Synthetic surfaces, popularly called Astroturf since the Houston Astrodome made it famous, were introduced in the 1960s to reduce strain on the playing surface and thus reduce field maintenance. But…

A tiny fossil, the nearly complete skeleton of a bird that would have fit in the palm of your hand and weighed less than an ounce, offers clues to the precursors of swift and hummingbird wings.…

Are 'smart' objects the future? People certainly like so-called smart phones, and almost every home in America has a computer, and making everything 'smart' might be a future trend, say humanities…

Imagine being the project scientist for a NASA experiment and getting an email telling you that a 3,100 lb. defunct spy satellite dating back to the Cold War might crash into your baby? That's…

In America, only two political parties can win the presidency. For that reason the two parties tend to have a 'big tent' mentality and embrace a lot of fringe members in return for votes. The perfect…

What Is Exogenous Semiotic Entropy ? The phrase exogenous semiotic entropy is from a recent "peer reviewed" "paper".  It looks like something that came out of a buzzphrase generator which was…

Doing a Top 10 List Of Science Bloggers is going to be subjective - so many people in science media write because so many in the audience prefer different styles and different content - that is why…

Doing a Top 10 List Of Science Bloggers is going to be subjective - so many people in science media write because so many in the audience prefer different styles and different content - that is why…

In the modern regulatory environment, start-ups and smaller companies tend to be less well-known. The costs are increasingly high and its hard to get venture capital funding without  knowing how…

If you read THE WIRED WORLD IN 2013 Annual Trend Report you may have seen my article predicting we would make a big advancement on the road to growing one of the Big 5 organs from a person's own stem…

As planets age the general rule is that they become darker and cooler - but Saturn is an exception. Why it looks so young for its age has been a space science topic since the late 1960s but a paper…

The Windows® NTFS disk filing system was first introduced in 1993, but despite its undoubted sophistication, not everyone is convinced that it is perfectly tuned for all possible eventualities.…

As a researcher in the fields of exact science and philosophy, I am obsessed with “truth”, which is a label of approval we assign to concepts that we judge to be consistent in a certain sense…

When I was a lad, I was fascinated by plant classification, enjoying the beds in our school botanic garden laid out according to different plant families.  Flowering plants (angiosperms)…

Love: An Almost Scientific Investigation What Is Love ? If I could answer that long-standing question in precise scientific terms with error bars I would be sure to get a Nobel prize and lynched. I…

Direct current (DC) In a DC (direct current) circuit where the electricity flows in one direction, we can think of a battery as a storage tank like the water tower in your neighborhood. If nobody…

Friends! This is a desperate cry for help. No, I don't think that the famous Fermi paradox is the actual coverup. But the certain chain of events would definitely bring this idea to any unbiased…

Elsevier and the Integrated Earth Data Applications facility at Columbia University have announced a competition to improve preservation of and access to research data in the earth sciences. …

There is no question that increased use of natural gas has been good for the atmosphere - energy CO2 emissions are down to early 1990s levels in America and coal is at early 1980s levels of emissions…

Brown and white fat cells in a living organism can be converted from one cell type to the other, according to a study using mice as a model organism. Two types of fat cells are found in mammals:…