A subtle rainy morning of June sets in with enduring smell of the soil waking me up. A life of a scientist does not begin with a cup of coffee, but with engaging emails. Just back from a hectic work…

Metric mania 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.…

Remote access ... for lab equipment?     Labshare Australia wants to create a shared network of remote laboratories.  Yep, with costs going up - and science and hospitals are two…

Post-Holocaust Noble Savages I’ve read three 1952 post-apocalyptic novels for this series - The Long Loud Silence, and two books that are so similar that they can be dealt with in a single post: Star…

With an increasing trend toward what marketing groups call 'natural' food, some companies have reduced preservatives.  A common preservative, acetic acid, is used to stop bacterial growth in…

Using two of the world’s largest telescopes, the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile and the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) on La Palma in the Canary Islands, an international team of astronomers…

Retinitis pigmentosa are a diverse group of hereditary diseases that lead to incurable blindness and affect two million people worldwide. Though the causes are diverse, the manifestation of the…

Imagine you wanted to predict when sheep would chew. (Don't ask why...just imagine.) Here's how you would do it: attach speakers to the tops of sheep heads to broadcast chewing sounds. Collect…

Let's say we have 1D cellular automata, bounded at beginning. The following is solution for halting problem - mathematically unproven, somewhat open here and there, but basically very near to what I…

This is what your next doctor's visit will sound like after you get your genome sequenced: "Analysis of 2·6 million single nucleotide polymorphisms and 752 copy number variations showed increased…

I have gotten the dig dates, which will be the last two weeks in July,  and we have the students we'll be working with all signed up. They appear to be a great group of kids, I honestly can't…

This is totally not my field-- medicine-- but totally up my alley-- electronic gaming.  So here goes.  Doctors prescribed playing Nintendo games to cure a boy's blindness in one eye. …

"It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts..." Sherlock Holmes

The following is based on my idea that there are two main problems related to halting problem: That you can not check if program does not halt. You can always check if it does. That the finite state…

Theories of physics rest on fundamental assumptions and those assumptions are based on how the real world works, and often produce amazingly precise predictions.  The most comprehensive theory…

How do plants perceive environmental stress ? Biotic and abiotic stress induces plant response and before" dying" different levels of resistance is shown and finally plants are overcome with stress…

It's no secret we have done things our own way here - no marketing, no corporate hierarchy, no political or cultural litmus test and no requirement that you already be popular before you can join.…

An international team of scientists say a new  technique could turn pulsars into superbly accurate time-keepers. A pulsar is the spinning, collapsed core of a massive star that ended in a…

The beauty and utility of crystalline materials has seen in almost every application today.  From silicon microprocessor and photovoltaic technologies, to dielectrics, laser applications, optics…

We have studied constraints to programs, but we can use constraints to programmers instead. Let's assume the following constraint: Programmer must always figure out, for his specific algorithm, how…