Scientific Name Tinospora cordifolia (Willd.) Miers. Family Menispermaceae Used Part     Stem   Distribution Area   A large, glabrous, deciduous climbing shrub found…

The slide below was shown yesterday at an invited talk that Antonio Masiero gave in the University of Bologna, during an open session of the CMS Physics week (see, I am careful to note I am not…

A group of archaeologists and paleobiologists say they have discovered flax fibers in a cave in the Republic of Georgia that are more than 34,000 years old, making them the oldest fibers known to…

Scientific Name Holarrhena  pubescens(Buch.-Ham.) Wall. ex DC. syn. Holarrhena antidysenterica    (Linn.) Wall. Family Apocynaceae   Used Part:    Seeds  …

Today is the 25th anniversary of the discovery of DNA fingerprinting.   So has it done anything important, like given us a real understanding of how men and women communicate? Well, no, but the…

Download it here

Panax, the generic name, is derived from the Greek Panakos (a panacea), in reference to the miraculous virtue ascribed to it by the Chinese, who consider it a sovereign remedy in almost all diseases.…

Biofuels According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory [NREL] (see http://www.nrel.gov/learning/re_biofuels.html): “Unlike other renewable energy sources, biomass can be converted directly…

We had this question posed to us in one of my classes. Here is my answer: Did the existence of nuclear weapons cause a dramatic change in the conduct of foreign policy or the options available to…

If I could do it all over again, I would forget genomics and specialize in the chemistry of Scotch. You may scoff, dear reader, but there are employment opportunities out there (not to mention…

Once again neuroscientists and physicists have teamed up to take brain imaging to a new level -- Supraresolution imaging.  This has the making of a great SciFi movie -- A team of researchers at…

NASA's 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope still has a few tricks up its sleeve!  New images were released today from Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3.  Installed back in March, WFC3…

No, that Geek is not me, it's John Siracusa exhaustively reviewing (literally - the review is 23 pages long) Mac OS X 10.6 for Ars Technica: A major operating system upgrade with "no new features"…

It's not all balloons and ponies in bee colonies, despite what you may have learned.   Bees are well known for high levels of cooperation but new research in Molecular Ecology says there is a…

In case you haven't heard, there's a debate about health care reform going on - today we find out that a campaign promise, no fines if you choose not to use government health care, is off the table…

Some turns of events in the technology world are truly surprising. Who knew that a couple of guys starting up Google would hit it as big as they did? Who imagined that Facebook or Twitter would turn…

The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets…

Can we bring life forms into pure quantum states? Will we ever manage to elevate Schrodinger's cat from thought experiment to real-life experiment? A recent publication suggests the answers to above…

The CDF collaboration has recently released a study of the production of pairs of W bosons in a large bounty of proton-antiproton collisions produced by the Tevatron collider -3.6 inverse femtobarns…

Scientific Name  Aegle marmelos (L.)Corr (A. marmelos (Linn.) Correa ex Roxb.) Family  Rutaceae Used Part     Fruit pieces Distribution Area   A tree, growing…