What is the ultimate fate of the universe? The big crunch and the big freeze aside, what is the fate of intelligent beings in the universe? It is reasonable to assume that even if it is the case…

It is the most common thing to hear people to refer to philosophy as uesless. There is even a joke about it. What's the difference between a pizza and a philosopher? A pizza can feed a family of…

Frog skin and human lungs hold secrets to developing new antibiotics, and a technique called solid-state NMR spectroscopy is a key to unlocking those secrets. That's the view of University of…

TOKYO 02/03/2007 Japan's advanced humanoids can now serve tea and wash the cup afterwards, but they still need to learn from their mistakes if they are to become real household helpers. A Tokyo…

The European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] has developed a new computational tool that makes images obtained with cutting-edge microscopes even sharper. The technological advance and its…

Brain damage that was thought to be caused by hypoglycemic coma actually occurs when glucose is administered to treat the coma, according to a study in rodents led by researchers at the San…

Tonight there will be a total lunar eclipse. The partial eclipse will begin at 21:30:04 UT and end  3½ hours later at 01:11:46 UT. The total eclipse lasts for about one hour; it begins at…

By analyzing the COSMOS field, the largest field of galaxies ever observed with the Hubble space telescope, an international team of scientists led by researchers from the California Institute of…

We don't normally like to highlight people funnier than we are but we have to make an exception here - we mean Lee Silver, of course, not Stephen Colbert, though he might be pretty funny also. Taped…

I discovered the Scientific Blogging site while preparing the next episode of my Books and Ideas Podcast , which is going to be a discussion of Dr. Lee M. Silver 's excellent book Challenging Nature…

Snail-racing is an action-packed spectator sport compared to watching the drift of Earth’s continents, which usually move just a few centimetres a year – about as fast as fingernails grow. But…

The chemical bond between carbon and fluorine is one of the strongest in nature, and has been both a blessing and a curse in the complex history of fluorocarbons. Now, in a powerful demonstration of…

Last week, I arrived in Toronto during a snow storm and the limousine which was supposed to pick me up was late. When it finally arrived, it turned out there was another person waiting for the same…

The changing Larsen-B Ice Shelf captured by Envisat on 22 February 2007 with its Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR). The Larsen Ice Shelf is a series of three shelves – A (the smallest), B…

A team of researchers from the UAB's Mutagenesis Group, led by Dr Jordi Surrallés, has identified one of the mechanisms used by cancer cells to resist chemotherapy. In his paper, to be published in…

It is a vision of information technology to store data in the smallest available units - single atoms - thus enabling the development of novel mass storage devices with huge capacities but compact…

There are many galaxies of different shapes and sizes around us today. Roughly half are gas-poor elliptical-shaped galaxies with little new star formation activity, and half are gas-rich spiral and…

[Note to scientific blogging readers:  I posted the following column on my other blog, www.evolutionshift.com in the first week of 2007. Since I write here under Future Thought under the…

As we have seen, penis size matters to female mice and sword size matters to female swordfish but brain size in humans barely gets noticed at all. It's what you do with it that counts. The ability…

While humans can survive large temperature fluctuations, such species as corals are only comfortable within a 12-degree temperature range. And rising global temperatures appear to be threatening…