How would we recognize truly alien life on a planet that is probably like a half molten Venus, and why we don't even bother trying.  How could we detect any kind  life…

Hyderabad conference on biodiversity is excellent opportunity on resource mobilisation.  With  over 180 participating countries  Prime Minister of India hopes for a "positive outcome".…

In 1428 AD, while King Alfonso V was ordering Sicilian Jews into conversion sermons and the Ottomans were consolidating in Europe, the city-states of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan…

Giving a hard number as a critical threshold for dangerous climate change -  temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius - has not helped climate negotiations.  The USA, for example, has led…

A recent edition of  ‘M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture’ features one of the very few, perhaps the only, fully blind, peer-reviewed academic papers on sugar pigs. Author Toni Risson, at the…

Michael Brutsch appeared to be an upstanding citizen. He is the father of a teenage son who joined the Marines, loves cats, and lives with his disabled wife in Arlington, TX. As a programmer for a…

As pointed out recently, a new type of creationism has entered popular discourse through the backdoor. That was mostly about computer geeks and physicists trying to outperform "old atheists" in…

Citizens who were told routine health checks were too expensive and so people did not get them, to the detriment of their health and higher costs later, just got good and bad news; the good news is…

A planet around the mass of the Earth has been found, orbiting a star in the Alpha Centauri system; the nearest to Earth and also the lightest exoplanet ever discovered around a star like the Sun.…

Secondary organic materials (SOM) in the atmosphere form two distinct types, liquids and jellies, and these airborne particles have begun to react with gases in the atmosphere. In the last 20…

You may have heard of superfluids and superconductors, so why not supersolids?  In 2004 Moses Chan and Eunseong Kim thought they had discovered that super-cooled helium ice could essentially…

Are you buying Halloween candy?  Don't you know they use child labor to harvest those cocoa beans?  You went to Chick-fil-A?  So you don't believe gay parents have just as much right…

One of the results of the conference "ComunicareFisica 2012" I attended last week (and about which I wrote extensively in the past few posts) was, for me, getting convinced that Twitter cannot really…

Even today, landmines planted as far back as World War II are still being discovered, posing a serious threat to civilians in 69 countries worldwide. Approximately 70 people are killed every day as a…

To people who are brand new to the culture wars, California's Proposition 37 might be scary. It has demonstrated that the world is a very small place, lies and hysteria can travel around the world…

Next month will be the ten year anniversary of the Prestige sinking, which caused one of Spain's largest ecological disasters. The oil spill reached the coasts of Galicia and the rest of the…

The best reasons to allow hunting in animal-heavy states are that they get hit by cars a lot and they starve. When it comes to cars, some areas are going to be a lot more dangerous than others and it…

Greenland has areas of very clean water, the like of which just does not exist in developed nations, but also highly polluted water, making it an excellent location for studying the environmental…

New research findings show that immune system development is affected by gravity changes when astronauts are exposed to stresses during launch and landing which disrupts their body’s natural defenses…

See, this is what I really like of a blog: when readers contribute significantly! I have discussed analogies here in the recent past, producing the writeup of a recent talk at a conference on the…