Today I turn 45 years of age. Overall, physically I do not feel much different from, say, 15 years ago. I consider myself lucky, since I am generally in good health. Never have I had to sleep in a…

Sure, Los Angeles has a terrible smog issue but it could be worse; movie stars could live on Titan.  Titan, Saturn's largest moon, looks like a dirty orange ball but the actual composition is…

The search for actively 'jumping' genes in humans has found new evidence that the genome contains numerous pesky mobile elements that may help to explain why people have such a variety of physical…

Mice have a healthy concept of fear and so they fear the scent of a predator.   While it seems obvious that brains quickly figure out with a sniff that a predator, like a cat, is nearby, the…

Facebook has always been plagued with privacy issues, such as revealing to third parties personal information which may be used to sell you goods and services.  While to some, this may seem like…

A Proposal for the District Community Jury Style Bank:   Executive Summary: A Jury Style Bank would be a wholly innovative form of banking and community development which can expand the formal…

How much actual on-task work do you do on a typically work day? The myth is everyone produces 8 hours of useful, targetted work in an 8.5 hour work day (with unpaid lunch). Staying in the office…

Talking about relativity one should not forget Galileo's great contributions to - or perhaps in fact foundations of - physics. But more fun are Galileos researches on falling bodies and…

In case you don't know it, the Navy is not the 1970s "Village People" branch of the military.  These guys do some cool stuff and are making even cooler toys to do it with. Want to find future…

A section of the people .... made capital out of their own ignorance. When I read this I immediately thought of a certain British commentator who denies the anthropogenic contribution to climate…

The Squids 4 Kids outreach program I helped to start up is going strong! We've been doing a number of local dissections, both in and out of classrooms, and shipping squid around the country. They…

Humans have about 23,000 genes and we are at the top of the food chain but the animal with the most genes is the near-microscopic freshwater crustacean Daphnia pulex, or water flea, clocking in…

Coffee can be quite good for you, as any number of studies have shown.   But you still have to take some personal responsibility for moderation because companies like Starbuck's are not going to…

There are exceptions, of course - some athletes will never be ethical no matter how much coaching they receive and not all coaches are ethical, but overall coaching helps athletes become more than…

Biofuels were all the rage in the 1990s, with Vice-President Al Gore declaring them the Holy Grail of fossil fuel replacement.    Unfortunately, no quality science agreed with that…

New papers in arXiv show that the Kepler space telescope continues to fulfill its mission of searching for exoplanets, especially those in the 'habitable' zone, a region where liquid water could…

Despite the various claims surrounding the idea of alien visitation in the past, one of the primary arguments has been the creation of immense structures in the past that have been argued as being…

A recent paper in the arxiv describes the observation, in 7 TeV proton-proton collisions produced by the LHC collider in the core of the LHCb detector, of a new decay mode of the particle called "B…

Did you ever wonder why both, Einstein’s relativity theory and quantum physics, in theory as well as experiment, seem obsessed with the nature of light? The velocity of light, light clocks, entangled…

FIS (Fish Information and Services, the "most comprehensive website for the commercial fishing industry") has a run of recent squid news. Let's start with Illex argentinus, the Argentinian shortfin…