Those working on quantum gravity have to accept the fact they are unlikely to ever compete for a Nobel in physics. No matter how brilliant and how widely accepted the contribution, a Nobel prize in…

You read that right.  Not 15 months old.  15 minutes. A team of doctors at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital determined the girl, diagnosed in the womb with a severe…

You read that right.  Not 15 months old.  15 minutes. A team of doctors at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital determined the girl, diagnosed in the womb with a severe…

I'm stoked to be joining the blogging team at KQED QUEST--a Northern California science multimedia extravaganza! My first post went up yesterday. As you can see, it required extremely rigorous and…

Good news for flapjack junkies.  For 15 hours on February 28th,  you can get some free pancakes at IHOP and raise some money for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. It's National…

There recently appeared on Scientific American Blogs an article by Jennifer Ouellette Don’t Be Dissin’ the Bohr Model! in which she deplores the frequent occurrence, among those who have recently…

A recent study by University of Alberta researchers Elena Nicoladis and Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology wanted to see whether speaking French (being bilingual…

Samsung wants to give away a lot of money for STEM projects in local schools and we all probably agree that is a good thing.  But there is no such thing as a free lunch so they want to give it…

Americans of a particular cultural and political persuasion like to regard Europeans as 'more' scientific because surveys reveal that they say 'yes' to the appropriate buzzwords.  Not so, even…

There are two ways to determine the height of the tallest possible running, breathing organism on planet Earth – one is to measure it – the other to calculate it from scratch. The groundwork for the…

Mongolian Gerbil psychoacoustics have been under investigation for several years now - particularly by Dr. Joan Sinnott, Endowed Professor of Research at the  Psychology Department,…

A train is heading toward five people who can't escape its path and only you are close enough to do anything.  You can reroute the train onto different tracks with only one person along that…

Last week I wrote a somewhat half-baked post describing simple numbers that parents can use to pick an elementary school (the first and second were solid!). This week, I called around to get experts…

I just ask. If I look at a glowing something with an antenna, I will not get any signal, I think. This is, I believe, because the radiation comes as photons, more or less, because it is a result of…

Often when reading about cutting edge physics and the amazing feats of the Large Hadron Collider, we are treated to crazy scenarios involving “virtual particles”, also variously referred to as “ghost…

What's the one thing that could make anti-science progressives dislike genetic modifications and medicine even more than they do now?  Putting them both together. Scientists at the Vienna…

It's Valentine's Day and the wonders of nature are getting in on the act.  Luckily, ESA was there to capture the memories. Here, for your enjoyment, are the numerous ways the cosmos and the…

In August of 2011, Hurricane Irene hit the Caribbean and and then traveled up parts of the eastern United States, bringing widespread wreckage in some places and, thanks to threatening midtown…

A note to bird flu virologists: Not all of you have been approaching of this whole engineered flu pandemic controversy quite optimally.  It’s understandable that you weren’t prepared for all the…

I've just begun reading the recently released review book, "Connectome," from Sebastian Seung of MIT. The basic notion of the book is that you are the emergent result from…