It's a common phrase; money can't buy happiness.   But a worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that included questions about happiness and income revealed that life…

Politicians and education activists believe computer access is creating a generation of "have not" students that will be unable to compete in a digital world.  Their very expensive solution is…

Biotechnology in the last decade has been continually driven forward by the relentless economical desires of the ever-growing biopharmaceutical industry, creating innovative technologies that have…

I have a theory (not like a science theory… more like a personal theory) about patriarchies (male led cultures) – they don’t exist. I suppose, on the face of it, many human cultures appear to be…

Alien Invasion and Evolutionary Succession The possibility of human extinction in End of the World sci-fi is sometimes paired with a consideration of our next evolutionary step - a concept that is…

Through a casual browsing of the Arxiv's hep-ph section, I got to read the following title: "CAMORRA: A C++ Library for Recursive Computation of Particle Scattering Amplitudes" Authors are R.Kleiss…

True or false: The cinema was invented in the late 19th century. It's only true if you consider the cinema to be artificial projection.   It turns out that the original idea behind the cinematic…

Satellites are being used to look at practically everything you can think of. Well, maybe not. But if you take a single subject like ice, it is amazing how many ways you can look at it with a…

If you've watched any World Cup games so far (and a record 15 million in the US watched Saturday's match versus Ghana, so statistically, ummm, 50,000 people in our audience have watched at least one)…

While I'm busy building an instrument to convert the ionosphere to music, this NASA group has sonified the Sun.  Astronomers at Univ. of Sheffield "found that huge magnetic loops that have been…

Here’s an amusing little device that Eric Taub writes about in the New York Times: All of this is why a new product from Zomm may wind up hitting a nerve. A small electronic disc that fits on a key…

Arctic Ice July 2010 In about a week the National Snow and Ice Data Center - NSIDC - will be publishing its analysis of June's sea ice.  I expect them to report another record loss of sea ice.…

A survey taken by the Science and Technology Facilities Council says their funded PhD students have high employment rates and above average salaries. Since 2007, STFC has funded over 250 new…

Proteins are the workhorses of our existence.   These "helmsmen of the cell" are composed of amino acids, whose sequence is already defined by the heritable information in every living being and…

ESA and friends are celebrating the success of the Living Planet program in Bergen Norway this week. It cannot be described as anything but a success actually, with a number of new advanced and…

Altitude training is a popular training method expected to improve the physical performance of athletes …and horses!   Recently, several national football teams spent some time at altitude on…

X-ray in characterization techniques 1. X-ray      X-ray is a form of electromagnetic wave with wavelength in the range of 10 to 0.01 nm and energies in the range of 120 eV to 120…

Social networks are a great help for this kind of news: a new paper by a FB friend does not go unnoticed (at least by me) as it once would. I learned today that Garrett Lisi (picture below), the…

23andMe, Inc., a direct-to-consumer personal genetics company, is arguably the most well-funded and therefore highest profile group out there (being married to a Google co-founder will do that) and…

Scientific Consensus Some scientific ideas are so easily grasped that they are easily explained to the general public.  Other ideas can only be fully understood after a minimum level of training…