In many animals, the brain is located in a specific structure like the head, along with sensory organs and often together with the mouth. However, there are distantly related animals which have a…

Schizophrenia may affect up to 1 percent of the population, it is diagnosed primarily in the teenage or early adult years, and is associated with problems in mental ability and memory. People who…

Today I spent the better part of the afternoon in the company of 150 high-school students at the Liceo Fermi in Padova, giving a seminar on particle physics in the context of a project called…

A lifelong diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids can inhibit growth of breast cancer tumors by 30 percent, according to new research published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, which they say is…

Bats are the stealth bombers of the animal kingdom. Equipped with radar-like echolocation, the dark form of the bat allows this creature to stay in the shadows before launching into attack on its…

Gravity works, it is a dominant force in physics, but at the very large and very small scales it holds a lot of mysteries left to be solved.  Foe example, when it comes to stars in young star…

If you have watched the strange, sad decline of psychology over the last decade, you may have started to wonder if any conclusions are legitimate. With evolutionary psychology claiming voting…

If you have watched the strange, sad decline of psychology over the last decade, you may have started to wonder if any conclusions are legitimate. With evolutionary psychology claiming voting…

In the UK, pharmaceutical innovation seems to be dying. The supply of new medicines has conspicuously dwindled in recent decades but that is not due to innovation issues, it is because regulations…

The hypothesis that tomato fruits from organic farming and greater stressing conditions associated with organic farming leads to more nutritional compounds, such as phenolics and vitamin C, recently…

First some exciting news about space-flight.  Then I'll finish with a followup (and speculative) reflection on our recent multiple encounters with space rocks. = NASA's NIAC: New and Innovative…

The Sun's eruptive events can change even more radically than the weather in Kentucky. Some eruptive events come just with a solar flare, while some provide additional ejection of solar material, a…

Imagine that you’re a young rat. You’re in the woods, doing rat things among the dead foliage. Suddenly, off to your left, you hear a sound that you've never heard before. It’s loud, it’s…

Sunspots on the surface of the Sun happen when magnetic fields rearrange and realign, forming dark spots Over the course of the last 48 hours, scientists watched a giant sunspot form - it has…

Meg Urry was on the senior scientific staff at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which runs the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA. That's no surprise to people outside the government…

In some Chinese cities, breathing has recently become demonstrably hazardous to your health.  According to the US embassy's monitoring station, air pollution has skipped over unhealthy, exceeded…

By recording the automatic brain wave responses of 100 school-aged children to speech sounds, researchers found that the very best readers encoded the sound most consistently while the poorest…

Howard Blume over at “looseendsdotme” in Assisted Suicide for Jumpers provides us with a strange article on my Suicidal Philosophy (which is as yet largely unpublished for reasons that should be…

Understanding how and why diversification occurs is important for understanding why there are so many species on Earth.  A new study found that similar, or even identical, mutations can occur…

A biological marker in the immune system predicts our ability to fight off the common cold, starting at about age 22, according to a recent paper in JAMA.  The study found that the length of…