Women often gain weight as they age and a new study in Cell Metabolism says the sex hormone estrogen, and estrogen receptor-α (ERα) has an important yet under-appreciated role in those bigger…

Musical cartoons can boost verbal intelligence?  We'll hiatus Science 2.0 and start watching "Phineas&Ferb" right now. Researchers writing in Psychological Science say pre-schoolers…

Tomorrow I will fly to Frascati, where are the headquarters of INFN, the italian institute for nuclear physics. I will attend to an event there, called "Incontri di Fisica" (Physics meetings), where…

A daily supplement to reduce diabetes?   Maybe. Researchers writing in Cell Metabolism show they have have restored normal blood sugar metabolism in diabetic mice using, nicotinamide…

This year’s Nobel Prize in physics goes to Saul Perlmutter, who shares it with Adam Riess and Brian P. Schmidt, all having been vital in the discovery of that the universe’s expansion is speeding up;…

Koalas have a reputation of being lazy animals (see figure 1). Of course, sleeping about 19 hours a day, and spending 3 out of the 5 remaining hours eating, only adds to their ‘street rep’. But even…

RETRACTION: I have decided to retract three blogs (Deriving … 4/5, 5/5, 6/5+1). I was unable to figure out a reasonable statement concerning gauge symmetry. When the blogs were initially written, I…

Hard Times For Unscientific Blogging Pseudo-skeptic claims of Arctic ice recovery have been followed by further losses in the real world.  Evidence of global warming is accumulating to such an…

October's Circus of the Spineless is up at Wanderin' Weeta's blog! Go read the horrific tale of the emerald cockroach wasp, admire the metallic teeth of the chiton, and much much more! Of course,…

We've all read about efforts to provide amputees with robotic limbs and we know that  deep brain stimulation can relieve a range of Parkinson and OCD symptoms - a Tel Aviv University researcher…

Relativity is by itself a very cross-disciplinary subject. Not only from the point view of Physics, Mathematics, Astrophysics, Philosophy... but also from that of Ethics, History and other Social…

In the 1990s, under the guise of wage protectionism, the Clinton administration got legislation passed that made it far more difficult for immigrants to get a work visa.  The concern was that a…

X-ray is a form of electromagnetic wave with wavelength in range of 0.01~10 nm and energies in range of 0.12~120 keV, almost the same range for the core-level electron binding energy (0.1~100 keV).[1…

The reportedly faster than light neutrinos at OPERA may be a systematic error, but if these and those data of other neutrino experiments are correct, they hint at a phenomenon that propagates with…

Researchers recently monitored the behavior of thousands of people as they sang along to more than a thousand tunes and say they have uncovered the common traits in songs that are most 'catchy'. That…

Being in media, it's easy to get inundated with convincing opposing data and so it's easy to understand why it can be confusing for the public who don't have hours each day to sift through it all.…

To PhD or not to PhD? It seem this is a question many students face. Perhaps the results of the first Eurodoc Survey can help some of them with their decision. Eurodoc, or the European Council of…

Scientists want more children.  Seriously, that's not my headline, that's the conclusion reached by Ecklund and Lincoln back in August in the online PLos ONE journal.  Put simply, science…

People want to live in important times and no one has more acolytes than Steve Jobs - he can do no wrong.  When he was caught illegally giving himself stock options, which other CEOs went to…

People want to live in important times and no one has more acolytes than Steve Jobs - he can do no wrong.  When he was caught illegally giving himself stock options, which other CEOs went to…