The periodic table goes well with many things, including, apparently, wine. This month's issue of Wired (with plenty of fodder for blogging and articles, so more to come) includes a nugget of…

Across the University of Colorado at Boulder campus students are sharing answers, checking their responses to questions against those of their neighbors and making adjustments to those answers in…

A team of Johns Hopkins neuroscientists has worked out how some newly discovered light sensors in the eye detect light and communicate with the brain. The report appears online this week in Nature.…

As worldwide demand for cleaner energy grows, scientists are working frantically in every area to improve the amount of energy we are able to generate from various renewable sources. Many existing…

The combination of a very pleasant but busy holiday visit with my In-laws and feeling a bit under the weather has caused my blogging to drop precipitously this past week. I'm back, ready to start off…

First, a neat little toy:  build your own squid! I won't give anything else away... Second, in the spirit of ending the old year and beginning the new, I like this synopsis of the best science…

Clichés are soft.. they leave it to your imagination.  Clichés are hard.. they leave it to your imagination. Embedded in the clichés are stereotypes. A new cliché: "2009 is years-old." P.S.…

The future of the nanotechnology field depends on our ability to reliably and reproducibly assemble nanoparticles into 3D structures we can use to develop new technologies. According to Hao Yan and…

Did you make a resolution?   Most people do, consciously or not.   The end of one year and the beginning of a new one is a built-in time for reflection.   You may resolve to go to the…

Want to buy cool Scientific SWAG?   Okay, it isn't actually SWAG, since you don't get it unless you buy it but you understand the point.   Awesome science t-shirts and mugs are here.  …

Abundant tiny particles of diamond dust exist in sediments dating to 12,900 years ago at six North American sites, adding strong evidence for Earth’s impact with a rare swarm of carbon-and-water-rich…

Using a beam of light shunted through a tiny silicon channel, researchers have created a nanoscale trap that can stop free floating DNA molecules and nanoparticles in their tracks. By holding the…

Nature recently provided a list of "15 evolutionary gems". ...the document summarizes 15 lines of evidence from papers published in Nature over the past 10 years. The evidence is drawn from the…

I won't get into this in detail, in part because I wrote about it in my paper The evolution of complex organs in the special issue of Evolution: Education and Outreach about eyes. It seems the most…

There was a big development in science this year, yet most people missed it.   It wasn't induced pluripotent stem cells or global warming or Barack Obama securing 99% of the scientist vote…

Despite the regular onslaught of mixed messages from those in scientific research land, I still take a multivitamin most days. (Thanks, Mom, for starting me off young with those delicious Flinstone…

Even on this side of the Atlantic, we have noticed: Burris, standing at the governor’s side, said he’s eager to get to work in Washington “to face a convergence of parallel crises.”  One’s…

Well, it's now a merry Christmas for everyone except Nicholas Cage. The U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency (CMA) announced Monday that as of Christmas Eve, 2008, they've completed the destruction of…

New computer visualization technology developed by the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing has helped astrophysicists understand that gravity plays a larger role than previously thought in…

An extract from grape seeds forces laboratory leukemia cells to commit cell suicide, according to researchers from the University of Kentucky. They found that within 24 hours, 76 percent of leukemia…