Harvard Magazine excerpts Louis Menand on "Professionalization in the academy. If you're thinking of going to graduate school, you need to read this. This is the premise behind academic scholarship:…

Many of you have probably heard about the Governator’s playing with steganography — specifically, an acrostic: Of course, everyone’s buzzing about whether it could possibly have been accidental, as…

Way back when, there was an excellent film loop called "Powers of 10".  Created by Charles and Ray Eames, it can now be found at the conveniently-named powersof10.com website.  The video is…

 Has evolution selected the best possible features for the species existing nowadays, or has it  done a second-hand job with whatever was available? We all have in mind that evolution from…

A new species of dinosaur, an ankylosaur, that lived 112 million years ago during the early Cretaceous of central Montana has been described by paleontologists writing in the Canadian Journal of…

Two letters to Nature today burst into data about a gamma-ray burst, GRB 090423. The first is A -ray burst at a redshift of z  8.2 by N. R. Tanvir et al. The second is GRB…

"Climate forcing due to aerosol changes is a wild card," concluded James Hansen, Makiko Sato, Reto Ruedy, Andrew Lacis, and Valdar Oinas in Global warming in the twenty-first century: An…

I need to call my broker and get in on some Arm&Hammer stock, because, according to Steve Levitt, we're going to need a lot of base: Of course, ocean acidification is an import issue. Now, there…

Halloween is on the horizon, and even the most analytical-minded among us can find ourselves getting pulled into stories of unexplained spooky phenomena and paranormal activity. Science has so far…

You've never seen anything like these photos. No one has. The captivating pictures show adult sperm whales feasting on a rare* giant squid. The coolest part of this story is not that someone saw…

Get your submissions in for a special, 150th Origin of Species anniversary edition of the Carnival of Evolution, going online November first. I've already received a whole slew of outstanding…

LAST THOUGHTS OF JESUS Ayad Gharbawi October 28 2009 - Damascus What were the last thoughts of Jesus Christ as he was crucified? Did he not doubt God when he uttered those famous words: “My God! My…

Jatropha curcas has now being extensively grown in India under the Department of Biotechnology supported micro mission projects with an object to identify, characterize and multiply high yielding…

Awesome. H/t to The Daily What and the huz.

Hormone replacement therapy (HRT) had been used to treat menopausal estrogen deficiency  for decades but the 2002 publication of a major study, the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), indicated…

An explosion detected on April 23 by NASA's Swift satellite was more than 13 billion light-years from Earth, representing an event that occurred 630 million years after the Big Bang, when the…

Researchers say they have discovered how to transform human embryonic stem cells into germ cells, the embryonic cells that ultimately give rise to sperm and eggs, an advance that will allow…

With all of the concern/hype/hysteria over vaccines for H1N1 influenza, a team of Alabama researchers say they may have found a way to protect lungs from all strains of the flu—antioxidants. In an…

Asimo:The Most Advanced Scientific Robot!!!Lets watch a video!! Hey, but did you know that Asimo can sometimes can't climb up the stairs?Watch this video!!!!

You've heard of the Discovery Channel - if you want to learn about sharks, they're the place to go.   Heck, they even whacked me this summer as part of their promotional campaign. Unfortunately,…