Total Football Versus The Beautiful Game Anyone who predicted Brazil would not be the World Cup winner, much less get beaten in the quarter-finals, was just being contrarian.  Virtually no…

You are all familiar with a solar eclipse, when our Moon passes in front of the Sun and blocks its light, but a similar situation can happen with asteroids, those Sun-orbiting, rocky objects left…

Homeopathy's origin should be a clue to why there is no evidence to show it has ever worked.  In the words of Samuel Hahnemann, the German physician at a time when being an M.D. was not a mark…

Nature is never inexplicable For 1954, we’re discussing the first vampire/zombie apocalypse in a series, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. This is a significant subgenre in End of the World fiction,…

We've all heard all about how the ice sheets (Greenland, Antarctica, glaciers) melting will result in sea level rise. One could easily believe that it is a one-to-one correlation between diminishing…

It's World Cup time and that means sports fans worldwide are focused on important issues, like complaining about vuvuzelas and this year's soccer ball, the Jabulani, which will push fan and player…

As a younger, unmarried man I wanted to visit Sweden, but more for the volleyball team than for the science(1), but since I don't want to find out if there 'are other fish in the sea' these days I…

Am I Allowed To Say This?Law is the means by which the simplest ideas are expressed in the most complex language. Civil law is the means by which private arguments are rapidly made public at great…

Lest you think that the AoAers have a hold on promoting woo or, just as bad, think that the mainstream media had potentially wised up (Kudos, Tsouderos!), a local reporter in Annapolis has an article…

Here’s another cute gadget, shown to us in the NY Times Gadgetwise blog: Size AA rechargeable batteries with built-in USB plugs, so you can plug the batteries directly into your computer to charge…

I have just finished four slides (well, five, if you count the cover) which I will show at ESOF 2010, the "EuroScience Open Forum" which is starting in Torino tomorrow. At ESOF, Sense About Science…

It's a common phrase; money can't buy happiness.   But a worldwide survey of more than 136,000 people in 132 countries that included questions about happiness and income revealed that life…

Politicians and education activists believe computer access is creating a generation of "have not" students that will be unable to compete in a digital world.  Their very expensive solution is…

Biotechnology in the last decade has been continually driven forward by the relentless economical desires of the ever-growing biopharmaceutical industry, creating innovative technologies that have…

I have a theory (not like a science theory… more like a personal theory) about patriarchies (male led cultures) – they don’t exist. I suppose, on the face of it, many human cultures appear to be…

Alien Invasion and Evolutionary Succession The possibility of human extinction in End of the World sci-fi is sometimes paired with a consideration of our next evolutionary step - a concept that is…

Through a casual browsing of the Arxiv's hep-ph section, I got to read the following title: "CAMORRA: A C++ Library for Recursive Computation of Particle Scattering Amplitudes" Authors are R.Kleiss…

True or false: The cinema was invented in the late 19th century. It's only true if you consider the cinema to be artificial projection.   It turns out that the original idea behind the cinematic…

Satellites are being used to look at practically everything you can think of. Well, maybe not. But if you take a single subject like ice, it is amazing how many ways you can look at it with a…

If you've watched any World Cup games so far (and a record 15 million in the US watched Saturday's match versus Ghana, so statistically, ummm, 50,000 people in our audience have watched at least one)…