NPR Busts 5 Common Myths Of GMOs

NPR Busts 5 Common Myths Of GMOs

Wouldn't it be great if seeds from GMO plants were sterile?  Then, unlike with regular seeds, farmers would have to buy them over and over again. Wait, Monsanto already does that, right?…
NPR Busts 5 Common Myths Of GMOs

NPR Busts 5 Common Myths Of GMOs

Wouldn't it be great if seeds from GMO plants were sterile?  Then, unlike with regular seeds, farmers would have to buy them over and over again. Wait, Monsanto already does that, right?…
Cyberbullying Does Not 'Cause' Teen Suicide

Cyberbullying Does Not 'Cause' Teen Suicide

While it makes for convenient mainstream media news pieces to draw convenient lines between cyber-bullying and suicide and thus declare that ending bullying would end suicides, it's not so simplistic…
Biodiversity conservation: in situ and ex situ.

Biodiversity conservation: in situ and ex situ.

I had a chance to witness plant conservation sites in Sweden, Japan  Germany and India. Almost all the plant species are conserved in cold storage , in liquid nitrogen, and in different methods…
Jonah Lehrer, Proust, And The Tyranny Of Salami

Jonah Lehrer, Proust, And The Tyranny Of Salami

In the scientific community, researchers call it salami slicing. Appropriately, the act consists of shaving down a collected dataset until a scientist reaches the smallest scrap of result that still…
The Quote of the Week

The Quote of the Week

"The problem of averaging data containing discrepant values is nicely discussed in Ref. x [...] It is difficult to develop a procedure that handles simultaneously in a reasonable way two basic…
Winners Of SciVal Award Brazil 2012 Announced

Winners Of SciVal Award Brazil 2012 Announced

Scientific products and services company Elsevier and the Federal Coordination of Improvement of Personnel in Higher Education (Capes / MEC), today announced the winners of the second edition of…
Lottery Tickets - To Swap, Or Not To Swap?

Lottery Tickets - To Swap, Or Not To Swap?

If you had just bought a lottery ticket, would you be willing to swap it? If you’re like most people, the answer would be an emphatic ‘No’. But why? Given that a properly-run lottery is an entirely…
Measuring Up To The Happiness Standard

Measuring Up To The Happiness Standard

By all accounts, my friend Lori has a fabulous sense of style. Plus, she really knows how to find a bargain. The outfits she assembles from Goodwill and vintage clothing shops continue to defy…
Helicobacter Pylori

Helicobacter Pylori

Helicobacter is a good example in our changing understanding of the role of microbes and the human body environment.  Some may recall that this particular bacteria was introduced to the public…
Atom Interferometry - Detecting The Undetectable

Atom Interferometry - Detecting The Undetectable

If one beam travels a fixed length and another travels an extra distance or in some other slightly different way, the two light beams overlap and interfere when they meet up, creating an interference…
Essays On Emergence Part I

Essays On Emergence Part I

I am about to go to an informal workshop on naturalism and its implications, organized by cosmologist Sean Carroll. The list of participants is impressive, including Pat Churchland, Jerry Coyne,…