It may turn out that coffee is bad for you. The World Health Organization already lists it as a possible carcinogen, despite any evidence, but they do the same thing about cell phones, in contrast to…

If you've ever wondered why the man in your life can't recall your discussion of organic squash from 20 minutes ago but he can vividly recall the time 11 years ago when you insulted his "Captain…

Plants help keep us cool by absorbing CO2 - sometimes too cool.  The arrival of the first plants 470 million years ago triggered a series of ice ages, according to a research team that set out…

...this turns up. This thing is Siphusauctum gregarium, and is known from over 1000 specimens. It probably looked something like this, The good news is that it's published in PLoS ONE so you can go…

NGC 3324, on the northern outskirts of the chaotic environment of the Carina Nebula in the constellation of Carina (The Keel, part of Jason’s ship the Argo), is about 7500 light-years from Earth and…

We are all familiar with velocities. Velocities tell us how positions change with time. Velocities can not be assigned to individual objects, as they describe a relation between pairs of objects. We…

NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft has allowed researchers to measure neutral "alien" particles entering our solar system from interstellar space; a first look at the…

If you ask Europeans about the metric system, they declare America should get with the program because it is more popular. When it comes to speaking English, however, barely a third of the EU's…

A study of 64,659 women, recently published in the journal Academic Radiology, found that while 1,246 of these women were at high enough breast cancer risk to recommend additional screening with MRI,…

The Wall Street Journal published an excellent case study in denialism on Friday, in the form of a letter from sixteen scientists seeking to perpetuate gridlock in climate policy.  While nothing…

Over 30 percent of all terrorist attacks from 1970 to 2008 occurred in just five metropolitan U.S. counties, according to a report published today by researchers in the National Consortium for the…

HPV Vaccine Side Effects: An Introduction As with any medicine, there are possible side effects with HPV vaccines (Gardasil® and Cervarix®). However, not everyone who receives the HPV…

The intersection of medical technology, medical practice and ethical principles has long been an important field of study but the rapid advance of medical technology has made it perhaps the most…

Klaudia Brix of Jacobs University has resigned from the board of the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology,  the official publication of the Italian Society of Anatomy and Histology, because…

Last week I spent a few interesting days in the pleasant winter setting of Engelberg, a mountain location in the Swiss alps. There I attended the CHIPP 2012 winter school, an event organized by…

Conventional wisdom holds you're born with perfect pitch or you're not. The conventional wisdom is wrong. Here's how to train perfect pitch. For my book Brain Trust, I interviewed Diana Deutsch,…

I hope The Atlantic is enjoying its page views - pseudoscience sells and they are pushing it out there.  After an ill-fated no-science-allowed cultural diatribe (by a food critic, no less)…

I hope The Atlantic is enjoying its page views - pseudoscience sells and they are pushing it out there.  After an ill-fated no-science-allowed cultural diatribe (by a food critic, no less)…

First I will play the old gauge symmetry game repeated everywhere for EM. I will then teach that old dog a new trick that ends up with the same bone. I will then struggle a little over the lingo to…

Most of the time, fishermen fish for one particular creature--be it tuna, sardines, or shrimp. Unfortunately, species tend to exist in a commingled muddle called ecology, and it's often…