Autistics are up to 40 percent faster at problem-solving than non-autistics, according to a new Université de Montréal and Harvard University study published in Human Brain Mapping. As part of the…

In 1987, Robert Bork became the target of an organized, special interest smear campaign aimed at ruining his chances for being confirmed by the Senate as a Supreme Court justice.   Since then, a…

Neurological diseases including Parkinson's, Tourette's, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Alzheimer's, and schizophrenia are all associated with alterations in dopamine-driven…

University of Louisville neurologist Robert P. Friedland, M.D., questions the safety of eating farmed fish in the June issue of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.  A legitimate worry about the…

A completely new species has been discovered in the Russian mountains! Sorry, it's not Bigfoot or Yeti or Abominable Snowman or Bumble or whatever he is called where you are from, though "Bigfoot…

We can measure what people prefer and value, but do we know why? And can we predict whether a nation will be liberal or conservative, atheist or religious, polygynous or monogamous? While researching…

Christine Baranski with BLoggy

A possible breakthrough in understanding of cancer pain has been announced. A group at Heidelberg University, led by Prof Dr Rohini Kuner, has just published an article in Nature Medicine entitled…

Tomorrow I am traveling to CERN, where I have been invited to give a seminar at a meeting of the LHCb experiment. My talk will discuss the issue of the energy calibration of b-quark jets, a topic to…

The Bookworm And The Encyclopedias A simple math puzzle. A set of 10 encyclopedias is sitting on a bookshelf in left-to-right numerical order. Each single volume contains 1,000 pages.  …

Do you have what it takes to be Scientific Blogging's alpha geek? Well it’s time put your geek where your mouth is…IF YOU CAN! But first a warning: yes, you could Google for these answers, but then,…

Researchers here have used sediment from the deep ocean bottom to reconstruct a record of ancient climate dating back more than 500,000 years.   The data were extracted from  the top 65…

The interstellar stuff that became incorporated into the planets and life on Earth has younger cosmic roots than theories predict, according to the University of Chicago postdoctoral scholar Philipp…

Is Internet expression a fundamental right?   Certainly a subset of the modern generation has  demonstrated an irrational sense of entitlement about free content, to the detriment of media…

Scientists say they have succeeded in treating immune cells in a way that enables them to inhibit unwanted immune reactions such as organ rejection. Their results have now been published in the…

Darwin knew that some mechanism had to govern how our physical features and behavioral traits have evolved over centuries, passing from a parent to their offspring with natural selection favoring…

It's two inches long, is shaped like a phallus and is commonly associated with wood.   A middle school joke?  No, it's a new species of stinkhorn mushroom discovered on the African island…

A team of researchershas discovered a biological marker for neovascular age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the leading cause of blindness in older adults.  The marker, a receptor known as…

Dr Jennifer Loveland-Curtze and a team of scientists from Pennsylvania State University say that a  bacterium trapped more than a mile under under glacial ice in Greenland for over 120,000 years…

Almost 140 years ago, Charles Darwin formalized what many people already believed - mate selection isn't pure chance;  it's a deliberate process that  involves numerous factors, including…