100 years yesterday, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg while crossing the North Atlantic and sank, killing over 1500 passengers and crew.  Today, thousands of boats cross the same iceberg-ridden…

The downside to partisan embryonic stem cell hype over the last decade and conflation of it with adult stem cell breakthroughs, is that a whole lot of hucksters are exploiting public confusion and…

Cyberbullies don't feel like they are the same as physical bullies.  Some new research agrees, and for that reason anti-bullying campaigns need to be optimized for the Internet. Traditional…

EQUAL RIGHTS   Modern humanity separates itself from other life forms (and earlier human history), in part, by glorification of our capacity to codify and enforce equal rights for man. From a…

The Trefael Stone is an ancient monument in south-west Wales.  The stone bears multiple cupmarks, circular holes gouged into its surface associated with ritual burial activity in the Neolithic…

Men and women of good conscience cannot sit silently by and allow these things to happen. This is abuse and torture and, still, people support these. Still the Massachusett's State House supports it…

Between physicists - there's an Easter bunny! Last Friday I went to Oslo, you know, the capital of Norway and home of the Vikings, to meet experimental physicist Tommaso Dorigo. Tommaso, who writes A…

To take a statement with 'a grain of salt' or 'a pinch of salt' means to accept it but to maintain a degree of skepticism about its truth. --The Phrase Finder We use idioms with little thought. We…

On April 5, 2010, the sun spewed a two million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles toward the magnetosphere, the invisible magnetic fields surrounding Earth. As the particles interacted…

A new observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), is still under construction but it has already given astronomers a major breakthrough in understanding a nearby…

A new five-ton instrument that goes by the name MOSFIRE (Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration) has been installed in the Keck I Telescope at the W.M. Keck Observatory atop Mauna Kea in…

For once I allow myself some self-advertising... I just published on the Cornell arXiv the preprint of a proceedings paper I wrote for the Bormio 2012 conference on Nuclear Physics, where I presented…

Why take something for free and feel cheap if you can pay half a grand and support quackery? Precisely! Hangovers from alcohol are almost entirely due to dehydration, read: too little water in your…

Global spending on cleaner energy grew to a record $263 billion in 2011, a 6.5 percent increase over the previous year, according to new research by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The United States…

Mitigation, rationing, taxes. Environmental policy claims have historically been driven by negative thinking - a demand-side mindset that seeks to limit consumption of fossil fuels through pollution…

In Moby Dick, Melville scoffs that “fine ladies and gentlemen should regale themselves with an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale.” Following the example of the Ancient Egyptians…

Greece has reopened a major archaeological site on the island of Santorini. It was closed for over six years years after a roof collapsed, killing a tourist. The bronze-age town at Akrotiri reopened…

Greece has reopened a major archaeological site on the island of Santorini. It was closed for over six years years after a roof collapsed, killing a tourist. The bronze-age town at Akrotiri reopened…

As soon as protestors began to occupy Zuccotti Park near Wall Street in New York City, people began to wonder why? Was it the result of disgust towards the New York Stock Exchange, chronic…

We know that voting changes your brain a little - just reading that sentence changed your brain a little, so actions and behaviors certainly change us.  But does voting change your descendants?…