Arctic Heroes #2 - North Pole 1 The first ever weather station on an ice floe was North Pole 1, set up May 21 1937 by a team of Russians and manned by four heroes.  The record of that event…

What Price Freedom Of Information ? There has been a great deal of fuss over a few emails and the topic of freedom of information in relation to the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.…

Prayer to the Funding Agency Reviewer(dedicated to those who worry about the detrimental effect of rumours) Oh Funding Reviewer, on whose handsRests the destiny of full many an experiment:Be true to…

Rajasthan Patrika has reported that there is water for 3 to 4 days left for Jaipur and Ajmer. What will happen then. Will Jaipur and Ajmer survive for another 50 years or 5 years if no water is left.…

Making the rounds today is a utility written by Coding Robots that analyzes your prose and then matches it with famous (note: not necessarily someone you like) authors. Among the blogosphere outside…

Chomskybot v Baseballbot The unsleeping Chomskybot stands ready to write a paragraph on linguistics at any time, just for you. Let us continue to suppose that the fundamental error of regarding…

How does a former math teacher in Texas keep winning the lottery?  Joan Ginther has hit four Texas Lottery jackpots and raked in $21 million since 1993 ($5.5 million, half of the Texas Lottery…

Superstition may work if you think it works.   If only voodoo were so easy, we'd love to have an army of zombies at our command. But people, and certainly athletes, maintain any number of…

A new study says it is the first to identify a life-or-death "cell competition" process in mammalian tissue that suppresses cancer by causing cancerous cells to kill themselves.  Central to…

Arctic Ice July 2010 - Update #2 Something strange is going on.  Arctic watcher blogs are abuzz with talk about the behaviour of graphics which are supposed to show ice extent, area or volume.…

Funny. While dozens of online media are abuzz with the (non)-news, and while Fermilab Today tweets that there is no Higgs in store for us and a blogger in search of fame is just spreading unconfirmed…

How high is space, how far can you fall with a parachute, where is the Project Calliope satellite going to be, and where does the hard radiation from the sun get nasty?  Gathered for the first…

The CDF experiment has just released their new average of top quark mass measurements, obtained with analyses that use up to 5.6 inverse femtobarns of proton-antiproton collisions provided by the 2…

Nobel laureate J. W. Szostak delivered an interesting lecture on his experiments relating to the origins of life. His research group has set itself the goal of just getting some kind of protocell…

Think a a mere 0.0350 millionth of a millionth of a millimeter is unimportant?  Think again.    At the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, an international team of researchers…

Even if you know an unexpected event is likely to occur, you are no better, and may be even worse, than those who aren't expecting anything unexpected at all.   Did you expect that confusing…

"Eighty percent of success is showing up" W.Allen

Ethnobotany is usually defined as anthropological approach to botany. There are several methods of ethnobotanical research and those relevant to medicinal plants are archaeological search in…

The Falkland Islands' own Sasha Arkhipkin (whom I missed meeting on his last trip to California--sorrow!) has discovered that males of a particular deep-sea squid species have penises as long as…

The Rise Of The Time Machines Do you own a time machine?  The chances are that if you are reading this, then you own a time machine.  They are fairly cheap nowadays.  Like so many…