Hank is worried about people who want to take us back to the stone age in response to environmental challenges. For my Earth Day post, here's someone who's talking sense (no, I'm not implying that…

When I was a kid, 'toxic' assets were not assets at all; they were called 'liabilities.'    That's why asset and liability columns exist on these things called 'spreadsheets.'   But I…

A process called ‘dark gulping’ may solve the mystery of the how supermassive black holes were able to form when the Universe was less than a billion years old. Dr Curtis Saxton will be presenting…

If your child has trouble with math, give her some gum and send her to school. Researchers at a Texas medical institution say gum-chewing improves math scores. Researchers at the…

Social media is a funny creature.   Try explaining it to someone in a third world country.  Heck, try explaining it to someone who lives next door and isn't on a social media site. We're…

I have recently been contacted by a friend who is worried at the decline in numeracy in the West.  He asked me what I thought of the following: In 2005, Newt Gingrich (who had been on the Hart…

Rita Levi-Montalcini, Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1986, turns 100 years old today: she was born on April 22nd, 1909 -before World War I had begun! "Ok," you might say, "she's probably bedridden and…

This is part 1 of 6 in a brief series describing the history of English and its grammar. What is Grammar? A grammar is a set of rules for the communal use of a language. A language can never become a…

I recently came across a radio lecture given by Dr Lee Alan Dugatkin on 7.6.2007, titled "Is Goodness Natural?" It deserves comment. (An article on the same subject but with some differences in text…

This week, researchers and scientists at UCLA are doing something unusual: They are organizing a demonstration against the violent tactics of certain animal rights groups. This week, people in labs…

It's Earth Day, in case you can't tell by our swanky green Earth logo in the header, and that means people will be thinking about Nature (the bitch, not the magazine) and our impact on her.   I…

Researchers writing in Nature magazine say the fossil skeleton of a newly discovered carnivorous animal, Puijila darwini, is a "missing link" in the evolution of the group that today includes seals,…

Using information from a suite of telescopes, astronomers have discovered a mysterious, giant object that existed at a time when the universe was only about 800 million years old. Objects such as…

An international team of astronomers has used the world's biggest radio telescope to look deep into the brightest galaxies that NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope can see. The study solidifies…

Take that, Taliban.   Western decadence, in the form of caring about beauty and nature, has infested your fundamentalist madness and it's here to stay. We are talking about Band-i-Amir national…

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have discovered a potential chink in the armor of fibers that make the cell walls of certain inedible plant materials so tough. The insight ultimately could…

Researchers know that animals which seem identical can actually belong to completely different species.   But if it's worms used in laboratory testing, that could be important news in research.…

WHAT: New research from Baylor College of Medicine indicates a positive effect of chewing gum on academic performance in teenagers. The study examined whether chewing Wrigley sugar-free gum can lead…

A new study reveals that asteroid surfaces age and redden much faster than previously thought — in less than a million years, the blink of an eye for an asteroid.  The solar wind is the likely…

Waves from Daphnis Undulations mark both sides of the path of Saturn's moon Daphnis through the A ring.  Daphnis may be small at only 8 kilometers (5 miles) across, but the moon's gravity is…