The late Devonian, about 390 million years ago to roughly 360 million years ago, was a time of struggle and escape for fish in a drying environment, theorized paleontologist Alfred Romer.  That…

A fiery ancient Greek curse inscribed on two sides of a thin lead tablet was about a greengrocer some 1,700 years ago in the city of Antioch, researchers have determined.  The tablet holding the…

A fiery ancient Greek curse inscribed on two sides of a thin lead tablet was about a greengrocer some 1,700 years ago in the city of Antioch, researchers have determined.  The tablet holding the…

The number of people with one or more of the adverse complications of obesity, including type 2 diabetes and heart disease is rapidly increasing. Drugs designed to treat obesity have shown limited…

From a Press Release by Yorkshire Water: Trillions Of Fat-Busting Bugs To Be Deployed To Help Fight Sewer Fat Trillions of fat busting bugs are being deployed from today (Thursday 22 December) by…

For the 41st Accretionary Wedge Ron Schott asked for "the most memorable or significant geological event that you've directly experienced."  I had to think long and hard about this, because I…

The Jaffe Laboratory at UC San Diego posted some lovely videos of market squid mating aggregations off La Jolla in Southern California. Check them out here. The first one is just classic: murky green…

The main observation here is that rationalization on the social level is rationalization on the personal level performed by macro-systems (social systems from our point of view). Scientism is the…

Richard Feynman is something of a legend in science circles these days.  Posthumously, he became regarded as an insightful polymath, with his hands in the development of the atomic bomb (which…

“Malicious,” “diatribe,” and “preposterous” are words recently thrown at me. (How remarkable that I lived nearly 60 years before drawing this kind of vitriol. Maybe I haven’t been assertive enough!)…

Some thoughts from G.K.Chesterton, with tomorrow in view: “But I say that whatever the day is that is to you festive or symbolic, it is essential that there should be a quite clear black line between…

A cave in South Africa contains a bed made of bundles of sedge and wild quince leaves. It was found by archaeologist Lyn Wadley of Wits University while excavating a site at Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal…

A cave in South Africa contains a bed made of bundles of sedge and wild quince leaves. It was found by archaeologist Lyn Wadley of Wits University while excavating a site at Sibudu in KwaZulu-Natal…

Just as you thought it was over for 2011, and you proceeded to hung the Higgs mass plots on the christmas tree as a wish for stronger signals next year, ATLAS comes out with a new particle discovery…

http://news.yahoo.com/alabama-professor-cites-mental-defect-university-… "Neuroscience essentially turns into a bioethics class. She's a liberal from "Hahvahd" and let's you know exactly how she…

Ohm For Christmas The ohm is the unit of electrical resistance.  It is named in honor of the genius of Georg Ohm, who figured out that the flow of electricity in materials from a 'hot' source…

Science for the win! A paper claiming a viral link to puzzling Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has been withdrawn by Science.  Since publication in October, 2009 it had been met with controversy by…

NASA is featuring the first high-resolution images of asteroid Vesta as taken by the DAWN spacecraft during a low-altitude orbit. The images show a very interesting surface, battered with old and…

I was saddened today upon hearing of the death of Franco Rimondi, a colleague in the CDF experiment. Franco was a professor of physics at the university of Bologna since 1980. His research in…

Los Alamos National Laboratory's top 10 science stories of 2011 include alternative energy research, world record magnetic fields, disease tracking, the study of Mars, climate change, fuel cells,…