You are a coach, trying to juggle practice plans, meetings, game prep and player issues while trying to stay focused on the season's goals.  At the end of another long day, you see this in your…

Today epigenetics is all the rage, but it has its roots in a pair of papers that appeared nearly simultaneously in 1952-1953. Luria SE and Human ML. 1952. A nonhereditary, host-induced variation of…

Yesterday, newspapers were telling us half of apes and monkeys face extinction and today we find out we could be overwhelmed by them. The Wildlife Conservation Society released a census showing…

When Yale astrophysicist Kevin Schawinski and colleagues at Oxford University enlisted public support in cataloguing galaxies, they never envisioned the strange object Hanny van Arkel found in…

A new Carnegie Mellon University brain imaging study of dyslexic students and other poor readers shows that the brain can permanently rewire itself and overcome reading deficits, if students are…

Despite concerns that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 would increase intolerance toward Muslims, the opposite is true, according to new research by University of British Columbia (UBC)…

New research from The University of Western Ontario reveals how the brain processes the 'rewarding' and addictive properties of nicotine, providing a better understanding of why some people seemingly…

University of Minnesota researchers have answered a key question as to why antiretroviral therapy isn't effective in restoring immunity in HIV-infected patients. Once a person is infected with the…

Globular star clusters, dense bunches of hundreds of thousands of stars, contain some of the oldest surviving stars in the Universe. A new international study of globular clusters outside our Milky…

You may have laughed when you read in history books that in years gone by maggots were used to cure disease. Laugh no more. It’s not uncommon for someone to suffer from chronic infected wounds for…

A study published in the International Journal of Obesity says that eating two eggs for breakfast, as part of an overall reduced-calorie diet, helps overweight adults lose more weight and feel more…

I apparently missed this little episode in June, when a creationist (with no scientific credentials) read a news piece on the recent work of Michigan State biologist Richard Lenski, and then wrote an…

It may not be an ever popular artificial sweetener like NutraSweet, or have the crystalline texture of pure sugar, but the herb, which is commonly found at Trader Joes when it isn’t in its natural…

My colleague Peter Turchin over at the University of Connecticut (my Alma Mater) has recently published an intriguing short article in Nature (3 July 2008) on what he termed “cliodynamics,”…

The architecture of haematopoiesis – which is the process by which all blood cells originate – is essentially the same throughout the mammal world, report scientists in the Proceedings of the Royal…

Metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of our unique cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities, according to research published today…

The first thing iRobot Corporation wants you to know, because they have been asked so many times, is that the Packbot is no Terminator - and never will be. Robots in the military are not the stuff of…

A revised outlook for the Arctic 2008 summer sea ice minimum shows ice extent will be below the 2005 level but not likely to beat the 2007 record, say researchers with DAMOCLES (Developing Arctic…

You no longer need a snooty wine expert to identify a ’74 Pinot Noir from Burgundy – a handheld “electronic tongue” devised by European scientists will tell you the grape variety and vintage at the…

Tiny fossilized teeth excavated from an Indian open-pit coal mine could be the oldest Asian remains ever found of anthropoids, the primate lineage of today's monkeys, apes and humans, say researchers…