Arctic Ice July 2010 - Update #2 Something strange is going on.  Arctic watcher blogs are abuzz with talk about the behaviour of graphics which are supposed to show ice extent, area or volume.…

Funny. While dozens of online media are abuzz with the (non)-news, and while Fermilab Today tweets that there is no Higgs in store for us and a blogger in search of fame is just spreading unconfirmed…

How high is space, how far can you fall with a parachute, where is the Project Calliope satellite going to be, and where does the hard radiation from the sun get nasty?  Gathered for the first…

The CDF experiment has just released their new average of top quark mass measurements, obtained with analyses that use up to 5.6 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions provided by the 2…

Nobel laureate J. W. Szostak delivered an interesting lecture on his experiments relating to the origins of life. His research group has set itself the goal of just getting some kind of protocell…

Think a a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimeter is unimportant?  Think again.    At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers…

Even if you know an unexpected event is likely to occur, you are no better, and may be even worse, than those who aren't expecting anything unexpected at all.   Did you expect that confusing…

"Eighty percent of success is showing up" W.Allen

Ethnobotany is usually defined as anthropological approach to botany. There are several methods of ethnobotanical research and those relevant to medicinal plants are archaeological search in…

The Falkland Islands' own Sasha Arkhipkin (whom I missed meeting on his last trip to California--sorrow!) has discovered that males of a particular deep-sea squid species have penises as long as…

The Rise Of The Time Machines Do you own a time machine?  The chances are that if you are reading this, then you own a time machine.  They are fairly cheap nowadays.  Like so many…

You may have noticed that a lot of posts about neuroscience research on scientificblogging.com describe new discoveries about the synapse.  If you are not a neuroscientists you might wonder why…

I just noticed a study from a few months back that correlated male shopping habits to ... evolution.   Yes, the necessary survival skills that women used for foraging and men used to hunt…

The ChatterBox Index Index to articles published in the ChatterBox. The ArcticGlaciersThe AntarcticArticles about iceArctic Ice May 2010Arctic Ice May 2010 - UpdateArctic Ice June 2010 Arctic Ice…

In the wake of the PepsiGate scandal at Scienceblogs.com, which apparently everyone except bloggers there saw coming (1), one person comes up with the obvious 'money corrupts all' argument, but is…

Think you're rational? Think again. Here's but one example, gentle reader, of your brain unbound by reason. Blue Devil basketball tickets are a hot commodity: there are far more fans than seats. And…

Sometimes my sympathy for science magazines (in print and online), which try to keep intelligent readers informed on the progress in basic science, gets dampened by observing how they end up…

Recently I had a chance to visit the grave of my departed Professor Dr Karl-Hermann Neumann with his son Mr Rolf Neumann in Giessen Germany. Professor Dr Neumann worked with Professor F. C. Steward…

The black hole at the edge of galaxy NGC 7793, twelve million light years from Earth, has been found to be doing something rare - emitting powerful jets of particles of a total length of 1,000 light…

Future technology such as quantum cryptography and computation, or perhaps even larger scale teleportation, requires a deeper understanding of the phenomenon known as "entanglement", the quantum non…