The Symphony of Science is a project inspired by the work of Carl Sagan and has become well-known for producing short videos setting to music the wise words of scientists. The above video is the 4th…

I first spotted this as a small advert on Nature. "Help Reduce the Placebo Effect in Clinical Drug Trials" I smiled cynically and just had to check it out - and I was right! "Placebo responses in as…

I recently wrote about research on people's beliefs using fMRI technology to see how different parts of the brain were activated. Near the end of their paper, the researchers commented that such…

A Mailman School of Public Health study examining the effects of institutional discrimination on the psychiatric health of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) individuals found an increase in psychiatric…

A new study in Environmental Science and Technology reports that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years, despite more stringent rules on the use…

A low-cost water purification technique that uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, according to a paper published…

Scientists writing this week in Geophysical Research Letters say they have pinpointed six spots on the remote Pacific Antarctic Ridge, 1,000 miles from the west coast of Antarctica, where they think…

Just as they would in face-to-face dating, people who lie about themselves on internet dating services probably are people-pleasers who want to present themselves in the most favorable light to get…

A newly discovered species that shared many characteristics with dinosaurs but fell just outside of the dinosaur family lived 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinosaurs. Researchers…

Astronomers have discovered a star that may have been among the second generation of stars to form after the Big Bang. Located in the dwarf galaxy Sculptor some 290,000 light-years away, S1020549…

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Headlines The problem with attracting readers to scientificblogging.com with attention-grabbing headlines is that some people don't realise that perhaps only…

NASA creates dramatic artistic renderings of upcoming launches, in full color animation, often scaled for the IMAX screen.  They're great eye candy, but they are also informative, and have…

This is an English translation of a potpourri of a number of recent papers and reports by one of the most interesting modern Russian journalists, Julia Latynina. I have just added a number of related…

 Can one make plastic from glucose? When I was young, there appeared on the shelf foods such as kippers that were boil-in-the-bag.  I then thought, “is the next stage to eat the bag as well…

This New Scientist article reminds me of a project I worked on about ten years ago. The article talks about analyzing mobile-phone location data to establish patterns of how the users move around.…

Why Anchors Don't Work From earliest times to today, from boat safety pamphlet to engineering treatise on marine architecture: all are agreed that the anchor does the work of keeping a boat or ship…

A new report released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project suggests that news has evolved from a consumable product to a participatory experience. Technology has not only changed how, where…

Richard Dawkins should write a paper entitled "How not to run a Web 2.0 website." Perhaps apt that he is now the former Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, as he has shown…

It may seem safe to assume that happy people are trusting people, but a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that, in some instances, people may actually be less…

New policies that eliminate sugary beverages and junk foods from schools may help slow childhood obesity, but the effects of such policies are unclear, according to a study in Health Affairs that…