Craig Venter and James Watson have won this year's Cold Spring Harbor 'Double Helix Medal For Scientific Research'. Venter deserves it, but what's the deal with Watson? He hasn't done much for…

I gets weary, and sick of trying … the words almost taken from Ol' Man River.  But weary of what?  Trying to persuade the physics world from harping too much on about celebrity physicists.…

The seasons are shifting. For most places, colder weather and less daylight means the steady approach of winter. In my home in Northern California, summer lasts through October.  The sun shines…

For those that suffer from Huntington’s Disease or worry about its development, a new hope for a treatment may be on the horizon. Raptor Pharmaceuticals Corp. has announced that it will collaborate…

As Adaptive Complexity writes, last week's issue of Nature  included the publication of  West-African and Han Chinese individual genomes.  The ability to sequence and analyze…

As a brief follow up to the post about Dr. Andras Pellionisz's Google seminar, I cannot help but quote from his website: Since a US Government-mandated (and taxpayer paid) 4-year study (ENCODE, led…

Petroleum is the feedstock for many products in the chemical industry but it is becoming increasingly expensive.  Renewable raw materials are an alternative but we quickly learned that, despite…

It sounds like a science fiction movie: A killer contagion threatens the Earth, but scientists save the day with a designer drug that forces the virus to mutate itself out of existence. The killer…

Children with heart defects may someday receive perfectly-matched new heart valves built using stem cells from their umbilical cord blood, according to research presented at the American Heart…

We rarely think about the electricity impact of something like a conveyor belt at an airport.   When our luggage goes on , or we step on one, numerous gears with ball- and slide-bearings go to…

About 10 million people in the United States alone—from troops returning from war to students with music blasting through headphones—are suffering from impairing noise-induced hearing loss.  The…

Ewing sarcoma is the second most common type of primary bone cancer seen in children and young adults. Patients with relapsed or refractory Ewing sarcoma have a poor outcome with conventional…

Chandrayaan-1, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) lunar orbiter, was captured into orbit around the Moon on 8 November. One day later, the spacecraft performed a manoeuvre that lowered…

OK, so you all know that Spore isn't based on how evolution actually works. There has been some concern that playing the game would cause players to develop a faulty understanding of evolution. So I…

Around 10,000 years ago, in the region of the United States now known as the Appalachians, lived one of the most impressive mammals ever to inhabit North American. With a height of over 8 feet, and…

Researchers have developed a new type of small-scale electric power generator able to produce alternating current through the cyclical stretching and releasing of zinc oxide wires encapsulated in a…

HIV is a master of disguise, able to rapidly change its identity and hide undetected in infected cells. But now, in a long-standing collaborative research effort partially-funded by the Wellcome…

Planet formation, as we all know (and don't know), is chaotic. It is like a lorenz Attractor constructable in computational astrophysics labs. When I was working on my astronomy project at Harvard…

So says a Daily Telegraph news item, reporting on a recent article in Journal of Clinical Nursing [1].  This brought to mind a programme from 2004 on Channel 4 (nicate?) called Sex Before 16:…

From the Tour de France to NASCAR, competitors and fans know that speed is only part of the equation. Strategy, including the ability to use elements like aerodynamic drafting, which makes it easier…