Dark matter and dark energy is thought to account for up to 80% of the matter in the universe. Does it exist? Well, it has to, we just can't see it. So what is it? We better know what it isn't. Dark…

I stayed up late (California) to watch the Higgs announcement and posted various thoughts of my own, and comments from the presentations, on my Twitter feed.  So I saw first hand a strange…

Living in the guts of worms are seemingly innocuous Photorhabdus luminescens bacteria that contribute to the worms' survival. Yet with a flip of a genetic switch, those same bacteria transform from…

Aerosols from relatively small volcanic eruptions can be boosted into the high atmosphere by weather systems such as monsoons and affect global temperatures, according to a new study.  It has…

The Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) was not too big to fail. Although it was a massive opportunity for the United States to maintain its primacy in high-energy physics and basic research, the…

Researchers have been able to photograph the shadow of a single atom for the first time. And this absorption imaging took five years of work. They basically wanted to investigate how few atoms…

Although boredom very rarely escapes the notice of those suffering from it, constructing a purely technical instrument for reliably recognising boredom in humans is currently rated as a non-trivial…

Plato famously maintained that knowledge is “justified true belief,” meaning that to claim the status of knowledge our beliefs (say, that the earth goes around the sun, rather than the other way…

Are you bored of the Higgsteria yet? Well, here's another issue that needs your attention. The Giant’s causeway is one of the most beautiful examples of columnar jointing in the world, formed during…

What is organic farming and “organic food”?  In the EU in many stores, particularly in Germany, there are shelves with the label “organic food”. To my surprise they cost almost double or one…

This is an apology and a promise - as every time there is a big event or deadline, everything else gets pushed down, creating a long backlog. My mailbox is in an awful state, and here too I am doing…

Crocodiles and humans are natural competitors. In all our history they have been there, silently waiting in the waters of our shared world, and only in our most recent history have we had the wisdom…

Well, that Nibiru rapture on July 2nd never happened but it does not mean we are out of the woods.  In July of 1996, a barely tolerable movie called "Independence Day" had a plot where aliens…

Well, that Nibiru rapture on July 2nd never happened but it does not mean we are out of the woods.  In July of 1996, a barely tolerable movie called "Independence Day" had a plot where aliens…

You remember when temperatures became really moderate and every heat wave could no longer be called global warming because we were not warning.  We were enduring climate change instead. That…

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, General in the War On Choice, is nothing if not inconsistent.  You can't decide how much salt to use in NYC or decide what size soda to buy, thanks to imperial fiat, but…

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, General in the War On Choice, is nothing if not inconsistent.  You can't decide how much salt to use in NYC or decide what size soda to buy, thanks to imperial fiat, but…

Rolf is drawing the conclusions. He just asked the audience: "I think we have it. Do you agree ?" And a roar of consensus fills the auditorium. The slide says "The observation of a new particle…

At CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented their latest results in the search for the Higgs particle. Both experiments see strong indications for the…

[ The previous entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) , here (part 2) , here (part 3) ,  here (part 4), and here (part 5) . The report of the CMS seminar is here.]…