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…

In the previous post we introduced the idea that indifference was the primary action at work at the biochemical and cellular levels. At this level, it would be hard to express any survival strategy…

Female birds often choose their mates based on fancy feathers. Female mammals, on the other hand, may be more likely to follow their noses to the right mate. That's one conclusion of Cambridge…

WASHINGTON – Romance does not have to fizzle out in long-term relationships and progress into a companionship/friendship-type love, a new study has found. Romantic love can last a lifetime and lead…

Finishing my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”, we have question 8, “Could we shut the net down?”, by Michael Brooks. It’s not…

I could write a book refuting the nonsense regularly expounded by New York Time’s columnist Stanley Fish. Oh, wait, I almost have written a book about it!   I already commented on this blog…

The “Holy Grail of Climate Change" press release about biomaterial found in Wyoming clouds has been making its way across the internet like a steady front.  Surprisingly, the blockbuster…

Good news today. Yesterday afternoon Werner Faymann, the Austrian Federal Chancellor, announced that Austria will not leave CERN, as previously suggested. An official confirmation of this decision…

Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have great…

Morphometric and phylogenetic analyses of the fossilised remains of the jaws and teeth of a shrew discovered in a deposit in Gran Dolina de Atapuerca, in Burgos, a city of northern Spain at the edge…

Neanderthals/neandertals, popularly regarded as the 'stupid' cousins of modern humans, were actually capable of capturing the most impressive animals - and that takes some sense.   Dutch…

A new type of air-fuelled battery called the STAIR (St Andrews Air) cell could give up to ten times the energy storage of designs currently available, meaning a new generation of batteries for…

It's always best not to go overboard but the discovery of Darwinius masillae is pretty darn exciting, because it represents the most complete fossil primate ever found;  the skeleton, soft body…