When I received the message from Frau Christian Plachta an associate  at the Institute   yesterday “Pflanzenernährung mitgeteilt, dass Herr Konrad Mengel am 12.07.2012 im Alter von 82…

We are currently witnessing the USDA public commentary period on the Arctic Apple, a transgenic apple that does not exhibit browning upon injury or cutting.  The anti-browning trait was…

Since the unicellular creature, going through the evolution of the living organisms, until the recently ones, with complex and different kind of neurons, the nervous system has had only one purpose;…

Last year I wrote about somewhat silly claims that Wikipedia must be sexist because it had poor female representation. Wikipedia is an open, voluntary community, I argued, some people are just not…

New work at the John Innes Centre in Norwich is hoped to benefit African farmers who cannot afford fertilizer. Fertilizer is essential, it has made it possible to feed billions, but it brings…

New work at the John Innes Centre in Norwich is hoped to benefit African farmers who cannot afford fertilizer. Fertilizer is essential, it has made it possible to feed billions, but it brings…

Think too much of ol' Sol won't age you prematurely? Here's an unintentional science experiment on the effects of sun exposure.  It's like a before and after picture, except it's the same face.…

Think too much of ol' Sol won't age you prematurely? Here's an unintentional science experiment on the effects of sun exposure.  It's like a before and after picture, except it's the same face.…

The date for domesticated kitchenware has just gotten pushed back.  While it was believed that pottery dated back to 10,000 years ago, when humans changed from being hunter-gathers to…

The date for domesticated kitchenware has just gotten pushed back.  While it was believed that pottery dated back to 10,000 years ago, when humans changed from being hunter-gathers to…

Eugenics, the darling of elite, educated progressives 100 years ago in their quest to create Utopia, has been out of favor since those crazy Germans took it too far in the late 1930s, but there is…

If you want to scare somebody, convince them that there is a remote chance of danger in their food, water or medicine. Even if there is no evidence to back up the claim, people respond strongly to…

Most people do not want war in their backyard.  In geopolitics, people claim to love their neighbor but they still prepare to fight; Switzerland, the home of neutrality, still has hundreds of…

 In a number of scenarios of the global food and agriculture system in 2030, we examine to what extent increases in livestock and crop productivity, and changes in human diets, may expand the…

Are psychopaths made in a certain way and unable to change? Perhaps, says Aina Gullhaugen, a psychologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, but there is a discrepancy between the…

This is an almost verbatim copy of a press release from the London Centre for nanotechnology. When Watson, Crick and Wilkins discovered the DNA double helix nearly sixty years ago, they based their…

Why do clowns freak us out?  And why are robots cute until they look too much like people, and then then they creep us out? It's our old friend the Uncanny Valley and it basically postulates…

Global climate change has stimulated efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. Photosynthetic organisms use solar energy to generate reducing equivalents and incorporate atmospheric CO2 into organic molecules…

"Given that the search for the Higgs took some 45 years, tens of thousands of scientists and engineers, billions of dollars, not to mention numerous divorces, huge amounts of sleep deprivation, tens…

Sometimes Science 2.0 has to swim against the stream. The stream, in this case, has been the long-standing irrational belief that America 'needs' more scientists. There are two reasons I have always…