In January, 2005, ESA’s Huygens probe bounced, slid and wobbled its way to rest for 10 seconds after touching down on Saturn’s moon, Titan. As you can imagine, that tells scientists quite a bit about…

Unless you are a microbiologist, you probably don't want to think about all of the things that are happening in your mouth right now.  One thing you share with microbiologists is incomplete…

Is it feasible to use dead stars to navigate spacecraft in deep space? Long-term space travel may be a pipe dream outside science fiction math but people inside science are at least thinking about…

When temperatures get low, close to absolute zero, some chemical reactions still occur at a much higher rate than classical chemistry says they should – in that extreme chill, quantum effects enter…

It is clear from many discussions that there is a split between things people consider to be "natural" versus those that are the products of technology, or man-made.  Obviously no one would…

Researchers from the University of Southampton have published a study in which they argue that crowdsourcing information can be improved through use of incentives.  In "Making crowdsourcing more…

Is karaoke a passing fad? Kevin Brown PhD. Associate Professor of Theatre History, Theory, Criticism, Performance Studies, New Media, Non-Western Theatre, and Popular Culture at the University of…

This is just to report that I feel greatly honoured to be cited on top of the acknowledgements section of the new paper by Dimitri Nanopoulos and colleagues. I hope I will be able to review the…

The biggest feel-good fallacy perpetuated by some in science media today is that "the right", whoever they are, is anti-science, while "the left", whoever they are, is pro-science.  It's exactly…

Two papers describing results of searches for high-mass resonances decaying into jet pairs have appeared on the arxiv this week. They are authored by the CMS and ATLAS collaborations, and they both…

Body hair in mammals is typically thought to have evolved to keep us warm in colder prehistoric periods but in elephants it may do the opposite.  A new study contends epidermal hair may have…

The Human body is a fine-tuned system of interactions between billions of cells and understanding molecular processes in biological systems of humans and animals has been a challenging task. At…

Synthetic biology uses genes as interchangeable parts to design cellular circuits that can perform new functions, such as sensing environmental conditions. But their complexity is limited by a…

Researchers say that a form of oxytocin — the hormone correlated with human love — has a similar effect on fish, suggesting it is a key regulator of social behavior that has evolved and endured since…

Implemented in 2006, Medicare prescription drug benefit (Part D) spent $65.8 billion for prescription drugs in 2011, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But Medicare beneficiaries are…

The 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating human expansion into other star systems, has some crucial hurdles to overcome. Basically, interstellar travel will depend upon…

 Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  As frequently happens in modern times, they are not chemists.   Lefkowitz is an investigator at the Howard…

 Robert Lefkowitz and Brian Kobilka have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  As frequently happens in modern times, they are not chemists.   Lefkowitz is an investigator at the Howard…

Researchers have found what they say is the only fossil ever discovered of a spider attacking prey caught in its web – and it dates back 100 million years.  The extraordinarily rare fossils are…

Solar cells can convert up to three-quarters of the energy contained in the Sun‘s spectrum into electricity, yet the infrared spectrum is entirely lost in standard solar cells. Around a quarter of…