Last week I told you how to get your degree.  Now it's time to look at the life of a working scientist.  It's time for me to answer oft-asked questions like: What is a scientist's regular…

Why are we forked creatures instead of tumbling beach balls of undifferentiated cells? An embryo begins by dividing into identical cells, but within hours these cells begin to make genetic…

I am acutely aware of my advantages as a tall, white, semi-able-bodied Westerner with middle class background in a northern European culture. I had and still have it much easier than most people…

Science programs get regular criticism here for being overhyped and then delayed with budget overruns as a sweetener. But the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider are not only.…

Science programs get regular criticism here for being overhyped and then delayed with budget overruns as a sweetener. But the James Webb Space Telescope and the Large Hadron Collider are not only.…

Want to know if you can be the king of Donkey Kong?    A group of researchers say they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well you will do on a complex task like a strategic…

Forget spray-on tans, new research in Evolution and Human Behaviour says eating carrots and tomatoes gives you a more healthy tan than even the sun.Dr Ian Stephen, from the School of Psychology,…

Stereotypes exist for a reason.  They give us a comfortable idea of what we are dealing with, based on experience or at least perception.   Gender stereotypes suggest that men are…

When physicists working in a collaboration want to publish the observation of a new effect in the data, they need to first convince their peer that what they are observing is real, and not the…

When I was a younger guy, I read my astrology sign 'predictions' in the newspaper.  It was in the comics section, so clearly no one took it too seriously.  But astrology had at least a…

Little green men. Can they exist? Do they exist? And what do they look like? Published this week in Philosophical Transactions A is an extravaganza of papers about extraterrestrial life, and what we…

The American Diabetes Association estimates that nearly 24 million children and adults in the U.S. have diabetes. Type 2 diabetes is the most common form of the disease and accounts for about 90 to…

 It is accepted wisdom that an increasing marginal rate on income taxes serve to balance inequality in our society, while also funding the massive entitlement programs created at the federal and…

I'm not sure how many of you out there have Facebook - quite a few, I assume, given their huge participation numbers - but on a frequent basis they introduce changes designed to help us.   …

Terminalia arjuna (Roxb.) Wight & Arn.= T. cuneata Roth Combretaceae Bark. A large, evergreen tree, common in most parts of India. . It is rare in the Karnatic, but is fairly plentiful…

Saraca asoca (Roxb.) De Wilde syn. S. indica auct. non Linn. Caesalpiniaceae (Fabaceae) Bark. Distribution Area It occurs almost throughout India up to an altitude of 750 m. in the central and…

So I guess squid are doing really well this year. It's estimated that around-the-world squid in mass outweighs the human population. . . . Along the coast of California, the squid season has been…

Observations done at the W. M. Keck Observatory on Hawaii's Mauna Kea have found 16 close-knit pairs of supermassive black holes in merging galaxies. These black-hole pairs, also called binaries, are…

Sociologists love when people get shot; it gives them a chance to make correlation/causation arrows go in all kinds of crazy directions. So when people jumped on the gun rage by Jared Loughner…

When I was a lad, the science fair was a dozen schools.   The Google Science Fair has students from around the world, which means I would be unlikely to spend 3 minutes looking at the problem,…