WASP-12b is the hottest known planet in the Milky Way galaxy, and it may also be the shortest-lived. The planet is being eaten by its parent star, according to observations made by a new instrument…

Scientists have developed the first cell controlled by a synthetic genome which may allow them to probe the basic machinery of life and engineer bacteria specially designed to solve environmental or…

Albert Einstein said scientists would never be able to observe the instantaneous velocity of tiny particles as they randomly shake and shimmy, so called Brownian motion, but physicist at the…

The Nation magazine is in a pickle.  It spends $1 million more than it makes and Chris Hayes, The Nation's Washington editor, was asked to send out an email to readers to bridge the gap.…

Birds wouldn't be happy in a Trader Joe's, it seems.   Stuffed with aisles full of organically grown, gluten-free, range fed deliciousness, birds would see through expensive marketing and know…

It's been several months since Michael White invited me to blog here at Scientific Blogging.  I think the immediate occasion for his invitation was a conversation we had about Douglas Hofstadter…

Scum Causes Outrage In U.K. A recent case in a British Magistrates Court has caused outrage in more ways than one. Two 16-year-old boys from Darwen had performed an act of wanton vandalism and…

If you thought their publications were freaky get a load of how they look after a ton of plastic surgery. You may remember them from the Bogdanov affair many years ago.  They…

Finally, the Bose-Einstein Correlations article by CMS to which I have personally contributed during the last few months is now an arxiv entry, and has been sent to Physical Review Letters. This is a…

My recent article The Origins of Virtue sparked a discussion in which Josh Witten has assumed that Gerhard Adam and I are confused as to the subject of genic selection. The confusion lies entirely…

Heavy alcohol consumption carries a lot of significant health risks, and researchers from the University of Texas say men who drink too much face a higher risk of pancreatic cancer. In a study…

Data from the ESA's Envisat radar satellite shows that the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill has entered the Loop Current, a powerful conveyor belt that flows clockwise around the Gulf of Mexico towards…

The global climate trend since Nov. 16, 1978 is +0.14 C per decade, according to scientists from the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The University of Alabama in Huntsville April temperatures…

Spices commonly used to season cooked ground beef may also reduce the risk of consuming compounds called heterocyclic amines (HCAs) that can cause cancer . HCAs are the carcinogenic compounds that…

The widely held notion that warming global temperatures will lead to a future intensification of malaria and an expansion of its global range is at odds with the available evidence, according to a…

In the last yen years, astronomers have discovered scads of strange exploding stars, one-offs that may point to new and unusual physics. Supernova (SN) 2005E, discovered five years ago by the…

In India mass scale cutting of trees along the roadside, increasing urbanisation, rampant destruction of trees on private land, forest land, panchayat land. has taken place. Cutting trees and selling…

This month a long time friend graduated with a PhD in science after 7 years of rather difficult studies beyond his master's degree. It was a big relief to him ending a period of weekend laboratories…

On this very date, 18th of May, 30 years ago, Mount St. Helens reawakened with a devastating eruption. If it weren't for the magnificent images taken by the USGS I would have had a hard time …

Just a quick update for my fab fans out there.  And by 'fab' I mean 'PCB fabricators'.  For the Calliope satellite, I need 8 printed circuit boards (PCBs) fabricated for the solar cells.…