Jared Diamond is not impressed by modern social sciences, like psychology and anthropology, because of the need to try and make claims about human nature by doing surveys or visiting a place and then…

In a comment on You, Andromeda, And The Largest Structure In The Universe, Mike Crow posted a picture of Andromeda, made from 40 hours of his exposure, 5 minutes at time, in his driveway. My first…

Much has been made of recent efforts to address the gun control issue, in the wake of the shootings of school children in Newtown, Ct.  While the media plays up the controversy, and various…

The new PDG - a full-size copy of the glorious "Review of Particle Properties"- is on my desk since its arrival a few weeks ago, but only today did I get some time to browse it. It is always awesome…

The rumor mill has it that Elsevier is in advanced talks to buy Science 2.0 fave Mendeley, a platform academics use to collate PDFS and share research and collaborate via a social network (and a…

While every study ever done shows that people who consume fewer calories than they burn will lose weight, it is as well known that some people cannot or will not eat less or exercise. For those…

In 2005, a decade and a half of environmental lobbying convinced President George W. Bush and the U.S. Congress that corn ethanol was a promising fossil fuel substitute which would reduce both…

Pregnant women who were vaccinated against pandemic influenza in 2009 were not at increased risk of experiencing fetal death, though pregnant women who contracted influenza had an increased risk of…

About 200 million people across 75 of the poorest countries in the world are now infected by the blood parasite Schistosoma haematobium (S. haematobium). The infection causes severe urogenital…

While the developed world gets all of the attention for obesity, the developing world is only different in one sense; they retain more severely undernourished people even while obese and overweight…

If you are going to use 'entanglement' to teleport quantum information on a practical scale, it needs to be worked out how entanglement could be 'recycled' to increase the efficiency of these…

It's all over the internet now, the story of the twin brothers in Belgium who were deaf and going blind and decided not to kill themselves in a joint suicide, but instead to seek legal euthanasia.…

There is currently a Twitter survey going on to establish a list of favorite philosophers of all time, organized by Oxford University Press. I don’t know the results yet, but my entries would have…

For two decades, carbon dioxide was touted as the silver bullet for halting climate change.  What about methane, what about NO2, and what about soot? Soot, that black carbon that causes smoggy…

Want concerns about transmission of disease and antibiotic resistance to get attention?  Show that pretty tropical fish are at risk. The $15 billion ornamental fish industry has sounded the…

Researchers have discovered a way to stimulate the brain's natural defense mechanisms in people with Alzheimer's disease.  One of the main characteristics of Alzheimer's disease is the…

A recent article titled ‘Protective buttressing of the human fist and the evolution of human hands’ rests on the assumption that human evolution has been characterised by competition for mates,…

Scientists have established that the majority of ozone-depleting iodine oxide observed over the remote ocean comes from a previously unknown marine source - the principal source of iodine oxide can…

January 10th came and went last week. Did you notice? Perhaps you did if losing weight was part of your New Year's Resolution. Because chances are that by day 10 you were off the wagon. What could…

The HIrisPlex DNA analysis system that can establish hair and eye color from forensic samples in modern crime scenes can also identify details from ancient human remains, according to a paper which…