The city of London, with funding from the European Space Agency, has launched AirTEXT, which delivers air pollution alerts and health advice via SMS text messages. AirTEXT is a free service aimed…

Fewer big sharks in the oceans led to the destruction of North Carolina’s bay scallop fishery and inhibits the recovery of depressed scallop, oyster and clam populations along the U.S. Atlantic…

For all the current emphasis on standardized testing and teaching requirements, the quality of elementary school instruction is mediocre at best, according to a study from the NICHD Study of Early…

Combining precise observations obtained by ESO's Very Large Telescope with those gathered by a network of smaller telescopes, astronomers have described in unprecedented detail the double asteroid…

Monday morning roles on by at the parent's house, sound asleep til seven AM, still waking up in the darkness of daylight savings time. I gather my personal belongings: 1) Laptop - Check! 2) CD ROM…

So there I am sitting at my computer desk Sunday morning, two days before I am supposed to present at the ACS, without a car in the world.  My roommate had split town two days earlier to make…

Gamma ray bursts (GRBs), the brief flashes of light signalling distant, extremely energetic events, have been elusive targets for astronomical observation. (It's something like the fairground game of…

Yesterday I presented my second talk, this time on the use of blogs and wikis to do laboratory research. This was under the Chemical Education symposium: Communicating Chemistry. Most of the talks…

The NPR interview on Open Science I discussed two weeks ago has aired and is now available. I think it was very well balanced. The positive aspects of not losing failed experiments was weighed…

This post is about an article by Schacter et al (pdf) regarding how the constructiveness of memories may crucially be due to the need to simulate future scenarios. But before I go to the main course,…

I have been watching way too much CSI. For those who haven’t seen the popular American television show, it is about a team of highly skilled Crime Scene Investigators who use keen observational…

Tidal marshes, which nurture marine life and reduce storm damage along many coastlines, should be able to adjust to rising sea levels and avoid being inundated and lost, if their vegetation isn't…

New calculations show that sensitivity of Earth's climate to changes in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) has been consistent for the last 420 million years, according to an article in Nature…

It is a natural history tale that every third grader knows: The dinosaurs ruled the Earth for hundreds of millions of years, until an asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula and triggered a mass…

A new, complete 'tree of life' tracing the history of all 4,500 mammals on Earth shows that they did not diversify as a result of the death of the dinosaurs, says new research published in Nature…

Tailor-made dietary fiber may be able to flush artery-clogging cholesterol from the body and lower the risk of heart disease, according to a new study by University of Guelph researchers. The study…

The Virginia Tech chemistry research group that has been creating molecular complexes that use solar energy to produce hydrogen from water has added an additional capacity to their supramolecule.…

Common sense says businesses, driven by profits, will go where they can make the most by paying the least. Three researchers, Dr Holger Görg from GEP (the Globalisation and Economic Policy Centre,…

Scientists at the University of Illinois have fabricated the world’s smallest chain-mail fabric. Combined with existing processing techniques, the flexible, metallic fabric holds promise for fully…

DNA testing carried out by University of Leicester geneticists and funded by The Wellcome Trust has thrown new light on the ancestry of one of the USA’s most revered figures, the third President,…