousands of years as its atmosphere is blown away into space  it could be surrounded by spectacular…

"What are the radiation doses to airplane passengers from the intense bursts of gamma-rays that originate from thunderclouds?" researchers asked at a press conference during the European Geosciences…

An unusual fossil of Euphanerops, a fossil jawless fish that swam in the seas around 370 million years ago, has fins behind its anus - a pair of them.  The find makes the fish one of the first…

There have been other attempts in the past, so this is not strictly a new idea. However I found the interactive web page at http://htwins.net/scale2/ extremely well constructed. It is a graphical…

In 2001 there was a massive outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth Disease (FMD) in the United Kingdom.  This caused, in terms of prices at that time £8bn / $13–16bn of loss to the UK economy, and much…

You wouldn’t know it by current world events, but humans actually evolved to be peaceful, cooperative and social animals.- ‘Man the Hunter’ theory is debunked in new book, February 18, 2006, By…

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding…

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding…

In my previous blog post, How I Solved My 555 Timer IC Frequency and Built a 555 Guituner, even though I tried several different combinations of resistors in series, I was unsuccessful in finding…

Long ago, obesity and high blood pressure were signs of being a wealthy elite. But the world has progressed and now even the poorest countries can eat enough to be fat. As recently as 1980 those…