Bio-diesel production First efforts to cultivate hydrocarbon producing plants for fuel production were made by Italians in Ethiopia and French in Morocco. Later on Calvin and his collaborators have…

A meeting of the San Diego Software Industry Council. The subject: What will Web 3.0 look like? “Why don’t we know?” asked one venture capitalist. “Are we idiots?” The VC was pandering to an in-group…

AIDS researchers have for the first time demonstrated that human blood stem cells can be engineered into cells that can target and kill HIV-infected cells — a process that potentially could be used…

A political scientist from the University of Alberta has uncovered a dastardly ploy by the producers of Thomas and Friends, a popular children's TV show, to turn their innocent audience of youngsters…

In a recent Journal of the National Cancer Institute editorial, doctors expressed concern over the media's coverage of oncology research, citing examples of exaggerated fears, hopes, and a general…

A new study appearing tomorrow in Earth and Planetary Science Letters rules out the possibility that the methane on Mars was delivered by meteorites, boosting the theory that life exists on the red…

If you start smoking cigarettes, chances are you'll become addicted. But that's only part of the story, according to new research published in Psychopharmacology.  After exposing rats to passive…

Female fruit flies can be too attractive to the opposite sex –– too attractive for their own good –– say biologists at UC Santa Barbara. In a new PLoS Biology study, they report that too much male…

A couple of months ago I attended a lecture by Saul Kripke at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th century, someone who you simply…

Dear TV and Movie Producer Person, I realize that you receive letters all the time complaining about the gratuitous sex and violence on television and in movies. This is not one of those letters. In…

Potentially fatal mosquito-borne West Nile fever (WNF) can become much more widespread in Europe than previously thought, say scientists in a new report just out in the journal BMC Evolutionary…

A devastating drought, possibly the worst of the last century, is sweeping through Kenya-- killing children, spreading malnutrition, crippling economies and resulting in the death…

In 1989, the Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov easily defeated the computer Deep Thought (name drawn from the Douglas Adams book). In 1997 Deep Blue kicked his ass, spawning accusations of…

The use of pilotless drones are up 94% in 2008.  The flight hours graph is particularly enlightening; 400,000 hours logged for all of 2008 between the military services. I wonder what the…

Searches are personal. My first piece in Scientific Blogging was about the Copenhagen Congress. The 11-day conference will start tomorrow. So I did a search for you on…

Not only is cardiovascular health good for children physically, it turns out that it may also promote intelligence. In a study published this week in PNAS, researchers say they have demonstrated a…

Despite the considerable amount of concern generated by the H1N1 outbreak earlier this year, the authors of a new study featured in PLoS Medicine believe it's impact will be relatively mild this flu…

 Astronomers at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have discovered and directly imaged a faint celestial body that orbits the star GJ 758. Its mass is estimated to be between 10 and 40…

Social isolation and stress are two environmental mechanisms likely to contribute to breast cancer susceptibility, researchers from the University of Chicago said this week. Their study, published in…

A study appearing in Nature Geoscience this week claims that Earth's temperature may be 30-50% more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than previous estimates suggest, and the effects of this…