I do not keep crocodiles[*] in my drawer, so this short piece will have to do today.... Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned British cosmologist, passed away yesterday, and with him we lost not only a…

Lisa Pratt, the new planetary protection officer for NASA takes up her job at a challenging time for astrobiology. We are approaching a major decision point for Mars. If Elon Musk succeeds in his…

Lisa Pratt, the new planetary protection officer for NASA takes up her job at a challenging time for astrobiology. We are approaching a major decision point for Mars. If Elon Musk succeeds in his…

Large amounts of ink (well, electrons) have been spilt over the web in the past few months to discuss the #MeToo movement. It seems this blog will eventually join the crowd, although a bit belatedly…

Well, to everyone’s surprise, it seems that Trump and Kim are going to meet. So this is no longer a hypothetical question. (This originates as my answer on Quora to: What would happen if Kim…

Lisa Pratt, the new planetary protection officer for NASA takes up her job at a challenging time for astrobiology. We are approaching a major decision point for Mars. If Elon Musk succeeds in his…

Brian Greene would say that those who doubt string theory just lack vision or  the capacity to understand it.  Balderdash!  String Theory is a beautiful system of mathematics which can…

Yesterday over 50 million Italian citizens were called to voted to elect the new government, after a rather tense period of political campaign. And today the results are out, yielding a quite…

Due to concerns expressed by readers, this article has been removed from our site. While meant as satire, the author’s imperfect grasp of the English language came off as deeply offensive to many.…

Titan might seem an unlikely place to for humans to build settlements, and maybe eventually colonize. After all, it is so far from the sun, and extraordinarily cold, and it's a long journey to get…

I’ve had several PM’s and we’ve had comments by scared people in our Doomsday Debunked Facebook group who have read alarmist stories suggesting that Putin threatens to attack the US. If you have read…

If you’ve ever heard of the chemical bisphenol A (BPA), and who hasn’t, you probably have the distinct impression that it’s highly toxic.  After a steady drumbeat of more than 15 years…

A recent article published in Science suggests 2 types of bacteria appear to trigger the growth of cancer cells in the colon. I was intrigued by the article since a year ago, I read a book on the…

Statistical hypothesis testing is quite boring if you apply it to cases where you know the answer, or where the data speak loud and clear about one hypothesis being true or false. Life at the…

I think we should build our first offworld backup on the Moon. We can start by storing seeds there, similar to the Svalbard seed vault in Norway. Within a few years we should have easy access to the…

By Karin Heineman, Inside Science - The 2017 California wildfire season was one of the most destructive on record. By the end of December, an area three times the size of Chicago had gone up…

A virtual reality system for men who committed a domestic violence crime allows them to 'get into the victim’s shoes' - not by beating them, that likely caused the cycle of violence, according to…

Mindfulness is big business, worth in excess of US$1.0 billion in the US alone and linked – somewhat paradoxically – to an expanding range of must have products. These include downloadable apps (1300…

This is just a short note - a record-keeping, if you like - to report that my long review on "Collider Searches for Diboson Resonances" has now appeared on the online Elsevier site of the journal "…

Even if we ban guns today, in any realistic situation, there would still be tens of millions of guns in circulation.   This fact means that in order to give teachers a real fighting chance,…