This is not an article in my continuing series about the Voynich manuscript.  It is a complaint about plagiarism. buckrogers2012 is a plagiarist. buckrogers2012, a blogger on blogspot.com has…

It's sharing time.  Here's a cool space mashup map, titled "If extraterrestrial civilizations are monitoring our TV broadcasts, then this is what they are currently watching." It's a plot of…

Biology has just gotten a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information, biology's equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics. Researchers at the European…

100 years ago you had to be rich to be fat.  Now apparently you have to be rich to stay thin.  And women add more pounds being poor than anyone. A nationwide study that followed…

Magnetotactic bacteria are the smallest organisms to use a biological compass but exactly how these bacteria create their cellular magnets is a mystery. In a study published online in Genome Research…

There are many hypotheses about the early days of black holes.  Researchers writing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters have undertaken simulations using data taken from observations…

Acupuncture has been used in East-Asian medicine for thousands of years to treat pain and some people swear by it, but if and how it works at the cellular level is largely unknown. Using brain…

If you're the family member of a critical care patient, you prefer doctors to keep their opinions on life support decisions to themselves, according to new research that challenges a long-held belief…

Language networks are built based on different principles and, for the most part, are designed to be scale-free.  Global statistical properties of language networks are independent of linguistic…

Despite the overwhelming abundance of water on the planet and in our lives, the molecular structure of water has remained a mystery. In all, water exhibits 66 known anomalies, including a strangely…

Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny. 1.  You've all heard that blondes have more fun.   There is even a recurring urban legend that they are becoming…

What would you do in this situation? In Europe, a woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a…

Inquiry is fundamentally different from stated conclusions, even when those conclusions can be legitimately qualified as knowledge (which is to say, as the products of valid inquiry). One can…

"Full many a gem of purest ray sereneThe dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,And waste its sweetness in the desert air." Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a…

Last week I posted a column on cost accounting. But I didn’t say it was about cost accounting, and nearly eight hundred people read it.   Let’s try a (ahem) “scientific” experiment,…

I recently saw the article about the findings of Keiko the killer whale's unsuccessful release in 1998.  This was a result of a public campaign to "Free Willy" and reintroduce him into the wild…

A group of University of Utah scientists say they developed a "molecular condom" that could help protect women against AIDS in Africa and other impoverished areas. It's a vaginal gel that turns…

The sex hormone estrogen tempers the killing activity of immune cells called cytotoxic T cells (CTLs), which are known to attack tumor cells and cells infected by viruses. Estrogen plays a critical…

Methane was discovered on Mars in 2004, meaning volcanic activity continues to generate heat below the martian surface or, if you are exceptionally kooky, that life there is generating it. When Mars…

When did executions go from being functional example-setting to being more humane in method? Annulla Linders, a University of Cincinnati sociologist, examined newspaper accounts of 19th and 20th…