There's an interesting discussion over on the Wikipedia boards about the topic of "popular misconceptions" that has all sorts of interesting linguistic and informational aspects to it (http://en…

Human alcoholic tendencies go way back, as described in one of the most interesting paragraphs I've ever read in a scientific paper: In the warm tropical climate of sub-Saharan Africa, where the…

Many computational biologists are interested in taking gene expression data, and using that data to computationally infer the underlying regulatory network that controls the observed pattern of gene…

Kepler has First Light. It is On! Team is a Go! Photons are Arriving! This provocativly-titled NASA release states "NASA's Kepler Captures First Views of Planet-Hunting Territory", and has a good…

I participated with pleasure last month to a four-day conference devoted to neutrino telescopes, NEUTEL 2009, in Venice. Venice is my home town, and walking in the morning to the conference venue in…

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The ferroelectric materials found in today's "smart cards" used in subway, ATM and fuel cards soon may eliminate the time-consuming booting and rebooting of computer operating systems by providing an…

How many times have you had some pithy comment in prose be misinterpreted when you just know that if the other people could simply hear your voice or see your face they would know how brilliant you…

Women get more knee injuries than men and new research from the Faculty of Kinesiology at the University of Calgary say there may be a connection between the laxity of a woman's knee joint and her…

New studies indicate the three drugs used to treat male impotence,  phosphodiesterase Type 5 inhibitors  Viagra, Levitra and Cialis also appear to work in females, albeit a little…

If you're a man and have Lou Gehrig's Disease - Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - there is good news if you drink caffeine.   Antioxidants, such as in coffee, can help.   The bad news…

According to lore (because apparently before the Internet, if it appeared in writing it had to be true) diarist Samual Pepes originally said, "Laughter is the best medicine." On a science site, we…

I had a nice essay going about information and sources, and a whack of the keyboard sent me off to a site I hadn't intended to visit and the post (all 400 words of it) off into bit-dust.  You'd…

Quick, can you answer the question about the dog with the neuromuscular disease myasthenia gravis?   If not, you'd be lost at Neurobowl, the highlight of the annual meeting of the American…

In 1930, in the Highlands of New Guinea, a group of Australian brothers looking for gold stumbled across thousands of Stone Age people who had no concept of the outside world. They happened to bring…

How meta!   A poll to ask if we need polling.    We could always do polls, of course, but they were stand-along things that would be in a block somewhere and I haven't seen much value…

If you have suffered the flu recently, then you know that it’s quite miserable. All of the sneezing, sore throat, fever and aching can really put a damper on your day (or week for some of us). Even…

This next in my series on Brain donation is of necessity going to seem partisan as the principal objection to this particular programme cannot help but be critical of the organization that is…

Reporting on scientific results to a broad audience is difficult, in my opinion, not so much because of the need to explain things in a simple way -which is easy and fun, once you master the matter-…

    Last week I described how Fred Hoyle, in 1946,  came up with the idea that carbon is synthesized in hot stars toward the end of their lifetime, and we now know that carbon and…