While I'm busy building an instrument to convert the ionosphere to music, this NASA group has sonified the Sun.  Astronomers at Univ. of Sheffield "found that huge magnetic loops that have been…

Here’s an amusing little device that Eric Taub writes about in the New York Times: All of this is why a new product from Zomm may wind up hitting a nerve. A small electronic disc that fits on a key…

Arctic Ice July 2010 In about a week the National Snow and Ice Data Center - NSIDC - will be publishing its analysis of June's sea ice.  I expect them to report another record loss of sea ice.…

A survey taken by the Science and Technology Facilities Council says their funded PhD students have high employment rates and above average salaries. Since 2007, STFC has funded over 250 new…

Proteins are the workhorses of our existence.   These "helmsmen of the cell" are composed of amino acids, whose sequence is already defined by the heritable information in every living being and…

ESA and friends are celebrating the success of the Living Planet program in Bergen Norway this week. It cannot be described as anything but a success actually, with a number of new advanced and…

Altitude training is a popular training method expected to improve the physical performance of athletes …and horses!   Recently, several national football teams spent some time at altitude on…

X-ray in characterization techniques 1. X-ray      X-ray is a form of electromagnetic wave with wavelength in the range of 10 to 0.01 nm and energies in the range of 120 eV to 120…

Social networks are a great help for this kind of news: a new paper by a FB friend does not go unnoticed (at least by me) as it once would. I learned today that Garrett Lisi (picture below), the…

23andMe, Inc., a direct-to-consumer personal genetics company, is arguably the most well-funded and therefore highest profile group out there (being married to a Google co-founder will do that) and…

Scientific Consensus Some scientific ideas are so easily grasped that they are easily explained to the general public.  Other ideas can only be fully understood after a minimum level of training…

A science historian at The University of Manchester says he has cracked 'The Plato Code', secret messages purported to be hidden in the writings of history's most famous philosopher. Plato likely…

Men will sometimes blame hormones for how women act but it isn't just one gender - one thing that sets off hormone changes in men is competition, says a new PNAS study. The average man experiences…

Researchers at Harvard and MIT using what is called programmable matter have demonstrated how a single thin sheet composed of interconnected triangular sections could transform itself into a boat- or…

Despite some of the more outrageous claims to the contrary, SecondLife, while an abstract 3-D world, is not actually a teaching platform.   It had its moment and devolved rather quickly into…

(updated - more formal, removed some parts and improved general clarity) Over years, I come again and again back to Halting Problem and it's unsolvability ..now I have created a system, which is…

I introduce the term "topological identity of computer programs" and show it in relation to halting problem and similar problems - what we need to detect in code to suspect it? I think that…

Inhibition in the brain seems simple but there is an underlying complexity that makes it one of the most challenging aspects of brain function to understand.   Its kind of like soccer, it…

Frustrated in dealing with the public?   You are not alone.   It may seem to researchers that the public is either stupid or intentionally ignoring evidence but it's not that one-sided,…

Aschner and Ceccatelli (2010) review the relevant data for thimerosal as a cause of autism. They conclude there is "no reliable data indicating that administration of vaccines containing thimerosal…