Observation is the generative act in scientific discovery. For all its aberrations, the evidence of the senses is essentially to be relied upon--provided we observe nature as a child does, without…

The knock on drastic global warming mitigation solutions by detractors is that it may end up being expensive and not accomplish much - the classic government scenario. 'Cash for Clunkers' is an…

Air conditioning technology hasn't changed much in the last 50 years and though different climates have different optimal air conditioning requirements, economies of scale force companies into a one…

Small bursts of heat and energy called nanoflares cause temperatures in the sun's atmosphere to reach millions of degrees, according to NASA researchers.. The sun's outer atmosphere, or corona, is…

A Dresden research team using laser tweezers  measured the friction between a single motor protein molecule and its track and say that within our cells, motors work against the resistance of…

A new mathematical model  could significantly improve the automatic recognition and processing of spoken language, meaning algorithms which imitate brain mechanisms could help machines to…

Members of sexual minorities are almost twice as likely as heterosexuals to seek help for mental health issues or substance abuse treatment.  48.5% of lesbian/gay/bisexual individuals reported…

Michael Massing at The NY Review of Books weighs in on the future of news organizations in the era of blogs: The practice of journalism, far from being leeched by the Web, is being reinvented there,…

A couple of months ago I wrote here about the first observation of a process called "diboson production", a quite rare occurrence in hadronic collisions: for the first time, the CDF collaboration…

It is a start. The first version of the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) was published for the process diagram, the entity relationship diagram, and the activity flow diagram. The…

Because I have played guitar some 30 years, I have always been interested in guitar construction.   I have multiple guitars because they all have different tones and are used for different…

If the labours of men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we  habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then…

Researchers who want to include surgeries in studies have to make first contact through non-medical administration staff who act as roadblocks, says a group of researchers whose planned leg…

Early modern humans living on the southern Africa coast employed pyrotechnology, the controlled use of fire, 72,000 years ago,  to increase the quality and efficiency of their stone tool…

Cancer impacts millions of lives for the worse every year. Despite this difficult reality, it appears that we are becoming increasing successful in our efforts to stem the tide of patients who fall…

Diesel and gasoline fuel sources both bring unique assets and liabilities to powering internal combustion engines. But what if an engine could be programmed to harvest the best properties of both…

A real life Alice In Wonderland story is a little closer to reality now that researchers in China have created the first tunable electromagnetic gateway. In a new paper,  researchers from the…

The green of a tree's leaves is from the larger proportion of the chlorophyll pigment in the leaves.  As days get shorter, less chlorophyll is  produced and green is no longer dominant…

Did late Lower Paleolithic people hunt or were they scavengers?    A University of Arizona anthropologist says that humans living at a Paleolithic cave site (Qesem Cave) in central…

Garter snakes like to eat newts. Newts don't like to be eaten, and to deter snakes from eating them, they have evolved a seriously lethal neurotoxin. This toxin, called tetrodotoxin (TTX), is…