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…

Scientists hope weather data from 18th century ships' logbooks will shed light on how the climate has changed in the past 200 years, according to this BBC report. Researchers in the UK are digitizing…

As posted on Indexed. P.S. Suck it, biatch.

Herbal medicines are more common in Asian countries to treat pre-diabetes (impaired glucose tolerance or IGT), the precursor of diabetes but is there any hard scientific evidence to confidently…

A study combining family- and population-based approaches has uncovered a single-letter change in the genetic code that is associated with autism.  The finding implicates a neuronal gene not…

Soon the world will learn who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Do you remember Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon of the following announcement? The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2003 The Royal…

There is a subset of people in the environmental conservation movement who hate their fellow man - they like nature but don't think anyone outside of their companies should enjoy it, they should just…

I always like to hear who got the Nobel Prize (well at least the one in medicine, anyway- I am definitely not a physics person), because lately it is almost someone who researched something that I…

Do you remember the "e-e-gamma-gamma-met"  event ? I am sure you do not. It is an incredibly striking event that appeared toward the end of the Tevatron Run I in the CDF data. One event that was…

Most years, we generally don't worry about the flu (unless we're paid to worry about it, or we belong to an especially susceptible population). Yet some years, like this one, threats of a pandemic…

I get some bizarre hits from my google squid alert, like this opinion piece discussing the "Democratic Squid." Squid-A-Day has nothing to say about Chicago, the Olympics, or Obama's foreign policy,…