Almost 30 years ago philosopher James Flynn discovered that IQ scores were increasing in every industrialized country around the globe. But before we pat ourselves on back, Bronson and Merryman warn…

What does the ionosphere sound like?  Well, our Project Calliope sonification will map the ionosphere's properties to a musical range.  What you'll hear is the volume and changes of…

When I was studying, a long, long time ago I encountered the problem that I was busy with subjects that most of my friends did not understand. Still I considered those subjects so interesting that I…

Werner Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle'(1927) is a fundamental concept in quantum physics, basically saying you can be increasingly accurate in position or momentum (mass X velocity), but not…

Optics normally treats the behaviour of packages of light waves (photons). However, when passing through appropriately shaped fields, particles may behave similar as photons. A beam of electrons that…

While everybody is busy discussing the latest Tevatron results on the Higgs boson searches -is that the light-mass excess the internet was abuzz, is it consistent with a signal as we expected it, how…

via It Takes 30, from the Department of Systems Biology @ Harvard Medical School As so often with mathematical treatments of complex problems, one of the key benefits of creating the model is that it…

via It Takes 30, from the Department of Systems Biology @ Harvard Medical School As so often with mathematical treatments of complex problems, one of the key benefits of creating the model is that it…

This story appeared on Science Daily, based on a press release from CNRS in France: Segmentation Is the Secret Behind the Extraordinary Diversification of Animals ScienceDaily (July 27, 2010) —…

Early last month, Michael White’s Adaptive Complexity on Science 2.0 had a useful critique of the citizen scientist. It is very important to consider these things, and the future of citizen…

Here's how I roll: my wife loves three-dollar bagels from the Sunday farmers' market. And so she says, "let's get a loaf of bread, some flowers, and a flat of strawberries!" When we roll home with…

Dynamic quantum logic Abstract Quantum logic has the structure of an orthomodular lattice. This defines a static skeleton. There is nothing in QL that restricts dynamics. There is also nothing that…

New Scientist reports on experiments that give search engines metadata about the person searching, with the hope of increasing the relevance of search results. It seems that some of it’s promising,…

Arctic Ice July - Update #5 The sharp decline in ice extent slowed somewhat during July.  Some people are claiming this as a sign of recovery. If you are going downhill at full throttle and you…

Part of the enjoyment in birding includes directly experiencing nature, taking your time, breathing, listening, watching each rustle in the trees, and listening some more. Part of the limitations,…

Plastiki  is made out of – you guessed it – plastic. Plastiki, the plastic bottle version of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki  , was carried from San Francisco to Sydney on a conveyor belt....and…

The concept of "primitive" is one that is very often misunderstood. Properly defined, "primitive" means "more like a particular ancestor", refers only to individual characteristics (not whole species…

As I have explained in various blog posts and in this paper, it is a fallacy to assume that any one character found in a so-called "primitive" species alive today was also found in the ancestral…

John Mattick, University of Queensland, is one of the leading proponents of the idea that much -- perhaps most -- of the human genome is functional. He has been making claims along these lines for at…

For the past year, I have been working with several colleagues to completely redesign our first year biology program at the University of Guelph. One of the aspects of the new "Discovering…