If you pay a lot of taxes and get little to show for it, you don't have much trust in government, but if you are in a disaster-prone area, you have more confidence in government than most, say…

Here's a way to make the bloated costs of health care reform seem more palatable to opponents - it will knock 220,000 illegal immigrants out of the health care system just in California alone. A new…

Too lazy to exercise?  In a world full of concern about global warming and estrogen in rivers and anti-vaccine hippies trying to bring back polio, science has some good news for a change; even…

Botany: A Blooming History And now we return to part one of this series 1. A Confusion of Names We now meet Thomas Fairchild (1667? – 1729).  Wikipedia is rather terse about him:…

Our own body is covered with entire (albeit tiny) ecosystems. Incredible numbers of bacterial strains live in and on the human body. And the belly button seems to be a place extraordinarily rich in…

History Mysteries #1 - Who Shot The Tomatoes?orThe Astonishment of a Sailor on Finding Buckshot in His Portion of Tomatoes. Hidden in the details of the Jeannette Expedition one finds a factor in…

According to an astrophysicist at UC Santa Barbara, 'zombie' stars may be a way to measure dark energy.   Type Ia supernovae are stars that have been observed since 1054 A.D., when an exploding…

An article in Marine Ecology Progress Series found evidence of plastic waste in more than nine percent of the stomachs of fish collected during a recent voyage by graduate students from…

As airplanes fly through clouds, they can punch holes through those with supercooled water, or water that has remained in liquid form below its freezing point and researchers are now saying this…

Using the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, researchers have examined two fossilized birds, Gansus yumenensis and Confuciusornis sanctus. Confuciusornis sanctus , which lived 120 million…

How easy is it to falsify memory?  Perhaps as easy as a little bit of social pressure, according to research at the Weizmann Institute. In a forthcoming Science study, they show a unique…

The problem with your diet is not that you’ve been eating the wrong food, but rather you’ve been thinking about your food all wrong.  According to Alia Crum, a clinical psychology researcher at…

"San Francisco doesn't realize that social legislation is like garlic," writes Meghan Daum at the LA Times. "Used sparingly, it can provide a useful kick to a dish, but overused and it makes people…

"San Francisco doesn't realize that social legislation is like garlic," writes Meghan Daum at the LA Times. "Used sparingly, it can provide a useful kick to a dish, but overused and it makes people…

You know a problem is real when academics say they don't need 5 more years of funding to know what is going to happen.   But that's the situation in the Great Lakes and the threated posed by…

Over all that quantum physics lately, I have totally neglected a much more important issue: our happiness. And I mean true happiness of course, not the fake stuff you get from a loving family and…

Francis Thackeray, a South African anthropologist and the director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, has asked permission from the Church of…

Twice as many people have recently died in Europe from eating organic food than died in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan - combined. …

Twice as many people have recently died in Europe from eating organic food than died in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan - combined. …

John Lennon disagreed with Paul McCartney on more than Macca's post-Beatles career arc - not the outrageous success part, but the leftwing proselytizing. John Lennon's last personal assistant said as…