A RAND corporation study examining the long-term economic consequences of childhood psychological disorders suggests the conditions diminish people's ability to work and earn as adults, costing $2.1…

I had a sore throat this afternoon so I came home early to rest (translation: be babied by the wife; she gave birth and it's dismissed as part of a natural cycle but if I get a cold I expect to be…

So I'm a couple of weeks late, but it's worth noting that NY Times science blogger John Tierney is quitting his blog: After three years of experiments, TierneyLab is shutting down. I’ll still be…

This is going to be a short post where I confess my recent troubles with keeping everything going on at full speed in my life, while the workload constantly grows. I believe it is a temporary problem…

This piece about crumbling faith in expertise is making the rounds on the web (see also Becky's comments): The democratization of scientific expertise carries danger with it. If experts cannot be…

Carbon Fudgeprints It seems that everyone has a carbon footprint.  The idea is that everything you do puts CO2 into the atmosphere or if it doesn't then it jolly well ought to so let's work out…

A sinkhole in Saint-Jude, Quebec has just collapsed a house, killing a family of four inside, leading people to ask what they are, how they occur and obviously who is at risk. Sinkholes are…

You could be forgiven for thinking that the days when flying was a frontier science are well and truly over, but not so, as the Solar Impulse had its maiden flight recently. A flying machine no…

Archaeologists say they have disproved the fifty-year-old theory underpinning our understanding of how the famous stone statues were moved around Easter Island. Fieldwork led by researchers at…

As the effort continues to find new treatments for Alzheimer's Disease (AD), researchers have found that music may have a role to play. A study from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) has…

Researches at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics have carried out the first fully three-dimensional computer simulations of a core collapse supernova over a timescale of hours after the…

Our daily lives are filled with changes that force us to abandon old behavioral strategies and develop new, more appropriate responses. While it is clear that new rules are often deduced through…

Since Darwin proposed universal common ancestry (UCA) More than 150 years ago, the theory, though well supported, has remained beyond the scope of formal testing. But the author of a new letter in…

Scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the University of Bayreuth say they have discovered how spiders form long, highly stable and elastic fibers from the proteins …

Given I'm a mad scientist building a satellite in my basement, who are my heroes?  Are they Carl Sagan, astronomer populist extraordinaire?  Neil Tyson, a dynamic yet media-saavy heir to…

Lasers can now generate light pulses down to 100 attoseconds thereby enabling real-time measurements on ultrashort time scales that are inaccessible by any other methods. Scientists at the Max Born…

The word "adolescent" is defined as a young person; one who is at the stage between childhood and adulthood. The word means "lack" or "be short of", and it has been used by humanity since centuries…

It almost reads like an April Fools Day article.  A new UC Davis study has found that more obese people have minimum-wage jobs by demographic, adding to growing evidence that being poor is a…

A Simple Quiz This diagram illustrates a general principle applicable to processing systems having multiple inputs. The principle is a broader application of a scientific law. The question is - which…

Is the 'plants love CO2' theory valid? Plants use CO2 from the atmosphere to grow.  It follows that more CO2 will promote more growth.  That is the gist of the 'plants love CO2' theory.…