In the USA, it is, I understand, a great insult to call a member of the fair sex a “Tub of Lard”.  So folks from across the Pond may do a slight double-take when they read   …

Robopocalypse, see also here on Boing Boing, is a novel by roboticist Daniel Wilson, who foretells a global apocalypse brought on by artificial Intelligence (AI) that hijacks automation systems…

Ok, don't forget PIPA and SOPA.  They're important too.  But whereas PIPA and SOPA only have the potentialto be misused for censorship, RWA is designed from the ground up to block the…

Peru is at the cutting edge, the forefront--nay, Peru is a veritable trendsetter, trailblazer, and spearheader--because Peru, alone in the world, has decided to set a quota for Humboldt squid.…

Peru is at the cutting edge, the forefront--nay, Peru is a veritable trendsetter, trailblazer, and spearheader--because Peru, alone in the world, has decided to set a quota for Humboldt squid.…

The deadliest mass extinction that we know of, 252 million years ago at the end of the Permian period,  took a long time to kill most of Earth's life, and it killed in stages. It wasn't superior…

Dr. Jon Cowan, the CEO of Peak Achievement Training, says they have found the “Cupid brainwave” – what they call Neureka! brainwaves that are related to feelings of love, happiness and gratitude. He…

Dr. Jon Cowan, the CEO of Peak Achievement Training, says they have found the “Cupid brainwave” – what they call Neureka! brainwaves that are related to feelings of love, happiness and gratitude. He…

Many publishers attract a significant amount of bile from scientists. However, most bile is reserved for that titan of publishers, Elsevier. Now, many academics are signing on online pledge called…

Bacteria can multiply rapidly, potentially doubling every 20 minutes in ideal conditions but this exponential growth phase is preceded by a period known as lag phase, where no increase in cell number…

As you know, 74 people were killed this Wednesday when Egyptian soccer fans stampeded into a bottleneck after a 3-1 hometown upset win. While certainly tragic, it’s far from irrational: it turns out…

What is actually happening in the brain when one person looks at another?  For people with prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces, information processing - the stages that our…

A new study in Nature shows that Santorini may have reactivated roughly a century before the Minoan "super-eruption", a lot quicker than had previously been thought.  How is it possible to time…

The Wall Street Journal posted a letter from 16 scientists who are critical of climate science in general and anthropogenic warming in specific. There were numerous flaws in the letter (see Robert…

I can feel it in the air, so thick I can taste it. Can you? It's the we're-going-to-build-an-artificial-brain-at-any-moment feeling. It's exuded into the atmosphere from news media plumes ("IBM Aims…

A social psychologist who doesn't spend his days finding ways to rationalize being progressive? University of Virginia Prof. Jonathan Haidt certainly was a partisan liberal, he says, but researching…

A social psychologist who doesn't spend his days finding ways to rationalize being progressive? University of Virginia Prof. Jonathan Haidt certainly was a partisan liberal, he says, but researching…

I spend quite a lot of time here at Squid A Day blathering about one fishery or another, and I ought to remember that the word "fishery" isn't exactly common parlance. It's not jargon in the same way…

Who has more credibility to the NPR audience, a scientist or someone who runs an organic yogurt company?  It depends on the issue, of course.  When it comes to global warming, science is…

It may turn out that coffee is bad for you. The World Health Organization already lists it as a possible carcinogen, despite any evidence, but they do the same thing about cell phones, in contrast to…