It's Shark Week! Not that I begrudge the elasmobranchs their ten thousand minutes of fame, but come on, Discovery Channel, you do Shark Week every year. When are you going to switch it up and do…

Proofiness, slightly different than Stephen Colbert's truthiness, is basically finding statistics you want to believe to enhance your confirmation bias.  It was coined by Charles Seife, a…

If you are worried about big changes in Arctic sea ice, you are not alone - but it is hard to know how much is worth worrying about.  If you are worried, there is some slightly good news - even…

Psychology does not usually lend itself to live experimentation but the The American Psychological Association intends to change that perception.    They are featuring three public…

As a teaching assistant for the pilot section of Bio 44Y, I spend Wednesday afternoons accompanying 10 students of field ecology to Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Only five miles from the main…

What is the world coming to when a man can't even split atoms in his own kitchen any more?    Richard Handl said he has always been attracted to physics and chemistry and so he decided to…

What is the world coming to when a man can't even split atoms in his own kitchen any more?    Richard Handl said he has always been attracted to physics and chemistry and so he decided to…

I wrote an article talking about the spate of "X is awesome" and "Y is bad for you" articles that came out every year and even had a little quiz asking people if they could identify what superfood…

As Tiger Woods returns to action this weekend at the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational, mortal golfers wonder what's inside his head that makes him so much better than us. Well, chances are his brain…

Blogging will be non-existent for three days, and please do not expect me to answer your comments in the various threads -I am going to be on a ship carrying me to Greece, and, God bless it, there is…

Most of us don’t have a problem attributing emotions to primates, dogs, horses and other vertebrates. But what about invertebrates? That seems less obvious. They have smaller, less complex brains,…

I am happy to read from a message by our publication board chair that CMS has reached the important goal of publishing 100 scientific papers. The majority of these are analyses of collision data (75)…

I like to think at this blog as a place where both full outsiders and highly knowledgeable insiders coexist and exchange information. I know I often err on the side of producing posts which are…

The quality of TED talks is in free fall and has gotten only worse since the last time I mentioned this. So it is worth to point to a rare good presentation whenever one comes along. Geoffrey West’s…

Squids, as I may have mentioned before, are the snacks of the sea. Everyone who can eat them, does. Whales. Sharks. Birds. Other squids. They're swimming tubes of protein with no scales or bones to…

Scientists have discovered a fossilized skull of a tree-climbing ape dating back about 20 million years while looking for fossils in the remnants of an extinct volcano in Karamoja, a semi-arid region…

Scientists have discovered a fossilized skull of a tree-climbing ape dating back about 20 million years while looking for fossils in the remnants of an extinct volcano in Karamoja, a semi-arid region…

A drought has left the OC Fisher Reservoir in San Angelo State Park of West Texas almost empty, except for stagnant, dead fish that have made the water a deep red. Credit: Texas Parks and…

A drought has left the OC Fisher Reservoir in San Angelo State Park of West Texas almost empty, except for stagnant, dead fish that have made the water a deep red. Credit: Texas Parks and…

A piece of debris from NASA's space shuttle Columbia has been discovered in Texas, eight years after the 2003 disaster that destroyed the spacecraft and killed its seven-astronaut crew during re…