c.280 Pappus, an Egyptian mathematician, compiled a summary of all mathematical knowledge to date (list) c.300 In Bernares, Vatsayana Mallagana publishes the Kama Sutra, a comprehensive guide to…

1609 Johann Kepler formalizes his first and second laws of planetary motion

Machines to move things and people The Industrial Revolution was made possible by machines that multiplied the force of human strength. First water power, then steam, made possible the factories that…

Here is the concluding part (for the first part see here) of a discussion of a few subtleties involved in the extraction of small new particle signals hiding within large backgrounds. This is a quite…

A Brief History of the English Language Part 3 The historical development of English is an excellent model of how a grammar naturally develops.  I am trying to capture some of that history in…

If you are even a teensy little bit into reason and rationality, then you are likely to wince every time you open a newspaper, surf the web or watch television. The wince of the week definitely came…

(Sensors in the skin - does that sound like Frank Sinatra singing?) Of the professors at Reading University, perhaps the one with the highest media profile is Kevin Warwick, well known for planting…

A piece of chalk in a laboratory at the University of Stavanger in Norway may be the key to unlocking a great mystery. If the mystery is solved, it will generate billions in additional income.…

Two researchers from the Spanish Centre of Astrobiology (INTA-CSIC) have developed a mathematical model which demonstrates that a mild increase in the mutation rate of some viruses can reduce their…

A study led by researchers from the Madrid Carlos III Institute of Health associates the increase of cholera cases in Zambia with climate factors.  They say their results confirm that the…

DNA sequencing is the next frontier in biological research.As new sequencing technology becomes more efficient and affordable, it is increasingly available to small laboratories. Thus, sequencing…

Biomedical engineers have developed a new type of probe that allows them to visualize single ribonucleic acid (RNA) molecules within live cells more easily than existing methods. The tool will help…

Since you are all inquisitive scientists, it is not a big surprise that sex is  a popular topic of study in the real world.  I attended a talk by Mary Roach, author of  “Bonk: The…

This guy is the poster child for computer nerd with no social life. Not that I'm making fun - my social life is pretty much nil. I'm also disturbed that technology moves this fast. I still haven't…

On the occasion of her centennial, Rita Levi-Montalcini addressed the crowd with the gentle tone of a grandmother and the confident cadence of a statesman.  At 100 years, she has an energy that…

Nobody wants to have a stuffy, runny nose and itchy eyes year-round, or to not be able to breathe deeply. (Or maybe there are some that do. Whatever floats your boat.) The current magical mystery…

Back on a frozen pre-Inaugeration Day, I picked up a hitchhiker on US295N. We exchanged the usual banter ("Got any guns? No? Great!").  He wasn't a local, just in town to help assemble…

MP3s, podcasts, etc. are not really our thing - most of our readers want data they can use and you can't forward a clip from an MP3 or copy and paste it conveniently ( "go to minute 18 for my…

“We are not only observers. We are participators. In some strange sense this is a participatory universe.”  One Year has passed. On April 13, 2008, John Archibald Wheeler, the doyen of…

The Hubble Telescope was carried into orbit on this day, April 24th, back in 1990, which makes it 19 years old. Now it can finally legally drink alcohol in Ontario! The Hubble Space Telescope (HST)…