When you go to New York City, to Central Park, to the American Museum of Natural History, to the Hayden Planetarium, to a seminar hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the entire cosmos, you might think…

The Silent Ape : On The Origins Of Language This article is a highly speculative account of how our distant ancestors evolved the capacity for speech, together with the evolved capacities that would…

The Brightest Candles #2The brightest candles are the people whose light remains long after they are gone. Imagine all the peopleliving life in peaceyou may say I'm a dreamerbut I'm not the only oneI…

Newborn babies have immature immune systems, making them highly vulnerable to severe infections and unable to mount an effective immune response to most vaccines, thereby frustrating efforts to…

Conception is not a meeting of equals, as scientists have said for decades. The egg is a relatively large, impressive biological factory compared with the tiny sperm, which delivers to the egg one…

Doom and gloom types always want to lament that the presence of people is killing the Earth.  Not so, say California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists.   At least on a cosmic…

Almost 90 percent of the world’s population will not have timely access to affordable supplies of vaccines and antiviral agents in the current influenza A (H1N1) pandemic but inexpensive generic…

Today I visited the 53rd international art exposition at the Biennale di Venezia, which this year is titled "Fare Mondi" (making worlds). I am posting below a few pictures I took of the installations…

New Hominid Discovered :  Anoiapithecus brevirostris Edit: were you looking for - New Hominid discovered in Denisova Cave? New Hominid Discovered :  Anoiapithecus brevirostris A study…

  More World Science Festival articles can be found here.

D'you dig the Geek Off? Did you email your answers to geekoff@gmail.com? If not, too late sucka! That is, too late until Monday morning, when we play another round of the feud. Yep, every week there…

Each individual decision along the way seemed rational at the time, but the result was insane. - Former Secretary of State Robert McNamara on the development of the nuclear arms race, interview with…

21st century computer modelling software has enabled a long-lost, trumpet-like instrument called the  Lituus to be recreated – even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a…

Created in a Bose Einstein Condensate, sound may enter these acoustic black holes but it may not leave.  This creates an system we can experiment with on a table top level and learn about black…

The likes of Snoop Doggy Dawg are joining the ubiquitous periodic table. Super-heavy element 112 is poised to join the ranks more than a decade after its discovery by German scientists.…

Kin selection is one of those special considerations derived from “selfish gene theory” that postulates that it is the degree of relatedness between organisms that will determine the likelihood that…

I wrote about the opening of the World Science Festival 2009 and Edward O. Wilson's 80th birthday at the Lincoln Center in New York City but he was not the only august personage in attendance.…

You age. As you age, your cells age. Your telomeres wear out. Even single-celled yeast age, giving birth to only a limited number of daughter cells. So how is it that each new generation starts fresh…

    Early science decided on the topology of matter as a system of atoms, durable units of mass.   The development of the full periodic table of elements gave each one a…

I'm mixing my movie references with the headline, perhaps, but it's honestly the first thing that popped into my head when I read about a worm helping scientists understand longevity.…