We sometimes have to wonder about the decision-making of government agencies. Senator Tom Coburn produced an annual list of waste and duplication that included science and it made sense to address…

Two things that have caught my attention recently. The first concerns trapping solar energy.  One way to do this is to convert it directly into electricity with a solar panel, but one with much…

An international team of physicists have been able to reconstruct the first ever 3-D image of individual virus particles by tweaking the X-ray diffraction technique of nanocrystallography1 Cleverly…

Speech problems in early childhood are common. One in four parents of Australian children are concerned about their 4- to 5-year-old child’s speech but two-thirds of these parents don’t act on their…

Damage to the spinal cord is often permanent because injured nerve cells fail to regenerate due to scar tissue of their long nerve fibers. Nerve cells are wire-like conductors that transmit and…

A new app for finding and mapping chromosomal loci uses multicolored versions of CRISPR/Cas9. The labeling system, developed by  the University of Massachusetts Medical School, could be a key to…

Sometimes science is the only witness to a crime. Fortunately, the application of scientific evidence in criminal proceedings has grown in proportion to the availability of cutting-edge methods and…

Why men have more heart disease than premenopausal women has been unclear, but a new study shows that the sex hormones testosterone and estrogen alter cardiovascular risk factors in a way that raises…

In a previous blog post, I demonstrated how to build a magnetic optical mount for a laser using Erector set parts. Here's another method of attaching a chip clip to the Erector set stand. Parts…

A new study has found that high levels of blood lipids such as cholesterol and triglycerides can keep Vitamin E, an essential micronutrient, tied up in the blood stream, and prevent vitamin E from…

A team of researchers can detect how taste is encoded in patterns of neural activity in the human brain. That means they can basically read your mind when it comes to food. Tastants in the mouth…

An important food resource has been disappearing from streams without anyone noticing until now. In a new study published March 6 in the journal Science, a team of researchers led by University of…

We have tens or hundreds of active 'foreign' genes, according to a new paper, and that may merit a rethink of how we discuss evolution, say the authors. The reason is horizontal gene transfer,…

The composition of intestinal bacteria and other micro-organisms--called the gut microbiota--changes over time in unhealthy ways in black men who are prediabetic, a new study finds. The results will…

Sometimes popular concepts catch fire with the public for no reason, even when they are shown to be incorrect - virtual water, a gallon of gas to create a pound of beef, you didn't build that - but…

In parts of the country that do not have icebergs washing up on shore or falling from the sky, it is almost spring planting season.  For tomatoes, that mean unless you use a toxic organic or…

A team of scientists have successfully transferred a receptor that recognizes bacteria from the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a dicot, to wheat, a monocot. The receptor can trigger a defensive…

A new paint makes robust self-cleaning surfaces and can be applied to clothes, paper, glass and steel and when combined with adhesives, maintains its self-cleaning properties after being wiped,…

Bacteria that live on iron were found for the first time at three well-known vent sites along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, one of the longest undersea mountain ranges in the world. Scientists report that…

In 2015, it doesn't need to be said for anyone over the age of 40, but for young people still newer to Miracle Vegetable and Scare Journalism claims that get pumped out in diet books, mainstream…