One of my favorite songs of all time is "In the Garden." I know Willie's not got the prettiest of voices, but I love his version best of all. He lives hard and the gravel in his voice lends a depth…

According to Karl Popper, there are two contexts at work when trying to understand science. One is called 'the context of discovery', the other 'context of justification'. In many ways all human…

Recently, research has been conducted to see if certain life-history traits could be correlated with DNA mutation rates. By using whole-genome sequence data for 32 species of mammal, the researchers…

This video has become quite popular recently (so if you've already seen it, my apologies). It's about a preacher who claims that (hold on to your seatbelts) becoming christian changes your DNA.…

The ATLAS Collaboration, one of the two high-energy physics experiments at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, has just produced updated results of their ongoing search for new heavy particles decaying…

The blog run by Sascha Vongehr is unscholarly and unprofessional.  It vilifies and attempts to belittle anyone whose ideas about the foundations of quantum mechanics differ from his.  When…

One of the most engaging things about a landscape is how it changes after dark.  I haven't been at TRAC very often after sundown, but last night I was in an Amphibian Watch training program and…

Arctic Ice June 2011 The sun is the main driver of climate and weather.  The Arctic solar year could be plotted as a graph of the angle of the sun relative to the horizon,  negative in…

When I was a teenager, my two scientific passions were astronomy and botany.  However, at my school in the early 1960s, one could either do A-levels in Mathematics - Physics - Chemistry…

The last wild Arabian Oryx (Oryx leukoryx), an antelope species found only on the Arabian peninsula, (see figure 1) was shot in 1972, causing the species to be labled 'Extinct in the wild' by the…

Springer has commissioned an edited volume about the singularity hypothesis and related questions, intelligence explosion, acceleration, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. “The book examines…

This is the extended abstract of an article you cannot read anywhere, which ensures that one can later claim “nobody could have possibly foreseen as the relevant literature clearly shows …” (here…

Georges Metanomski posted this as a comment to my Quantum Crackpot Counter Challenge but it is a bit long.  After discussing this with George and with several people in support of this, I…

The Puyehue volcano in Chile was dormant for decades but it recently made its presence known, covering Lake Nahuel Huapi in Argentina with ash.  6-mile high plumes.  And this guy is diving…

The Puyehue volcano in Chile was dormant for decades but it recently made its presence known, covering Lake Nahuel Huapi in Argentina with ash.  6-mile high plumes.  And this guy is diving…

A federal judge has approved a request by prosecutors to officially dismiss all criminal charges against Osama bin Laden.   This makes sense - declaring terrorists criminals is what candidates…

A federal judge has approved a request by prosecutors to officially dismiss all criminal charges against Osama bin Laden.   This makes sense - declaring terrorists criminals is what candidates…

This week's friday fossil is Cheirotherium (or Isocheirotherium, whichever you want). Every year, thousands of geology students descend on the tiny Isle of Arran in the inner Hebrides. Its unique in…

I see a lot of talk on 'the future of science journalism'-- or science writing, or science funding, or science careers.  I'm guilty of contributing to it myself, but the 'future of' debates miss…

Artists, man! They'll cut a square of sod out of your front yard, stick it on the wall, and call it a masterpiece. No, but actually this is quite cool: Film is said to be a dying medium, and…