Does torture work?  Hard to say, it certainly has proponents and the line of where people would use it versus the lives it might save is a subjective one but certainly whether it works at all…

My attempt at stimulating your curiosity with a scientific graph last time worked quite well, and I want to try it again. This time, however, you should not consider yourself eligible to participate…

Simon Baron-Cohen,  Cambridge University psychology and psychiatry professor labeled by fans as a world expert in autism and developmental psychopathology, says evil doesn't explain...evil. He…

Simon Baron-Cohen,  Cambridge University psychology and psychiatry professor labeled by fans as a world expert in autism and developmental psychopathology, says evil doesn't explain...evil. He…

Neurowear of Japan have created “necomimi” (neco and mimi being the words for cat and ear)  which takes brain signals and, they say, turns them into visible actions in the form of wiggling…

Neurowear of Japan have created “necomimi” (neco and mimi being the words for cat and ear)  which takes brain signals and, they say, turns them into visible actions in the form of wiggling…

50 years ago today Alan Shepard became the first American into space, launching at just after 9AM from the Space Coast of Florida and finishing just over 15 minutes and 117 miles up later.  The…

The Mississippi Floods One of the greatest strengths of science is its power to make accurate predictions.  Science predicted correctly that global warming would be caused by excessive burning…

Over 100 million years ago, late Mesozoic forests were chock full of a diverse group of plants of the class Equisetopsida, though only one genus, Equisetum, commonly called scouring rush or horsetail…

50 years ago today, Alan Shepard journeyed into the Final Frontier and became the first American in space, following USSR cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin by a period of weeks. Here is a look at some of…

Here, I present for you a snippet from the Western Electric document Introduction to Project Mercury and Site Handbook on one of the most important aspects of a space program that barely existed;…

As many of you know, I expressed here my strong doubts that the rumoured Higgs signal found by members of the ATLAS collaboration in the two-photon final state was due to a real particle, and went as…

In yesterday’s article on Science 2.0, Oh, Health Ranger...You Make Me Ill, said person was taken to task for saying: "The use of GMOs is the closest thing to 'Satanic' that you'll find in modern…

A community survey in England identified people with autism or asperger's syndrome  and found none of them knew they have it.    And autism turned out to be more prevalent in males…

In my American Literature course this semester, I worked to weave Joseph Campbell’s vision of the purpose of mythology throughout the pieces we read, to get students to consider the role that…

My Project Calliope satellite will be launched on an Interorbital Systems (IOS) rocket-- but IOS hasn't yet launched into orbit. Where are they, how close are we to launch, and what's the risk? Ad:…

Mike Rangers has a post called "14 signs that the collapse of our modern world has already begun." If it weren't so scary to think of how easily people can be conned, it would almost be funny that he…

This week's Friday Fossil is Helicoprion. What can I say. This is one weird bastard. And it used to look even weirder, The story is like this. At the turn of the last century, people started to…

What draws people to communal rituals has long been a topic of interest to sociologists and anthropologists.  What draws people to a communal ritual like walking on hot coals is a topic of…

Rice, the eponymous food of Asia, originated in China, and domesticated rice may have first appeared as far back as approximately 9,000 years ago in the Yangtze Valley of China. Previous research…