As if taken by a spell, my joking claim to be on strike in the last post grew to become one of the longest streaks of absence from blogging of the last few months, for a series of irrelevant reasons…

It's conventional thinking that the recent years, in which affective mental illnesses such as depression have been routinely considered alongside non-mental ("physiological") illness, instead of as a…

If you are unsure what a buzzword is, please first read:The Buzzword Blog #2 : What is a Buzzword? The Buzzword Blog #6 : CustomerThe word 'customer' comes via old French from the Latin consuetudinem…

The annual AAAS conference is being held next month in San Diego and I went last year (here and here and here) , despite it being a Chicago February, but most of you did not, thus the reason for the…

Connecting my earlier post on PhD job realities and Melissa's blog post on Entitlement Culture is today's Ph.D comic (by Jorge Cham): Alex, the Daytime Astronomer Tues and Fri here, via RSS feed, and…

The more hands of online poker a player wins, the more money that person is likely to lose, concludes a study conducted by a Cornell sociology doctoral student. The likely reason being that multiple…

Drinking green tea could modulate the effects of smoking on lung cancer, suggests a hospital-based, randomized study presented at the AACR-IASLC Joint Conference on Molecular Origins of Lung Cancer.…

Blocking the function of an enzyme called cPLA2 with a specific kind of vitamin E can prevent nerve cells from dying after a stroke, new research published in the Journal of Neurochemistry suggests.…

No matter what you do for a living, you're likely to consistently feel better mentally and physically on the weekend, according to a study of daily mood variation in employed adults. Dubbed the…

While exerting willpower is an important part of losing weight, new evidence suggests that their may be more to successful dieting than simply trying to eat less. Cognitive scientists from Indiana…

Policy makers and lobbyists who want to enact a carbon tax would do well to choose their words carefully, say Columbia University Psychologists. In a new study in Psychological Science, the research…

 Giving up caffeine does not relieve tinnitus and acute caffeine withdrawal may actually add to the problem, according to a new study published in the International Journal of Audiology. …

Parents are acutely aware of the influence that friends exert over their children's behavior -- how they dress, how they wear their hair, whether they drink or smoke. And now a new laboratory-based…

Brad DeLong picks up on some nonsense in Businessweek: Kevin "Dow 36000" Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute calls for the USAF to bomb both France and Switzerland, hoping to get the…

Global Cooling: A Good Story, If Only It Were True. According to Daily Mail reports of 10th and 11th January 2010, we are now entering a phase of global cooling.  However, there is an old saying…

Why should we bother building mathematical models of biological systems? Scientists from other fields might wonder why one would as such a question - physicists, climate scientists, economists,…

Richard Fortey reviews The Genesis Enigma in The Times Literary Supplement: The reader will search in vain for a reference to Jean-André de Luc (1727–1817) in this eccentric book by Andrew Parker.…

Science is inextricably interwoven with cosmology, with theology, with epistemology, with ethics, politics, and psychology, all of them crucial to exploration into the human condition. A cosmology…

Scorpion venom is composed of a complex cocktail of poisonous peptides that immobilize animal prey on the spot. Some of the toxins in this cocktail, however, are only harmful to insects, which has…

While genetics play a key role in children's initial reading skills, a new study of twins is the first to demonstrate that environment plays an important role in reading growth over time. The results…