I largely agree with this (subscription required for full text): The media not only influence public perceptions but also shape and reflect the policy debate. Few decisions are made by policymakers…

Can you fly a house with balloons?  The recent Pixar movie "Up" does, but it's animated.  In the "Up" production notes, Steve May, the film's supervising technical director, writes "It was…

Random Noise #16 : Dangerous Knowledge ... holding the paper with one hand, and jumping up and down as she works the pumping-handle with the other, she pushes dynamite down the tube till the paper…

Same-sex behavior has been extensively documented in the non-human animal kingdom, concludes a new review of existing research. Yep, homosexual behavior is common across species, from worms to…

In revisiting a chemical reaction that's been in the literature for several decades and adding a new wrinkle of their own, researchers with Berkeley Lab and the University of California (UC) Berkeley…

Fire drills are conducted to know what it will be like in an actual fire incident. The main objective of fire drills are to asses how fast can people evacuate the buildings safely, if ever they catch…

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…

University of Leicester researchers writing in the journal Chemical Research in Toxicology say they have found "convincing evidence" that cannabis smoke damages DNA and it could potentially increase…

An ancient Ice Age, once regarded as a brief 'blip', in fact lasted for 30 million years according to geologists at the University of Leicester who will discuss their findings during a public lecture…

A new study says Tai Chi can have positive health benefits for musculoskeletal pain. The results of the first comprehensive analysis, conducted by The George Institute for International Health in…

An enormous eruption has found its way to Earth after travelling for many thousands of years across space. Studying this blast with ESA's XMM-Newton and Integral space observatories, astronomers have…

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…

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.  …