I'm so used to calling computers, phones, and all sorts of other devices "electronics" that I tend to forget that word means something very specific. It means those toys are manipulating the flow of…

The shortlist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books was recently announced. (http://royalsociety.org/news/Royal-Society-Winton-Prize-for-Science-Book...) 6 books have been chosen for…

A new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and performed by researchers at the university of Oxford, has shown that larger groups of birds are better at solving…

The article Neutrinos CAN go Faster than Light has triggered large interest and is at present widely discussed, for example here and here on my favorite (for variety and reliability) German science…

Nature abhors a magnetic monopole, although she adores gravitational and electric monopoles. The homogeneous Maxwell equations are the ones that need no currents, known as the no magnetic monopoles…

Here is a song called "I Am A Squid" sung to the tune of Simon&Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock." It is awesome. That is all. (I got a bit bogged down over the weekend with the process of migrating my…

Max Tegmark calculated a Really Big Number1 (RBN). It represents the probability of you having an identical Alter Ego (AE) at some other place than where you are now. This distance is so vast, it is…

Women who increase consumption of caffeinated coffee have lower risk of depression, according to a report in Archives of Internal Medicine. Caffeine is the most frequently used central nervous system…

If health care is free, more people will go to the doctor and that means longer waiting for people who truly need it. An overburdened health care system would then have to hire less-qualified people…

Are students inspired to go into physics because of a television show like "The Big Bang Theory"?  Probably not, or else 60% of America would be cops and lawyers. But chemistry has a bad…

The organizers of TEDx Flanders did produce in a very timely manner very professional videos of the event, so you can follow offline the talks, including mine. However, what I said is not exactly…

One of the things I used to enjoy as a youngster was Dundee Cake, a famous traditional Scottish fruit cake with a rich flavour. Not long ago, one of the reporters on The One Show went up to Bonny…

Researchers have created a protein 'switch' that instructs cancer cells to produce their own anti-cancer medication and lab tests showed it can activate a powerful cell-killing drug when the device…

In the preface to the third edition of "Frankenstein", Mary Shelley described a villa party in which Lord Byron challenged each of them to begin a ghost story. In attendance also was Percy Shelley,…

In the preface to the third edition of "Frankenstein", Mary Shelley described a villa party in which Lord Byron challenged each of them to begin a ghost story. In attendance also was Percy Shelley,…

What We Fight For: Children Who Will Find a Place in the World Have I said I've been in the trenches now for two decades, fighting to get what my children need? I get tired of the fight, tired of the…

The least convincing argument for government-run schooling is that it provides a 'social' experience for children.  Anyone who attended school has horror stories about the behavior kids learn…

In Doomsday Comet Elenin Goes Out With A Whimper we dismissed concerns from prophets of doom that a tiny comet 22 million miles away would make any difference in our lives - but we never said…

While concern about water is always real, scare tactics like virtual water do more harm than good for rational policy making. Objective analyses show we don't have a food issue looming that science…

A new study in Nature shows that genetic parasites invaded the mammalian genome more than 100 million years ago and dramatically changed the way mammals reproduce. The molecular changes allowed…