a new review published in the April issue of The Cochrane Library suggests that restrictions on smoking in public reduce secondhand smoke exposure, heart attacks, and improve a number health…

New satellite data indicate that March 2010 was the third warmest month since December 1978, compared to seasonal norms, according to researchers at the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at The…

Anthropologists writing in the Journal of Social Archaeology say they have found evidence indicating that Mayan citizens recorded their family history by burying it within their homes. Maya in the…

Researchers have identified the brain circuit that underlies our ability to resist instant gratification in order to earn a better payoff. The effort provides insight, scientists say, into the…

Exclusive licenses to gene patents are supposed to spur development of new technologies for gauging disease risk but actually do more to block competition in the gene testing market, say researchers…

The Animal That Amplifies Itself Amplify: to make a thing bigger or more powerful. The characteristic that most distinguishes humans from our animal cousins is not the use of tools.  Nor is it…

Brain damage at birth is a horrible thing to happen to a baby.  Brain cells are very vulnerable to hypoxic / ischemic damage (the latter term referring to restricted blood supply), which makes…

Communicating with the dead is a standard job requirement for a psychic such as the infamous medium John Edward of the television show Crossing Over who claims to be able to listen to what the…

A while ago, I read an argument that understanding economics is more important than understanding evolution. The author's point is that evolutionary theory does not provide the layman with…

Lands Of The Midnight Sun This is a list of dates and latitudes where the sun doesn't set for days on end. It might be a useful resource for anyone interested in the Arctic or Antarctic. I've posted…

Could you successfully launch a high precision functioning space satellite that was made out of wood? Instead of speculating, I asked.  In my 365DOA Podcast I called up Randa Milliron, the CEO…

I withdrew from blogging for a while to garden. Wild violet patrol has been my mission and freelance gig. Wild violets – a.k.a. Viola papilionacea (or one of the several other species)…

I am quite proud today to announce the publication of a new physics result from the CMS experiment: maybe not a groundbreaking result, yet one to which I contributed directly, and the first full…

University of Delaware psychologists say that jealously may literally impair vision. In a recent study published in Emotion, the researchers found that women who were made to feel jealous were so…

Just ten years ago, researchers assumed that countries needed the freedoms of democracy to cross the digital divide, but a new study in Sociological Inquiry suggests that countries don't necessarily…

Slender women worry about packing on extra weight, say Brigham Young University researchers who used MRI technology to observe what happened in the brain when people viewed images of complete…

Researchers from North Carolina State University are making an attempt to help academia lose its "ivory tower" reputation by connecting students to their local communities. The new research project…

Mirror neurons are the cells in the brain that fire not only when we perform a particular action but also when we watch someone else perform that same action. Neuroscientists believe this "mirroring"…

Despite their vocal criticism of the health care legislation enacted by Congress, the majority of Americans want some kind of reform, according to a new poll conducted by Indiana University's Center…

Scientists assume that all exoplanets orbit in more or less the same plane and  move along their orbits in the same direction of their host star's rotation. But now astronomers have discovered…