The Wall Street Journal has a piece on Tinkering Makes a Comeback Amid Crisis. They are talking about what is referred to by varied terms such as Do-It-Yourself (DIY), the Make movement, and simply…

ESA’s comet chaser Rosetta has swung by Earth for the third and final time, skimming past our planet to pick up a gravitational boost for an epic journey to rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov…

Mice who had the PKCI/HINT1 gene removed had an anti-depressant-like and anxiolytic-like effect, say esearchers writing in BMC Neuroscience who applied a battery of behavioral tests to the PKCI/HINT1…

Many a parent has been driven to the point of madness by successive "why?" questions from preschoolers, but it's a good sign that they ask and they do better if they get a detailed explanation than…

As a mouse vet, my job is to suggest refinements to make cancer studies as easy as possible on the mice. Cancer researchers grow tumor cells for study. They buy them from a catalog, or they get…

The Monterey Herald hit close to home today with Turning the tables on giant, predatory squid: These fascinatingly grotesque creatures can reach 7 feet in length and weigh in excess of 100 pounds,…

Our satellite hits the road-- even before it gets built!  I will be presenting a short talk on "Project Calliope: Science and Social Media" at the winter AAS meeting in Washington DC on January…

Today I got access to a collection of very cool pictures of the CMS detector, one of the two experiments designed and built to study proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at…

PARCELATORIES OF SECOND ORDER don't exist in fact. What exists are counting processes, a human ability that consist in to quantify, measure, compare and enumerate objects. Any object! Because they…

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP), recently accepted a six-figure grant from the Coca-Cola Corporation to "educate consumers about the role their products can play in a healthy, active…

Satellite observations and a state-of-the art regional atmospheric model have independently confirmed that the Greenland ice sheet is loosing mass at an accelerating rate, according to a new study…

Contrary to conservative wisdom, exercising up to the end of pregnancy has no harmful effect on the health of the mother or child, and may even be beneficial for both, indicates a study published in…

A team of researchers said this week that they may have identified the genes responsible for bipolar disorder in children. Their study, published in BMC Psychiatry, implicates malfunctioning…

The controversy surrounding prescription drug advertising is immense. Advocates for prescription drug direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) claim that it educates consumers, improves the quality of…

Enhancing the effects of dopamine influences how people make life choices by affecting expectations of pleasure, according to new research from the UCL Institute of Neurology.  Published today…

Cooperation is seen in every corner of life from microbes to humans, many times with no obvious advantages to those that provide it at high costs. Given the existence of “freeloading cheaters” ready…

Today's scapegoat for my rant about the place of cephalopods in society is, as I predicted, Squidward Quincy Tentacles, of Spongebob Squarepants fame: What IS that? Six appendages, a misplaced mouth…

(Essay 2 in Evolution&Morality Series) The atheistic blowback to the overbearing religiosity of the Bush era has been something of a boon for the publishing industry. In an uncertain and…

(Essay 1 in Series Evolution&Morality ) Can you believe it? It has been a year since a majority of Americans voted for and elected Barak Obama as president, shattering once and for all the…

This blog is my way of looking at moral values from an evolutionary perspective. If we agree that evolution explains human behavior, then it must be true of moral behavior as well. Today I will…