In ancient stories, and even some newer ones, the appearance of a comet or any heavenly object could symbolize a God's displeasure and even mean a sure failure in battle for one side.   Tel Aviv…

Young children think about gender in the same way they think about species of animals. They believe, for example, that a boy's preference for football is innate, as is a girl's preference for dolls,…

A new longitudinal study of children's personality traits and interests tells us that sex-typed characteristics develop differently in girls and boys. The study, by researchers at The Pennsylvania…

The record numbers of young people who took part in last year's presidential election, along with high schools' raised expectations that students participate in community service, have led to growing…

A limestone countertop, a practiced eye and Google Earth all played roles in the discovery of a trove of fossils that may shed light on the origins of African wildlife. The story concerns University…

During a seminar several years ago, University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski fielded a hostile question: Why bother classifying organisms according to their physical appearance, let alone…

Autism is a complex brain disorder that strikes in early childhood. The condition disrupts a child's ability to communicate and develop social relationships and is often accompanied by acute…

An international team of researchers has determined key structural features of the largest known virus -the mimivirus, called by some a possible "missing link" between viruses and living cells. It…

Facial recognition is not as automatic as it may seem, according to researchers who have identified specific areas in the brain devoted solely to picking out faces among other objects we encounter.…

The farthest we have 'seen' in space just got a little farther away, thanks to ESO's Very Large Telescope and GRB (Gamma Ray Burst) 090423. VLT has shown that a faint gamma-ray burst detected last…

"The Lost World", published in 1912, is not Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous work but his account of an isolated community of dinosaurs that survived the catastrophic extinction event 65 million…

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched experiments designed to combine the H5N1 virus and human flu viruses and then see how the resulting hybrids affected animals so…

April 27, 2009 is the 218th birthday of Samuel Morse, the creator of Morse code.  Morse code is losing its popularity as a way to signal other ships, but it is still going strong as a way to…

Summer is coming. The time of camping and cold, frosty drinks. I've been working on developing a freeze dried beer that comes in a small pack and rehydrates fully carbonated with all its alcohol…

How many numbers should you include in an article? This is debatable, depending on the subject matter and audience. But using too many numbers will lose a reader. Read this story from the Christian…

I can't decide if this image from the Panda's Thumb is pretty or creepy looking?

Is tenure good for America? Mark Taylor, a professor of religion, has observed (in the New York Times) that: "graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no…

A Brief History of the English Language Part 5 - Early Modern English Part 1 briefly covered the period from the 5th century CE to the 14th century.Part 2 describes Chaucer's influence on the…

In a previous article, I discussed the controversies associated with anthropological research and debunked myths regarding the true intentions of molecular anthropologists.  Furthermore, I also…

Graduate education in the humanities may have its problems, but don't try to tar science with the same brush. In a NY Times Op-Ed, by Dr. Mark Taylor, the chairman of Columbia's religion department,…