Utah and Texas researchers have learned how quiet sounds are magnified by bundles of tiny, hair-like tubes atop “hair cells” in the ear: when the tubes dance back and forth, they act as…

At the European Geophysical Union EGU, Jochen Zschau from GeoForschungZentrum GFZ in Germany presented his Sergey Soloviev medal lecture, Meeting the Challenge of Earthquake Risk Globalisation:…

There are a lot of biologists out there with physics and engineering envy, and it shows in the occasional awkward and sometimes downright ridiculous borrowing of terminology. Take the term…

Every type of disease has a specific treatment program. We have drugs to treat symptoms of countless illnesses and maladies, but viral infections continue to elude treatment. While we have vaccines…

For those of us who are savvy on health food, what I’m about to tell you will come as no surprise, if not, hold onto your hats. If you have heard about “good fats” such as poly-unsaturated fats and…

Just in case you didn't know, Scientific Blogging geek fave Garth Sundem will make a guest appearance on The Early Show (your local CBS channel) tomorrow AM, in promotion of his new book.  …

"Kepler is like Field of Dreams meets Cosmos" says Padi Boyd, a scientist with the Kepler planet-hunting mission. This set the stage for an enjoyable short interview. Earlier I wrote why Kepler is…

For your Tuesday morning meditation:  what do you get when you cross the Mandelbrot set with Eastern religion? Buddhabrot: Melinda Green made this amazing picture, has more on her website, plus…

(I'm quite tired now, but just wanted to note this down.  This ain't science; it's just a diary.) As it says in my profile, I'm a volunteer part-time fossil preparator for the Dallas Museum of…

A team of astronomers from University College London (UCL) have discovered that an exotic world passes directly in front of the Sun-like star it orbits, revealing for the first time that it is about…

Exoplanet researcher Michel Mayor today announced the discovery of the lightest exoplanet found so far. The planet, Gliese 581 e, in the famous system Gliese 581, is only about twice the mass of our…

Want to hunt down enemy bacteria?   Look at the sugars on the germs' surface where they start building a 'structure' that helps the microbes resist efforts to kill them. Scientists have…

Dartmouth researchers have determined that the presence of the rare element osmium is on the rise globally. They trace this increase to the consumption of refined platinum, the primary ingredient in…

Thinking your memory will get worse as you get older may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that senior citizens who think older people…

Star Trek We don't talk down to people, no worries about appealling to 8th grade kids or whatever the reading level is supposed to be.

I stumbled on this amazing set of videos: physics legend Hans Bethe giving lectures on theoretical physics to his retirement community neighbors. It's not as crazy as it sounds - a running joke…

If you have recently given a close enough look at the search results that the CDF and DZERO experiments have been producing at a regular pace on the Higgs boson - every six months, that is: for…

Fields are alive with the promise of medicine. Consider my list of dozen alkaloids found in nature. They exist in whole plant or its organ(s). Some of these chemical…

Sigh - I was going to recommend this piece about recent human genome research in Scientific American, by a leading researcher in comparative genomics, Katherine Pollard, until I came to the last…

Continued from A Scientific Approach to Science Education - Beliefs, Guided Thinking And Technology. I assign students to groups the first day of class (typically three to four students in adjacent…