In early July, Karolinska University Hospital issued a press release about a successful trachea transplant using synthetic tissue.  It got mainstream media coverage and it was interesting, I…

Writing in USA Today, microbiologist Dr. Alex Berezow makes a statement sure to leave the militant left wing who believe all Republicans are mentally Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann sputtering.…

Octopoteuthis is a curious animal. As the name suggests, it's a squid that looks like an octopus. Babies have eight arms and two tentacles, but they lose the tentacles as they grow up--becoming the…

Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are hoping the Higgs boson is found at the LHC for a big reason - they think it can explain universal expansion and even reveal the…

A study out tomorrow in Nature by researchers from the Institute of Healthy Ageing at the University College of London and colleagues is questioning the anti-aging effects of sirtuin – which is…

To religious fundamentalists, atheists in science are engaged in an insidious campaign to undercut morality and replace it with God-less relativism and moral equivalence.  To militant atheists,…

Social projection, where we believe that others agree with us, helps us validate our beliefs. Psychologists say that we tend to believe people who are similar to us in an important way, religion…

Sonification-- like our Project Calliope satellite will do-- is taking the measurements of something and converting it to sound so you can hear the patterns and rhythms in an intuitive manner, rather…

A new plant species is appropriately named Spigelia genuflexa because after fruits are formed, the fruiting branches 'bend down' and deposit  the capsules with seeds on the ground and sometimes…

Edward Calabrese, an environmental toxicologist at University of Massachusetts Amherst,  says he has evidence that oNobel Prize winner Hermann Muller knowingly lied when he claimed in 1946 that…

We've often defended Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.  Publishing 50 years before Darwin, he can be forgiven for not having 'the greatest idea anyone ever had' and in the last few years,  geneticists…

Cancer patients quickly find themselves learning a new language and, keen to trust in science and medicine, they sometimes don't take time to fully understand their treatment options, and the risks…

The Times Atlas of the World, published by HarperCollins, exaggerated the rate of Greenland's ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists are saying. It said that Greenland lost 15…

The Times Atlas of the World, published by HarperCollins, exaggerated the rate of Greenland's ice loss in its thirteenth edition last week, scientists are saying. It said that Greenland lost 15…

We like to think some things are constant, like temperature, and they are as long as everyone agrees.  That does not mean they are accurate.  The metric system is a famous example of a…

Devices that monitor the human body's processes are being researched and tested for biological sensing or for prosthetics but materials scientists at the University of Washington have taken that a…

People may complain about tax breaks for successful energy companies but the one thing worse is spending real money on lousy ones.   Yet it has happened because advocacy is taking precedence…

Retroviral proteases are a class of enzymes that play an important role in the maturation and proliferation of the AIDS virus. As such, this class of enzymes is a subject of intense research. The…

A well-known HEP rule says that yesterday's searched new processes will be tomorrow's annoying irreducible backgrounds; but since I am an optimist, I always see the glass half-full and feel compelled…

Last time I blogged, I discussed entropic gravity and ended with the prediction that we will witness some more opposing and supportive views on entropic gravity before the dust will settle on the…