This weekend is the first episode in a three-part "Brain Games" series on the National Geographic channel.  Since National Geographic does not have a show on the 'science' of ghost hunting, and…

Two items of tremendous note today, to wit: The 2011 International Cephalopod Awareness Days begin tomorrow! It's no accident that this date also marks TONMOCON, the fourth biannual gathering of…

A new review has found evidence that a specific gene is linked to suicidal behavior, which may be one of the many complex causes of suicide.  In the past, studies have implicated the gene for…

It took years of mismanagement, printing Monopoly money by the federal government, and runaway unemployment to get groups claiming to represent 99% of Americans protesting progressive fiscal policy…

To say that a system implements a given computation is to say that something about that system - some aspect of its behavior - is described by the computation. It is thus a way of characterizing the…

This TED video of Christoph Adami is about life, and how to look for it. He begins by talking about the apparent difficulty in defining life (click here for a post about inorganic life) (funny that…

Males of many species guard the females they have mated with, a behavior generally interpreted as a tactic to reduce the likelihood that rival males will mate with the female. This, of course, can…

Humboldt squid have been fished in Peru for years. The government has now decided to make some new regulations, with noble intent: The Government also aims to ensure the rational and sustainable use…

I'll lay out something a lot of people won't like to hear; science is about understanding the world according to natural laws and that means sometimes breaking the laws of nature.  How far that…

Americans sometimes believe things have to be expensive, from science to technology.   Yet getting adopted by the masses is the road to long-term success so a country that can make a microscope…

Americans sometimes believe things have to be expensive, from science to technology.   Yet getting adopted by the masses is the road to long-term success so a country that can make a microscope…

The world's most complex ground-based astronomy observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) on on the Chajnantor plateau in northern Chile, has officially opened for…

Pity Pittsburgh. The Steelers are not having a good year and don't even get me started on the Pirates.  I got to wear my baseball jersey out of pride rather than defiance for the first time…

Pity Pittsburgh. The Steelers are not having a good year and don't even get me started on the Pirates.  I got to wear my baseball jersey out of pride rather than defiance for the first time…

Can the Nobel prize be fair today?  I am not talking about the Peace prize, those are always something of a running joke (given the dates of the nominations, for example, and the awards, Pres.…

Can the Nobel prize be fair today?  I am not talking about the Peace prize, those are always something of a running joke (given the dates of the nominations, for example, and the awards, Pres.…

Hypothetically, if someone told you that a hypothetical question can influence your judgments or behavior, would you believe them? A study in Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes…

In which context did life arise? A problem yet unsolved. Several plausible ideas and hypotheses have been put forward: shallow seas, meteorites (see DNA, Made In Space?), and even much more extreme…

One of the issues that emerged in the discussion of whether researchers should be bloggers is the fact that it is always dangerous to wear multiple "hats", i.e. carrying multiple responsibilities…

Is your cell phone a known carcinogen? Do cell phones give you cancer?  Well, the precautionary principle contends unless you can prove cell phones can't give you cancer, then they are a concern…