Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, had a life-changing event occur almost one year ago.   On November 19th, 2009, a thousand e-mail messages and…

Lee Smolin claims that AP is bad and favors a Cosmological Natural Selection view instead (on grounds of falsifiability).  I believe this is a false dichotomy and that they are really…

I liken cognition to a hill-climbing search on the landscape of theories/models/maps that explain/predict reality.  It’s easy to get stuck on peaks of local maximality.  Injecting…

Will kids be inspired by a talking proton?   A filmmaker is betting on it.   Using as a plot an effort to destroy the Cassini-Huygens antenna, writer/director Harry Kloor in Quantum…

Will kids be inspired by a talking proton?   A filmmaker is betting on it.   Using as a plot an effort to destroy the Cassini-Huygens antenna, writer/director Harry Kloor in Quantum…

The DZERO collaboration  published a few days ago the results of their search for multi-b-quark signatures of Supersymmetry in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions at 1.96 TeV. The…

Many are troubled by dark energy. I will tell you first why dark energy is really crazy. Then I tell you that the crazy part is not actually the problem of dark energy, but one of basic general…

Proteins are the indispensable catalytic workhorses, carrying out the processes essential to life in today's sophisticated organisms, but long ago ribonucleic acid (RNA) reigned supreme. Researchers…

Want to kill about 8,000 hours of your life?   Go to data.gov and start looking around.  In the interest of transparency (well, sometimes - see Recovery Accountability and Transparency…

I am 26,160 words into my squid racing novel, about halfway through the plot, and enjoying NaNoWriMo quite thoroughly. But I just had to pop out of my month of hibernation to link a few really cool…

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth. - Flannery O'Connor Stories and Memes The…

I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth. - Flannery O'Connor Stories and Memes The…

This story about the "chubby" galaxy cluster Abell 1689 and dark matter made me laugh out loud. Here's the title: Chubby Galaxy Cluster Suggests Dark Energy Was Stronger Long Ago Then, later on in…

Plants often get shorted on attention among biologists.  Don't get me wrong -- there is a huge scientific community of plant biologists, field botanists, and agronomists out there, and plenty of…

Equations relating speed and mass go back to Newton and beyond. But what about relating speed and MESS? Simply, how fast should you expect a clean kids' room to get messy? Friends Jonathan Liu and…

'Agouti' is a family of genes previously identified in humans and the first two members are responsible for skin and hair color. Identified by Vanderbilt scientists, AgRP2 the newest member of…

Once I heard a remark from a would be father in most prosperous nation in the eastern hemisphere a leader in car industry, that "We don’t see smile on face of our children though they have…

Gad Saad, who likes to link evolution to consumption and marketing phenomena, says the length between the second and fourth finger is an indicator of high levels of prenatal testosterone and…

Metabolism = anabolism-catabolism In plant science metabolism is sum total of anabolic processes i.e. photosynthesis which make complex substances from simple molecules to catabolism i.e. respiration…

At The Hazard Of His EarsWhat has the hazard of a person's ears to do with science history? The history of Arctic science, exploration and discovery is sprinkled with many as yet unsolved mysteries,…