Tobacco is a high-density crop that is mowed several times throughout its cycle and that can be a good thing, because it can produce as much as 160 tons of fresh biomass per hectare. Biomass that is…

Singlet oxygen is an electronically excited state of oxygen that is less stable than normal oxygen. Its high reactivity has enabled its use in photodynamic therapy, in which light is used in…

Global warming may be a topic of debate and arguments about measurements and models, but some things are measurable right now, like environmental pollutants.  Although persistent…

A new paper suggests that genes evolve more rapidly in species containing germ plasm, which challenges a long held belief about the way certain species of vertebrates evolved.  The…

Dog owners in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia might want to consider penning up their dogs more often: hybridization of wolves with shepherd dogs might be more common, and more recent, than…

Glacial cycles at 104-yr time scale have been the focus of Quaternary paleoclimatology over the last century. In recent years with the emergence of continuous high-resolution records (ice cores, deep…

It’s been all over the news.  Depending on the accuracy of the headline, you may conclude that worms live longer when exposed to glucosamine, mice live 10 percent longer when fed glucosamine or…

Below is a clip from a chapter of my book where I describe the story of the silicon microvertex detector of the CDF experiment. CDF collected proton-antiproton collisions from the Tevatron collider…

Google Earth Mystery Object? - Hardly! What is it that you can see in this snapshot of Google Earth in the vicinity of Amsterdam Island? If you think it's a special antenna for transmitting…

The mechanism which underlies the susceptibility of liver disease patients to life-threatening infection has been uncovered by Wellcome Trust-funded medical scientists, who have also suggested a…

Idioscenic Conjecture I am posting some ideas here to promote discussion of the psychology of conspiracism. I suggest that the mere fact of knowing that some events have been caused by C may overly…

"They can smell but they can't distinguish between chemical cues," Dixson said. Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is absorbed into ocean waters, where it dissolves and lowers the pH of the…

A phenomenon has long been believed in psychology: traumatic experiences induce behavioral disorders that are passed down from one generation to the next, a kind of psychological epigenetics.…

Scientists at Yale University have devised a dramatically faster way of identifying and characterizing complex alloys known as bulk metallic glasses (BMGs), a versatile type of pliable glass that's…

The complexity of biology can befuddle even the most sophisticated light microscopes because biological samples bend light in unpredictable ways, returning difficult-to-interpret information to the…

In a new study, researchers from North Carolina State University, UNC-Chapel Hill and other institutions have taken the first steps toward creating a roadmap that may help scientists narrow down the…

Live electronic music is an oxymoron. Clearly if you have hired Paris Hilton as a deejay, you are not hiring her because she is any sort of keen ear. If she never showed up, the music would go…

Self-healing materials can repair themselves by restoring their initial molecular structure after the damage and scientists from Evonik Industries and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have…

Researchers recently used an array of high-speed video cameras operating at 7,500 frames a second to capture the wing and body motion of Drosophila hydei after they encountered an image of an…

Professional forester and writer Norm Benson recently got a healthy dose of anti-science environmentalism, because he wrote an article endorsing a vitamin-enriched bowl of rice that, nonetheless, is…