Today begins the Third Annual International Cephalopod Awareness Days! Naturally, since it is the eighth of the month, we are honoring octopods today. This provides the perfect opening for my…

Perhaps the more wrenching by-product of the scientific revolution has been to render untenable many of our most cherished and most comforting beliefs. The tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our own…

Calcium is crucial for heart regeneration by cardiac stem cells following cardiovascular problems say scientists in an article to be published in the journal Circulation Research this 9th of October.…

I now own half a satellite... and in a way, you do to.  The Scientific Blogging "Project Calliope" satellite order has been placed!  Thanks to Hank's SB contribution, we have the 'science'…

It's been all over the news for so long and so hyped that people expect it to be 1918-1919 all over again.  Well I reckon that I have that pandemic flu.  Let me tell you all you need to…

Suppose that when you started your car today, it displayed a question on the dashboard: “Should I advance the timing by 4 degrees?” The car wouldn’t go until you responded. What would you think?…

Archaeopteryx (Urvogel ) is the most primitive bird yet discovered.   Found in the 1860's, it has since been dated  to 150 million years ago but new microscopic imaging of its bone…

Researchers studying Rhesus Macaque mothers and writing on their results in Current Biology have determined that interactions of macaque mothers with their infants have a lot of similarity to human…

No country is immune from gender discrimination, says the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Report, and most companies feel like they are gender neutral and perhaps are - but because people and…

Chiroteuthids (ky-ro-tooth-ids) are crazy weird squid; their most notable feature is having two sets of fins on the "tail end" of their mantles as paralarvae. To me, this is nearly as bizarre as…

If you're a child of the 1970s you remember peak oil - it was a book that claimed by 1992 we were going to reach maximum capacity and then it would gradually become more scarce.   If you're a…

Want a chance to see the water on the moon in real life? Wake up early Friday morning (if you live in the Americas), and get out your telescope. NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite…

A new type of rocket propellant made from a mixture of water and nanoscale aluminum powder could be manufactured on the moon or Mars or any place remnant ice may exist, say researchers from NASA, the…

My real life has swamped my online one recently, and so I failed to note that the 16th Carnival of Evolution is up at the excellent blog Pleiotropy. Bjørn has managed to collect 50,228 words of…

Last week it was Science, with a swath of Ardipithecus papers. This week Nature has an above-average issue. I can't vouch for the quality of the papers (since I havent' finished them yet), but these…

This just in: Berlusconi is not above the law. In a reassuring sentence the judges of the Italian "Consulta" of the constitutional court have ruled today that the "Lodo Alfano", a law strongly wanted…

The periodic table has been covered in myriad ways on this site1, but no one has addressed the re-setting of the venerable Table. I was reminded of this slightly consternating activity this morning…

They say the world is changing. Let’s check that out empirically. We might run a couple of sample surveys, to see how people’s behaviors or attitudes change between the two questionnaire…

Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been…

I start my activity on these pages by pointing to a security problem we have here. I found it when viewing one of my comments to a news article where a new comment appeared:http://www.science20.com…