New York University cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor Allen Feldman is visiting the University of Sydney, notes the blog site of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry…

Whenever I try to explain something about particle physics to a layman, I run into the problem of mass/energy units. A Giga-electronVolt is not something you may expect people to be familiar with,…

The idea for this blog was dead simple. In my second blog at Science 2.0, "Quaternions for a Third Grader",  I showed of my clay and pipe cleaner model of quaternion multiplication. A few months…

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns Albert Einstein's papers, is pulling never-before seen items from its climate-controlled safe, photographing them in high resolution and posting them on…

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns Albert Einstein's papers, is pulling never-before seen items from its climate-controlled safe, photographing them in high resolution and posting them on…

A study by Indiana University researchers on "coregasm" says it has confirmed anecdotal evidence that exercise can lead to female orgasms. Good news for health clubs everywhere? Maybe.  But it's…

One of the disappointments experienced by most mathematics students is that they never get a course in mathematics. They get courses in calculus, algebra, topology, and so on, but the division of…

There are over 400 different tribal and other ethnic groups in India. The tribals constitute about 7.5 per cent of Indian population (Gupta, 1970). Apart from the tribal groups, many other forest…

For many years, it was thought that new brain cells could not develop in adulthood and that the connections between nerves were fairly static after childhood.  This was primarily because it wasn…

It may have been predictable, but shortly after the introduction of automated fingerprint recognition systems came the invention of fake fingers. As this research paper from May 2009 explains, fake…

There is nothing like computer-assisted post-mortem analysis of your chess games to get you back to reality about the potential of your brain: the computer sees so much more than you do, and so much…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE   Futurologists tend to look at the impacts of artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and robotics in isolation. It is a simple matter to…

Mus musculus, the common mouse, can happily live wherever there are humans. When populations of humans migrate the mice often travel with them and apparently that has long been the case. New research…

A number of conservatives hold strange anti-science positions and the same number of progressives do.  The non-social-authoritarians of the political spectrum, mostly those with that liber root…

A number of conservatives hold strange anti-science positions and the same number of progressives do.  The non-social-authoritarians of the political spectrum, mostly those with that liber root…

Food stamps are not food stamps now, they are the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits - and record numbers of Americans are receiving them. Given that, it was only a matter…

Rice and wheat take a lot of water to grow and no one eats more than China.  That also means no one contributes more to global warming from irrigation than China - a whopping 30 million tons of…

Yesterday, I wrote a post about how facebook is a rapid, easy way to spread misinformation and pseudoscience, and the difficulties in figuring out how to respond to pseudoscience when you…

Young people have to be greener, right?  That crying Indian commercial(1) was 40 years ago, we have to have made progress in pollution by now. Well, we have.  But it's not because of young…

We engage in wishful thinking all the time. Infomercials continue to exist because people continue to buy the products. Diet pills fly off the shelves because we want an easy fix. The HCG diet is…