In a previous article I built a magnetic stirrer using littleBits and Erector set parts for the home laboratory. At the end of the article I added a design for a sample rotator (a device used to…

Currently in the UK, when health care workers are "unequivocally guilty of willful or reckless neglect or mistreatment of patients" that is not criminal behavior but Dr. Jo Bibby, Director of…

Those familiar with the Lord of the Rings will remember the Huorns.  According to the Lord of the Rings Wiki: Mostly the Huorns stood as dark trees in the deepest forests, gnarled and…

"The most important task at hand is experimental. Based on our considerations of dynamical symmetry breaking through preons and the assumption of universal size for all quarks and leptons, we are led…

Where do new genes come from? It's a long standing debate in evolutionary biology but a new paper in Science Express says that new genes are created from non-coding DNA, and more rapidly than…

If you think wilding was much more civilized when you were young, well, you're old. Older people are more likely to regard the behavior of younger people as anti-social, even if it doesn't bother…

It was once commonly known than ancient Carthaginians sacrificed their children. The evidence was right there, in historical documents and graves. The city-state of ancient Carthage was a Phoenician…

A new paper has demonstrated the power of path tracking to measure social behavior and automatically determine dogs' personalities. How dogs behave during walks reveals a lot about traits such as…

Human induced-pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from human umbilical cord-blood are capable of repairing damaged retinal vascular tissue in mice, according to a new paper. The adult stem…

What would you do if you were on a borehole drilling expedition and tapped into 1,000 degree Celcius magma at slightly over a mile deep? Most people would run but the Icelandic Deep Drilling Project…

Researchers have sequenced the genome of the world's oldest continuously surviving cancer, a transmissible genital cancer which causes grotesque genital tumors in dogs around the world. It first…

I must say I feel proud of myself tonight. In Italy a unified procedure to rank candidates to the position of associate or full professor has been launched last year, and I of course participated to…

A new paper says the the human sense of smell can detect dietary fat in food. As the most calorically dense nutrient, fat has been a desired energy source across much of human evolution - but those…

Though media stories about obesity are still prevalent, what gets left out is that American obesity rates have stabilized. It's unclear why. Some papers claim it was due to the lingering stagnant…

So far, the Affordable Care Act and its mandate for insurance coverage has been a disaster. It isn't just that the website doesn't work, it's that the bulk of the people signing up for the program…

The climate is a sensitive balancing act. There are a lot of knobs turning, making the future difficult to model. But trees have done a surprisingly good job adapting quickly to keep atmospheric…

Diversity police regulate success by making overachievers victims of their own success. They spread quickly, preventing too much dominance by undercutting whatever gets ahead and enforcing lots of…

Marijuana is enjoying a golden age of cultural advocacy, to such an extent that its medical benefits are exaggerated while the obvious impact on health is trivialized. The health implications are…

America has developed a surveillance problem, hiding behind a facade of security. Britain has been down this road before, the average citizen in London is photographed 300 times per day by government…

Some recent poll results show that right wing people in America have widened the gap of evolution acceptance. Generally, only a few points on this issue have separated the parties but if you know…