To ancient Romans, the depiction of female nudes in mosaics were meant to invoke beauty, carnality and eroticism while male bodies reflected determination, strength and power, according to work from…

To ancient Romans, the depiction of female nudes in mosaics were meant to invoke beauty, carnality and eroticism while male bodies reflected determination, strength and power, according to work from…

Here comes another post on ethics! This one is, I must admit, somewhat meta-ethical, despite my recent post about the limited value of meta-ethical discussions when it comes to debates in first-order…

Since its discovery in the early 1990s, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast has become the mainstay of human brain imaging. Today, the…

Since its discovery in the early 1990s, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) contrast has become the mainstay of human brain imaging. Today, the…

Only one species of hoatzins exists in South America today - or anywhere else.  Opisthocomus hoazin, also known as the Stinkbird or Canje Pheasant, has an unclear evolutionary history but was…

The origin of life remains a great mystery in biology. Billions of years of continental drift erased most of the record, and all that's left of the first half billion years of evolution are some…

One of the difficulties of judging the ways of people is the fact that highly intelligent individuals can at the same time be in the grip of a totally cockeyed ideology.  One reads things like…

You don't need to show kids a frying egg in a pan to get the message across about drugs; just show them this statistic.  Heroin and cocaine addicts in Spain have a fatality rate that is 14.3…

50,000 years ago, the Arctic tundra was not as drab as you might think, being an Ice Age - it was filled with colorful wildflowers and these wildflowers helped sustain woolly mammoths and other giant…

A lot of coffee is grown on and around Kilimanjaro, which towers almost 20,000 feet in the air.  The most traditional form of cultivation can be found in the gardens of the Chagga people. In…

Stampedes occur often, and not just in wild animal herds. Previously, physicists developed numerous models of crowd evacuation dynamics based on disasters such as the yearly Muslim Hajj or of the…

Wal-Mart caters to people with less money and there has long been a link between poverty and crime. Criminologists have instead taken the additional step of implicating Wal-Mart in crime rates.…

A journal that published papers on something called 'ethical leadership' wouldn't seem to need any strong evidence basis, just a lot of surveys and weak observational claims with pretty words…

A journal that published papers on something called 'ethical leadership' wouldn't seem to need any strong evidence basis, just a lot of surveys and weak observational claims with pretty words…

A drug given to pregnant mice with models of autism prevents autistic behavior in their offspring, according to a new report, and though the drug could not be administered prenatally in humans -…

Researchers have discovered an unusual bacterial protein that attaches to virtually any antibody and prevents it from binding to its target. Protein M, as it is called, probably helps some bacteria…

The autism community agrees that autism has its origins in early life—fotal and/or postnatal. A team led by Yehezkel Ben-Ari, Inserm Emeritus Research Director at the Mediterranean Institute of…

Satellite observations of global sea-surface temperature have shown that a 30-year upward trend slowed in the last 15 years.  It can't be due to successful mitigation, since outside the United…

 Mesopelagic fishes like lantern fishes (Myctophidae) and cyclothonids (Gonostomatidae) live in the twilight zone of the ocean, between 200 and 1,000 meters deep.  With a stock estimated…