My friend Benny (who produces the Rationally Speaking podcast) really hates the word “skepticism.” He understands and appreciates its meaning and long intellectual pedigree (heck, we even did a show…

Top quarks are most often produced in pairs at hadron colliders. The reason of this fact is that the strong interaction, which produces most of the reactions between the projectiles, is flavor-blind,…

High-sugar diets are bad for your waistline but they may be bad for your brain too. Researchers trained rats to successfully navigate a maze and then for six weeks the rats' water was replaced with…

High-sugar diets are bad for your waistline but they may be bad for your brain too. Researchers trained rats to successfully navigate a maze and then for six weeks the rats' water was replaced with…

When forests are logged, managed or selectively trimmed so they’ll be less susceptible to raging fires, there are usually huge piles of stumps, branches and other wood debris left laying on the…

I have seen Mansagar Lake drying for several years. I have seen it stinking for several years. It was also used as place for immersion of idols after the festival season.  I have seen…

“The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called ‘academic inbreeding’ has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and…

Sometimes you set out to test for antibiotics but get a bonus; in this case, diphenhydramine, arsenic, and fluoxetine. Yikes. Well, there is a science basis to some of what sounds pretty horrid…

"Contact", Carl Sagan's 1985 novel about man's contact with extraterrestrial life and where it takes us, was, like all good stories, modeled around real characters. The book was okay but the movie…

Psychologists contend there is a 'health halo' adopted toward foods thought to be 'healthy', whether or not they actually are (granola, low fat yogurt, etc). There is also a health halo around foods…

Psychologists contend there is a 'health halo' adopted toward foods thought to be 'healthy', whether or not they actually are (granola, low fat yogurt, etc). There is also a health halo around foods…

Mike McRae's Tribal Science: Brains, Beliefs, and Bad Ideas is short, sweet, often humorous and to the point. It's also pithy and full of quote-worthy sentences:"Since most of the face-like…

YiZRi LLC has unveiled VoiceSee, the world's first hands-free, eyes-free web navigation platform that uses mobile apps to read aloud recipes, digital newspapers and Wikipedia entries for the Android…

All as about "quantum gravity" as about "the interpretations of quantum mechanics" shows only our misunderstanding of what quantum mechanics means and wants to tell us. Its "complementarity" is…

In this blog I will derive the Einstein field equations starting from the Hilbert action.  Since there are only two terms in the Hilbert action, one of which is left alone, there is not that…

The anterior insular cortex is a small region of the brain, but it plays a big role in human self-awareness and in neuropsychiatric disorders. A unique cell type, the von Economo neuron (VEN), is…

Researchers writing in PNAS state they have seen an increased reaction to stress in animals whose ancestors were exposed to an environmental compound, vinclozolin, a popular fruit and vegetable…

I'll tell you a secret a chef told me. That secret is...butter. There is a reason restaurants that seek to charge the same for 'healthy' fare end up being big flops; people feel cheated eating bean…

California faces an identity crisis.  The financial mismanagement is so well known that late-night talk show hosts make jokes about getting loans...from Greece.  Three years ago, third…

With four members of Congress possessing science degrees, it is no wonder our science policies looks a lot like what lawyers would create. But Science 2.0 is about lighting candles for people, not…