When we teach, and even communicate with people whom we assume to belong to some sort of common circle with ourselves, we simply assume that our audience knows or at least have heard about certain…

The following entries are an exchange between myself and Helen Barratt regarding superluminal neutrinos and related topics.  I have removed them to this archive for anyone that wants to peruse…

In a Nature paper published Oct. 26 by Sicardy et al from the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, Pluto was promoted to the ninth largest body orbiting the Sun. Its evil dwarf…

It's always a little surreal to see a new comment in the email on an old article. The older the article is, the stranger it is, especially when the comment itself is bizarre. Back in May, I wrote the…

Once in 737,000 times. That's how frequently happens what I saw yesterday evening, playing poker with my kids.  We were playing with eights and up since we were three, so 28 cards. And Filippo…

252 million years ago there was a watershed moment in the history of life on Earth - namely that there was almost no life left on Earth. As much as 90 percent of ocean organisms were extinguished,…

An underwater ridge may be the only thing holding back the retreat of Antarctica's fast-flowing Thwaites Glacier, which drains into west Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, and it could speed up within 20…

The phylogeny of the nervous system has been very well understood by evolutionary neuroscience. Since the first self-defense reactions (irritability) of the unicelular organisms, going through the…

Here's a little history, since some of my students are starting to look me up on the web.  It's also a story about how life is so weird that, if you wrote about it in a movie, the audience would…

I know that there are plenty of liberals and progressives that are scientific whacko's and embrace many anti-scientific sentiments.  I'm certainly not about to defend them, but .... Something…

I've been hearing about issues with seafood labeling (and mislabeling) for years. As it turns out, if you don't have a PCR machine in your kitchen, there's no way to know if the red snapper you…

Quick, have you heard of Professor Curie?  How about Marie Curie? If you're reading this article, you may have known who I meant with the first one, but how many of you instinctively thought of…

As you circle Earth from your polar-orbiting perch 512 miles above, may your daily output of 4 terabytes of data enable the Science 2.0 community to help educate the masses about climate change.…

In the following TED-talk, cancer researcher Jay Bradner talks about the work in going on in his lab. How they approach understanding the way cancer works, how they proceed in designing potential…

A process which caught some of the LHC Higgs analysts by surprise in the recent run of analyses for summer 2011 conferences is the production of multiple-lepton events by a process called "internal…

 A 400 meter, C-type asteroid will pass within 0.85 lunar distances from the Earth on November 8, 2011.  The attached animated illustration shows the Earth and moon flyby geometry for…

The Hayward fault runs smack dab through the UC Berkeley football stadium; it is being retrofitted this year. In the last week, there have been 3 earthquakes on or near the campus, with a magnitude…

On Nov. 8th, Mississippi will vote on a proposed 'personhood' constitutional amendment that will outlaw the destruction of embryos created in laboratories. The amendment has been endorsed by both…

A couple of months ago, I picked up on the news that Archaeopteryx had been rebumped in its* phylogeny to now sit among the dromeosaurs. I also mentioned near the end... I will say this, though: don…

'Lucid' dreamers are people who claim they are aware that they are dreaming and can deliberately control their actions in dreams. When people dream that they are performing a particular action, a…