In the April 6, 2009 Edition of The Nation, Professor Michael T. Klare has written a rather thoughtful article ("Global Crime Wave?") on how the global economic crisis may be pushing a surge in crime…

Biocentrism - life and consciousness are the bottom line in understanding the universe Biology must be first among sciences in a theory of everything Consciousness is a physics problem Strange…

Is there an advantage to being short? I think so, but I'm biased, being what the French call quite "petite." Good things come in small packages, I say. But now at least one person with a presumably…

A Grammar of Questions. Quistic grammar is based on what I believe to be the biological basis of language in the brain: a set of models of our internal and external environment, specifically…

Like dolphins and unicorns, butterflies exist mostly to show artists what to draw on Trapper Keepers.  As such, you wouldn’t expect there to be a major difference between the genders. …

Practically every month in my Chemistry World there appears an article where a group of workers has synthesized some natural product with amazing ingenuity. But why, to use a Hogwartsian analogy,…

I Russell Ade have concluded my testing for fallout generated by above ground testing of nuclear weapons in the Independence County, Arkansas area. Just to get you up to speed on what's been…

There are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there…

Cambridge University researchers have discovered that whether someone is a 'people-person' may depend on the structure of their brain: the greater the concentration of brain tissue in certain parts…

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, astronomers have succeeded in measuring the size of giant galaxy Messier 87 - or what they thought there should be.    It turns out that its outer parts…

Scientists sometimes regret when the terms they use in a scientific way get a colloquial meaning.   In physics, Peter Higgs has to like his name recognition but might edit out references to a…

One time, I was on vacation with my parents and we went to some garden. Oh man, I hate gardens. But that's not the point. The point is that the garden had some alpacas just hanging out, and this…

I just came across this little gem on the QED blog: De Wiskundige en de CanyonDon't worry - it's in English! Enjoy!  :)

What happens when a guy married to an art historian who dislikes religion writes a book using science?   "Angels&Demons", that's what.   It's the book Dan Brown wrote that made even…

What is Language ? We are tool-using social  animals. The most powerful tool known is the one we use to build every other tool: language - spoken or written. But tools can be used with little or…

The politics of science is about more than just funding and science-based policy decisions: governments, and in particular the US Federal Government, are into science education in a big way, whether…

In thirty minutes (4 PM Chicago time) a live streaming of the Omega_b discovery by CDF will be broadcast at this link: http://vms-db-srv.fnal.gov/fmi/xsl/VMS_Site_2/000Return/video/r_live.xsl Please…

In the last few days I indulged in a rather technical description of the checks I made on DZERO's evaluation of the significance of their observation of Omega_b particles. In those occasions I did…

"We have the habit, as humans, of only thinking that what we see is real", began Neil Tyson.  Our job as astronomers is to 'turn something invisible and make it real'.  His premise: space…

Georg, over at Lattice Points noted a piece about open science in Physics World: The adoption and growth of scientific journals has created a body of shared knowledge for our civilization, a…