Two players share a deck composed of three cards: Jack, Queen, and King. The highest card wins. You each ante one. You each get a card. The third card remains unseen. There's one standard round of…

Retirement in less than three week’s time!  What shall I sing?  How about this? And now the end is nearAnd so I face the final curtain Well, that’s my second most hated song, suited either…

In science, we first verify our procedures and the process by which we got our results.  Then we validate it against reality.  For example, I wrote a code that simulated galaxies colliding.…

Cyberstalking as a way of trying to bully someone into giving them what they want on line.  A certain website was set up just to slander me by The  Organisation Intersex International…

In almost everything, size matters.  And usually, being bigger helps.   I don't know anyone who couldn't use a larger refrigerator but University of Bristol physicists have done the…

9/11 implies some sort of terror for everybody, mostly in form of boundless hypocrisy. Was it unimaginable, unthinkable? I knew 9/11 would happen since I first saw the twin towers in 1995. I was up…

The downside to PLoS One forcing out almost 8000 articles this year will be that a lot of them won't have any legitimate peer review, despite shrill objections to my noting in even the nicest…

The First Green Revolution was an effort to create dwarf wheat and rice plants that could prosper with more fertilizer. It was highly successful in India. While this approach worked in Asia and…

Medicinal plants constitute a vast, undocumented and overexploited economic resource and they are the principle health care resource for the majority of the tribes. Among these Asparagus racemosus…

Is there a pill that might inoculate us from smog? Is there a gene we can target that would make us resistant to resurgent infectious diseases? And is there a way to use genetic data to insulate new…

When nerve cells communicate with each other, they do so through electrical pulses.  Most everything in our bodies comes down to induction when you think about it.    Since the early…

Petermann Ice Island - Now There Are twoPetermann Ice Island (2010) has now broken into two parts.   The smaller island is about 80 km2.  It is the thinner of the two and is likely to…

In Australia this week a crucial battle begins to combat every Australian farmer’s nightmare, the worst locust plague in 40 years. There is a $100 million national campaign in Australia to prevent a…

Euphorbia tirucalli L. (Family, Euphorbiacae) a succulent cactus-like plant growing to a height of about 10 m, was introduced from Africa as a garden plant. E. tirucalli Grows in arid zones as well…

Large interest groups get medicinal plants collected from the fields and thus they endanger the plant species in natural conditions and many medicinal plants have come in the category of endangered…

It’s long been a peeve of mine that some computer programs are programmed to try to sound friendly, cheerful, or just colloquial. It seems out of place to me, forced, overly artificial. I don’t mean…

Fish in a wind tunnel?   How else will you learn how they fly? It turns out flying fish can remain airborne for over 40 seconds and cover distances of up to a quarter mile hitting a top speed up…

22 scientists have published a study they say provides clear evidence about the effectiveness of Non-pharmacological Therapies in Alzheimer's disease and are calling on governments to make these…

What happens to the laws of physics if a fundamental constant turns out to be not a constant after all?   The 'magic number' known as the fine-structure constant, called 'alpha' by physicists,…

A federal appeals court ruled today that federal financing of embryonic stem cell research could continue while the court considers a judge's order last month that banned the government from…