Gout is a painful rheumatic condition. It occurs when uric acid, a bodily waste product, crystallizes in joints and soft tissues. Gout is often associated with the big toe, but that turns out to be…

Deciding who gets a lung transplant - and thereby who doesn’t - is not easy.  Lungs can only be transplanted from people who are organ donors, who are brain dead, and who died in such a way that…

The problem of classifying elements of a data set as belonging to one class or another, depending on their characteristics, is a very, very well-studied one, and one which is particularly important…

Researchers using magnetic imaging to assess memory  have shown that soccer players who frequently head the ball have brain abnormalities resembling those found in patients with concussion (mild…

“Converging evidence indicates that blirtatiousness is unique in its ability to amplify people’s qualities, making these qualities more readily observable to perceivers.” Blirtatiousness in this…

Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship - Compatibility between Cultural and Biological Approaches.Author – Maximilian HollandAvailable from Amazon and online at http://maximilianholland.com/  …

By outsourcing manufacturing to China - sending jobs Americans don't want, according to immigration experts - America is also outsourcing carbon dioxide emissions. China is now doing the same thing,…

With nuclear power trapped in committee meetings and biofuels exposed as a bad idea, the search for another carbon-neutral alternative is ongoing. While the sun gives us enough energy in an hour to…

An experiment to probe brain circuits involved in compulsive behavior - where mice were bred missing a gene suspected to be involved in compulsive behavior and obesity - resulted in offspring…

Though the mechanism responsible for generating part of the skeletal support for the membrane in animal cells is not yet understood, researchers have found a well-defined layer beneath the cell outer…

A 350-year-old mathematical mystery, that two pendulum clocks mounted together could swing in opposite directions, due to tiny vibrations in the beam caused by both clocks affecting their…

Since 1996, farmers across the world have planted more than a billion acres of genetically modified corn and cotton that produce insecticidal proteins from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis,…

Overprecision, excessive confidence in the accuracy of our knowledge, can have profound consequences in various ways, making people intolerant of dissenting views,  leading physicians to…

For a human, knowing the difference between the "charge" of a battery and being charged in a crime is easy. Any three-year-old can look at a cartoon of a chicken and say "That's a chicken" but for…

When a liver from a deceased adult or adolescent donor is split into two separate portions for transplantation, with the smaller portion going to a young child and the larger to an adult, the child…

The Sea of Galilee, located in the North of Israel, has numerous significant archaeological sites and an ancient structure underneath the waves adds to its mysteries. The cone-shaped monument,…

While the universe is littered with planets, comets and lots of other rocky bodies, how tiny grains of dust in the disc around a young star grow bigger and bigger, to eventually become rubble and…

I mentioned at the end of last week's post about the new "earliest bird" that there were murmurs of discontent about the authenticity of the fossil specimen of Anchrionis. This fossil has come from…

I’ve already mentioned the nonsensical paper “published” in (surprise, surprise) arXiv in which the authors claim that the origin of life occurred long before the origin of the Earth based on the…

This morning I arrived to my office with one idea to develop, and I decided to work on the blackboard that is hung on the wall opposite to where I sit. I seldom use it, but for some reason it seems…