Smoking cigarettes is bad because of, you know, smoke. Right? So why are e-cigarettes, which are not smoking, facing the kind of social authoritarian ban hammer usually reserved for Happy Meals and…

Smoking cigarettes is bad because of, you know, smoke. Right? So why are e-cigarettes, which are not smoking, facing the kind of social authoritarian ban hammer usually reserved for Happy Meals and…

I have seen creeping into recent discussions of the TV show ‘Cosmos’ the idea that we scientists, because of our greater knowledge and understanding of how the natural world works, will somehow be…

Imagine what the reaction would be if it were 2006 and President George W. Bush had an environmental report on his desk from government scientists and chose to ignore the data and stall in order to…

Imagine what the reaction would be if it were 2006 and President George W. Bush had an environmental report on his desk from government scientists and chose to ignore the data and stall in order to…

In the latest episode of Cosmos we got some history regarding how science has tried to converge on the age of the Earth. With that, we also got another jab at religion. Why use yet another religious…

Relativity says that spacetime is smooth, and only big things can warp it, in ways that are exactly known. Quantum theory says that the smallest parts of the universe are constantly fluctuating and…

SensaBubble is a chrono-sensory mid-air display system that generates scented bubbles to deliver information to people using different senses. The bubble-based technology creates bubbles with a…

Man or woman? Male or female? Modern sociological woo about gender aside, in humans and other mammals, the difference between the sexes depends on one single element of the genome: the Y…

Shark data collected by citizen scientists may be as reliable as data collected using automated tools, according to results published April 23, 2014, in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Gabriel…

While creating new springs to support a cephalopod-inspired imaging project, a group of Harvard researchers stumbled upon a surprising discovery: the hemihelix, a shape rarely seen in nature. Helices…

Big brains do not explain why only humans use sophisticated language, according to researchers who have discovered that even a species of pond life communicates by similar methods. Dr Thom Scott…

The humble aspirin may have just added another beneficial effect beyond its ability to ameliorate headaches and reduce the risk of heart attacks: lowering colon cancer risk among people with high…

A new study from the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington has bolstered the link between red meat consumption and heart disease by finding a strong association between heme iron,…

A meteor caught on film during its non-luminous free fall at terminal velocity ? Or an elaborate hoax ? Or something else ? I must admit that when I saw the video posted in the internet a few weeks…

If some drug-addled sociopath shoots up a movie theater or an elementary school, there is lots of speculation about the cause. In frustration and helplessness, people search for a magic bullet -…

Researchers have transplanted human neural stem cells (hNSCs) into the brains of nonhuman primates and assessed cell survival and differentiation. The results: After 22 and 24 months the neural stem…

There has been a unique rhythmic sound emanating for decades from the Southern Ocean. It was first described and named by submarine personnel in the 1960s who thought it sounded like a duck,…

Quantum mechanics is able to effectively explain three of the four fundamental forces of the Universe - electromagnetism, weak interaction and strong interaction - but it does not explain gravity,…

Feral camels in the Australian outback are reviled as pests. Yet they thrive, totaling some one million strong. How did they go from historic helper to overbearing invader? As usual, numbers make the…