A study of twin veterans has linked antidepressant use to thicker arteries and therefore possibly increased risk of heart disease and stroke, according to data presented last week at the American…

Ants and termites have a significant positive impact on crop yields in dryland agriculture, according to a paper published in Nature Communications.   The authors say it is the first study to…

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the mosquito branched off the same evolutionary tree as the house fly around 220 million years ago.   Though only a…

A combination of forest byproducts and crustacean shells may be the key to removing radioactive materials from drinking water, researchers from North Carolina State University have found.The new…

These are fulgerites, Now, without googling (!) can you tell what they are? You can find several fulgerites at Corrie on the Isle of Arran (I've heard that there were something like 5, but I could…

Many of us while growing up and listening to our bedtime stories learned to not freak out and run screaming through the streets if we thought that the “sky is falling.” As little chickens, we were…

There's a joke "what if schools got fully funded and the military had to run a bake sale to buy their next aircraft carrier?" I'm here to tell you how to run your own Bake Sale for Science! Except,…

Mitochondria are better known as the power factories of the cell but in fact they are much more interesting than that. Contrary to the old image in textbooks of round static structures, mitochondria…

Methodological Stuff: 1. Introduction 2: Patterns3: Patterns, Objectivity and Truth4: Patterns and Processes The Pattern Library: 1.       A pattern of Difference The…

Today, 12 April 2011, is “Equal-Pay Day” in the U.S. If you took the median-salary American man and the median-salary woman, and started paying them both on the first of 2010, today is the day when…

For the unpopular cutting edge, there is no book with the answers at the back. This post will need to suffice for the snarky puzzles at the end of my previous posts. I am a playful snark, not a…

A Brief History Of Climate Science "One of the lesser-known branches of climatology is historical climatology, the study of past climates from historical records of instrumental observations and…

In the comments thread of one of the posts I wrote recently, where I discussed the new tentative signal of a new jet-decaying particle discovered by the CDF collaboration in their data, a reader…

Okay, I know I won't shut up about the Argentine shortfin squid, but the situation is just so weird and complicated, and there's always new news for me to puzzle over. We make a lot of people a lot…

The US national debt is now at 100% of Gross National Product, in other words equal to what we produce in a year. Forty cents of every dollar the US government spends is borrowed. Horrible, cry the…

Once upon a time when Taj Mahal was built the west was passing through the age of renaissance This has brought in industrial revolution while agrarian societies did not advance much and remained as…

One of my dear readers out there wrote to me “I don't own a scale and I understand I have to measure this s**t out in mg.” Thus we introduce to the world today: Alpha Meme’s Divide and Join…

On March 14, I became aware of the CDC’s consideration of adding a wandering code to the ICD-9-CM in relation to autism and other developmental disabilities. ASAN, an organization created and headed…

"Sir, if you were to suddenly appear in space would you be able to talk because you already had air in your lungs?" This was a question shouted out by a year 8 pupil last week in the middle of a…

If one utilizes from the mother earth more than required for his daily life from air , water, food, fiber, shelter, recreation, and destroys mother earth for its greed to have more and more for…