Well, it seems that someone has finally decided that with all this talk of "end-times" and the "rapture" it was important that we have a more scientific approach to determining how close we actually…

On important occasions, when man feels that his efforts and work are enough to bring forth result, he begins to depend on good and bad omens and oracles and totems Anonymous (1959). To get leaves…

I'm not one of the more fundamentalist types in the broad science community who had any issue with Francis Collins leading the NIH.   His credentials are impeccable and the same people who were…

Do you really care about the human race ? I do, and probably I do more than you do. Well, not more than you, maybe -I do not know you personally!-; but I know where you come from: the class of human…

A commenter on a previous post seems to have objected to the claim that evolutionary science makes predictions. gimme 5 examples of predictions, i mean real predictions: not fit the model hogwash…

Today I gave my lecture on mammal diversity and evolution in the 4th year vertebrate course. We have been talking a fair bit about paraphyletic groups, common vs. scientific names, and so on. Within…

This is too funny. A website called Kill or Cure? has been compiling links to science stories in The Daily Mail (UK) and their apparent "ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those…

Just came across this nice video by C0nc0rdance summarizing the work of Susumu Ohno and the original concept of junk DNA. (Oh, and it gets bonus points for using one of my figures!)

Does an ideal marriage exist?   Before we start this discussion, we ought to, as a beginning, ask ourselves: What is an 'ideal marriage'?   Presumably an 'ideal marriage' is one where there…

  WHY WE STARE AT THE STARS   September 17, 1989       Ayad Izzet Gharbawi       The people are tired, the people are weary; bored in their life styles; bored…

An article in LiveScience entitled "Evolution Can't Go Backward" has highlighted an experiment done to determine whether a protein could be "unmutated" (i.e. returned to its original state) and…

Aonla, Aonla Mewar Bawul, Bawul Marwar: Here plants are used to distinguish Mewar from Marwar. English rendering would be Cassia auriculata Linn. Characterizes Mewar, whereas Acacia nilotica Indica.…

ETHNOBOTANICAL STUDIES ON SOME IMPORTANT HERBAL MEDICINES Ethnobotany is a distinct branch of natural science dealing with various aspects such as anthropology, archaeology, botany, ecology,…

We now present the basic Constituents of the Mind (CoM): 1.    Event/s (E) 2.    Sound/s (Sn) 3.    Scenery (Sc) 4.    Thought (t) 5.    Odour (Od) 6…

"I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einsteins' brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops". Stephen…

The past few times I've driven in New Jersey (in NJ for work, through NJ to get to fun places), I've noticed a sign that says "Restricted CMV." To me this means HLA-restricted cytomegalovirus. I…

A few years ago, I was spending a good bit of my time on context-based services. User context — also called “presence” — is information, which changes over time, about the current state of a user or…

Antioxidants are a big buzzword these days - everyone claims to have them and that impresses buyers but most don't really know what that means. Health conscious people know that taking antioxidants…

The moon has no has no atmosphere like Earth's but oxygen which can be used for people, growing food, creating water and even burning rocket fuel is trapped in its soil.Scientists from NASA and…

Not to beat a dead squid, but a reasonable question came up in a conversation with one of my labmates today: Who's to say that the Architeuthis collected in the Gulf of Mexico this summer was alive…