The path leading to today's technological society has gone through several phases of evolution. Carl Sagan distinguished three main phases of evolution: biological evolution, development of the…

  Following on my last article, I'd like to ask the question, weither some day, dark matter might be useful or even vital to a civilisation. This depends on the properties of the stuff,…

An extremely hot, massive young galaxy cluster named ACT-CL J0102-4915 is the largest ever seen in the distant Universe, and has been has been nicknamed El Gordo — the "big" or "fat one" in Spanish.…

A new study has used an interesting metric to highlight their concern about a disconnect between government funding of biomedical research and young investigators; Nobel Prizes.  As has been…

MIT physicist Cesar Hidalgo is experimenting with a new television program that gets scientists talking about their research and the wonders of discovery. He's not really like Jon Stewart, much more…

Start the year off with a new toy model for gravity. It is a toy, so let's just play with it and see what we learn. Feel free in the comments section to vote if I should keep this toy or return it…

In Bihar, one of the poorest states in India, 85 percent of people are not connected to the electricity grid so households use kerosene lamps when they can afford it and businesses use expensive and…

  The FDA puts a lot of stock into studies done on mice and many a warning label has been the outcome. Seems most of the really bad side effects hit pregnant rats the hardest. So, you can feel…

.  Many First Nations sites were inhabited continually for centuries. The discarded shells and scraps of bone from their food formed enormous mounds called middens. Left over time, these…

Solar photovoltaic (PV) mass-market polycrystalline panels are typically about 15% efficiency. Pretty terrible, right?  Maybe, maybe not.   Cars - both gasoline and electric vehicles,…

One of the more unusual cephalopods of my acquaintance (and I do not say this lightly) is the ram's horn squid, Spirula spirula. The species is named for its beautifully coiled internal shell, which…

Edwin Hubble's observation about the spectral redshift from nearby ``nebulae'' (galaxy 10 Mpc), published in 1929 got interpreted in terms of an ``Expanding Universe'' and eventually the ``Big Bang…

The universe expands. The galaxies, as they depart ever further from one another, are classically and even in Einstein’s special theory of relativity, described as dust particles: The universe as a…

How do airplanes fly? The next time you find yourself in an airplane, look around at your fellow passengers. How many of them would be able to explain to you what force keeps the hundreds of tons…

Is science just lacking a bumper sticker slogan?  Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, seems to think so.  Aside from being in New Scientist, you can see…

Is science just lacking a bumper sticker slogan?  Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University, seems to think so.  Aside from being in New Scientist, you can see…

Last March I posted about a little problem with the east cost longfin squid fishery: The nets that fishermen use to catch longfin squid also ensnare butterfish. And butterfish populations are very…

Last March I posted about a little problem with the east cost longfin squid fishery: The nets that fishermen use to catch longfin squid also ensnare butterfish. And butterfish populations are very…

In the autism community, there are plenty of heated opinions, which lead to even more heated attacks against those who believe differently. Some of the fiercest attacks come from those who believe in…

Okay, not despair. But frustration. This is my fourth year in this PhD program, and it's getting to be crunch time. Everything that influences and directs my degree program are pushing me formore…