I heard the Finnish diplomat Martti Ahtisaari say today that he had been "eternally displaced" ever since he had become a child refuge in World War II. The recipient of the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize…

Venus Express looking back on Earth Credits: ESA/VIRTIS/INAF-IASF/Obs. de Paris-LESIA (Earth views: Solar System Simulator JPL-NASA)This image composite shows the signatures of methane (CH4), carbon…

“Fluoridation of drinking water is scientifically untenable, and should not be part of a public health initiative or program,” says the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE)…

As promised in my previous post, I would like to bring to people’s attention one of the best reviews of scientific investigations of religion as a social phenomenon, a paper published in Science (3…

Okay, now I'm really upset. I've been watching the news, and hearing all about the financial crisis hitting our country, and spreading throughout the world. AIG begs for a handout, and then goes on a…

A new improved gene therapy can be the first treatment for Machado-Joseph disease as  Portuguese, Swiss and French researchers show, for the first time, that is possible to inhibit in a living…

Supercomputer simulations of dusty disks around sunlike stars show that planets even as small as Mars can create patterns that future telescopes might detect. Much of the dust in our solar system…

If you're riding a bike at Copenhagen's November 2009 U.N. Climate Change Conference, you may be able to take advantage of some new 'Smart Biking' techology created by MIT - it will help you make…

Hospital for Special Surgery researchers writing in the Journal of Clinical Investigation say that statins may be able to prevent miscarriages in women who are suffering from pregnancy complications…

Scientists have confirmed the second-ever case of a 'virgin birth' in a shark, further confirming that female sharks can reproduce without mating and that many female sharks may have this incredible…

The stickleback fish, Gasterosteus aculeatus, is one of the most thoroughly studied organisms in the wild, and has been a particularly useful model for understanding variation in physiology, behavior…

In a seminar co-organized by Stanford University and the American Institute of Mathematics, Kannam Soundararajan, Professor of Mathematics, announced that he and Roman Holowinsky have proven a…

This week, Astronomy & Astrophysics is publishing new observations with AMBER/VLTI of the gas component in the vicinity of young stars. An international team of astronomers led by E. Tatulli…

Scientists from the Universities of Bath and Exeter have developed a rapid new way of checking for toxic genes in disease-causing bacteria which infect insects and humans. Their findings could in the…

Sleep in man is divided in two main phases : non-REM sleep, which occupies most of our early sleep night, and REM sleep, during which our dreams prevail. Non-REM sleep is usually considered as a…

Do females intrinsically have less ability than males to excel in mathematics at the very highest level? That used to be the conventional wisdom. But that has changed in the last few years and more…

Pregnancy and motherhood may make us all go a little gooey, but it's not turning mums' brains into mush, according to mental health researchers at The Australian National University. The study –…

Way is here to a ton of joy for our hearts and minds and bodies, folks. It is that time of the year. Let's visualize giant pumpkins... Two-thousand pounds of feast for the eyes and the stomachs. And…

As a scientist, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands. Or into your own arm, and occasionally, your own heart. Autoexperimentation is the very risky practice of wildcat science. If…

Juno Spacecraft to Study Jupiter, we are informed by space.com. Don't people think before they give names, or choose songs? They select for weddings "I will always love you" by Whitney Houston,…