Watch out, Jayson Blair - there's a new sheriff in town, and it's going to cross-reference your work to make sure you haven't plagiarized your material. Plagiarism, using others' work but putting it…

A reality check on“healthy aging.”  The real troubles - and opportunities - of a gero-nation go unheeded. The numbers are increasingly disturbing: By 2050, some 88 million Americans will be over…

Women are waiting until their 30s and 40s to have children, but when they decide to do so, they are a lot more willing to engage in a variety of sexual activities to capitalize on their remaining…

I happened to be reading Howard Bloom's book The Genius of the Beast when I saw something odd happening in social media - there was a minor blow up on a science blogging site called Scienceblogs.com…

Mercola, webster of woo, he of the get your vitamin D through our tanning bed fame, has a new post up at Huffington Post. I tell you, I find it endlessly comforting to know that these medically…

"My plan for today: 1. Pick up dry cleaning.2. Go to dentist.3. Think up brilliant idea.” Good luck with that third bullet. Big ideas can’t be planned like growing tomatoes in one’s garden. We…

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University, the Internet will do more social good than…

Which country does not belong in the following list: Burma, Liberia, Somalia, United States? OK, that was not too difficult. As astute Scientific Blogging reader you got that right. Somalia has made…

What do you get when you mix politics and space exploration?a) an impenetrable messb) an interesting clash between technology and peoplec) something scarier than sausage making For those who think…

This is a post that has nothing to do with physics or other sciences, for once. I just report here my thoughts as a father upon allowing my 11-years-old son to go spend a day to the beach alone with…

Post-apocalyptic Fundamentalism Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is one of many post-apocalyptic novels that envision society returned to a 19th century agrarian state. The rural settings of these…

If you pass your ball to others to score a goal you win the match. That one has seen yesterday and that one will see today and in next week also. I have already told who the winner will be . Now you…

Though I have been gardening less and getting back to freelance writing, my wondering about invasive species has been growing like a weeds, like Creeping Camanula perhaps. Creeping Campanula (a.k.a.…

If you follow social media, you may have been alarmed by claims that today is the day Doc Brown traveled to at the end of Back to the Future, that comedy classic from 1985, approaches. To sum up the…

ESA’s Planck mission is a 'time machine' to study the relic radiation from the Big Bang, and it has delivered its first all-sky image, one of four all-sky scans it will complete by the end of its…

Another Poetic Interlude Language is my first love. When I discovered the joy of the scientific method I applied it to language. The study of linguistics can be incredibly boring or a source of great…

When some members of a discussion group asked me to write a small course on Hilbert spaces, I decided to define that Hilbert space over the quaternions. Futher I wanted to indicate the relation…

Brain stem cells remain dormant until needed to make more neurons but little is known about the molecular guards that keep them quiet - or 'wake' them up.   Scientists from the Salk Institute…

Researchers have shown a new ability to control the behaviors of individual electrons within simple atoms and molecules by stripping them away, one by one, and in some cases creating 'hollow atoms'.…

The cell membrane at first may seem a simple device, but it is in fact a very complex machine. The basic building block is the phospholipid, a set of molecules that have hydrophilic (water loving)…