Measuring 'intelligence' is a much art as science.   Even using the word intelligence sends people down a philosophical rabbit hole, disagreeing about what the word means. So can there be a '…

If wearing 3-D glasses makes you feel like we haven't progressed much since the 1950s, you are not alone.   Fortunately, MIT is in the 1970s - namely, the movie "Star Wars" from 1977, using a…

Eclipta grows abundantly in the tropics and is used with much success in Ayurvedic medicine. In India the juice of the leaves is used in the treatment of liver cirrhosis, hepatitis and infective…

In the quarterly lamentation about the need for science outreach in the U.S., what often gets lost is that not everyone will be good at science.   Lack of science knowledge is regarded as some…

In optimization problems, we often encounter second-order equations in which we need to solve for unknowns in order to determine suitable values that are economical for designs as in engineering, and…

Can olive oil prevent mental illness? A new study says the ingestion of trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of suffering depression and that olive oil protects against this mental…

Astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope believe they have found the most distant object ever seen in the universe, 13.2 billion light years away, some 3% of the age of universe, making it roughly…

This morning, as I walked out of home headed to work, the sky was clear and still dark. As I looked up, I immediately noticed the bright light of Venus above the houses of Venice. Have you ever…

My son just wrote an article for his 10th grade journalism class about a couple on their way to plan a Disney wedding in Orlando - their long-held dream wedding - who were hit by a truck driver that…

Has anyone else heard of a "massive 20ft. octopus" washing ashore in the Bahamas last week? I hadn't until this article, which also comments on a recent octopus stranding in Portugal (presumably the…

Erik Klemetti (of the Eruptions Blog) posted about this paper (An extraordinary episode of Yellowstone caldera uplift, 2004–2010, from GPS and InSAR observations) that has been causing a bit of a…

In a recent paper, by blah and blah, we have been asked to vote for an official definition of a galaxy. That's easy, I hear you cry: you proceed to draw me an S shaped squiggle on a piece of paper,…

This is the first posting on the Simulating Life's Origins column. Not much more to say here except to test whether this feature is working!

Ashwani Kumar1 and Sven Schubert2 Abstract Phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase (PEPcase) catalyzes the first step in the fixation of atmospheric CO2 during C4 photosynthesis. Under saline conditions,…

Frédéric Chopin, composer of "The Last Waltz" and poet of the piano, suffered from tuberculosis and regularly hallucinated. Even for those in the Romantic Revolution, like Liszt, Schumann and Victor…

In  , it was noted that happiness spikes when wealth increases but then gradually levels off as a factor.   Money does not buy happiness, it was always said, and it may be that money does…

A software that can drastically reduce CO2 emissions (and energetic costs) on computers all over the world has been developed by Portuguese scientists and is freely available to anyone interested.…

Without question, a booming worldwide population and the need to feed them have resulted in greater greenhouse gas emissions.   The goal of any civilized society has always been to make food…

Do you live for moments where "you're so absorbed by the task at hand that you lose track of time and place"?  Some call this 'the zone', psychologists call it Flow, and I'll pointlessly coin a…

The U.S. spends more per capita on health care for its citizens than any other nation and, its proponents note, the quality is higher, but where area where spending has not helped is the life…