The Dead Sea scrolls used to be revered as holding some special insight, perhaps we were only now mature enough to understand it. More recently, it's clear these were errors and cast-offs that were…

We think we know the perfect balance of gases in the atmosphere, and it involves a time before there was any industry, when the human population was tiny, when almost all of the planet was covered in…

If you sip a beer when you are a teenager, are you going to become a raging alcoholic? You are according to the logic of anti-smoking activists who won the war on cigarettes and need a one place to…

Its not a great idea to use surveys, but sometimes those are all we have. After environmental groups drummed up publicity about a colony collapse disorder in honeybees, for example, concerned…

Why do people skip queues, cause traffic jams, and create delays for everyone? Who are these misbehaving creatures lacking basic cooperation skills? Are they really all that different from you?…

The post originally appeared on the Putting Pesticides in Perspective (PPIP) Blog on 2/7/17 on which there are also 6 related sub-posts Whether a farmer is growing in an organic or…

With the availability of Arctic Apples around the corner, there are a lot of questions swirling about how the browning is suppressed when the apple is exposed to air.   The browning process…

In Insectivorous Plants, Sir Charles Darwin pondered carnivorous plants. They live in habitats poor in nutrients, mostly on nitrogen and phosphorous, and have compensated this lack with the…

In dating, at least the online kind, younger people tend to have a hard line on educational matching, but older people feel like that's less important. Traditionally, humans look for certain…

Recently, two armies were pitted against each other, with harpoon-like appendages covered in poison. They went two war, stabbing each other and rupturing victims like water balloons. It was all…

The so-called Lambda_b baryon is a well-studied particle nowadays, with several experiments having measured its main production properties and decay modes in the course of the past two decades. It is…

Between 2012 and 2015, the number of chemical burns to the eye associated with laundry detergent pods increased more than 30-fold among preschool-aged children in the US, according to a new analysis,…

Fictional metaphors matter, and in the battle to safeguard our civil liberties few metaphors matter more than George Orwell’s 1984. Although first published almost 70 years ago, the lasting salience…

Young patients with acute lymphocytic leukemia, the most common type of pediatric cancer, are likely to report that they adhered to their anti-cancer medication better than they really did. And so do…

A few days ago I discussed the coin toss game ‘triple or bust‘. The game is between Alice and Bob. Alice start the game by writing a $ 1.00 IOU to Bob. Alice then makes at least six subsequent tosses…

The Amery Zig-Zags Cracks in the Amery Ice Shelf show a prominent zig-zag form.  This is a type of crack which forms in a laminated material which is deformed under pressure.   As the…

In what seems like a scene from the movie Groundhog Day, another rat study has come out of the laboratory of Dr. Giles-Eric Séralini, only in this case it is Roundup and not GMOs that are under fire.…

A large-scale international study involving 700,000 participants has revealed 83 genetic variations controlling human height.  It is well-known that above-average-height parents often have above…

CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology, a way to generate very precise gene knock-out kits, has now been used to produce cows with resistance to bovine tuberculosis. Bovine TB, caused by Mycobacterium…

Lubos Motl published the other day in his crazily active blog a very nice new review of "Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab". The review is authored by Tristan du…