Toothpaste For Dinner

Last week, scientists announced the interim results of one of modern physiology’s most closely watched experiments: the effects of caloric restriction on the lifespan of non-human primates. The…

A new impact on Jupiter is getting all the attention this week but it can happen here - and has.  Nanosized diamonds found just below the surface of Santa Rosa Island off the coast of Santa…

Purdue University researchers have created magnetically responsive gold nanostars that gyrate when exposed to a rotating magnetic field and can scatter light to produce a pulsating or "twinkling"…

'Sun power for soldiers' sounds like aging hipsters have taken over the military, right?   No, this is still manly; a special "conductive ink" that can be used to make printed organic…

How do individual cells survive conditions that should kill them?  It's long been a mystery of nature but a team of researchers recently tracked the chemical changes in Desulfovibrio vulgaris,…

In all the talk about using skin cells to create pluripotent stem cells that don't need human embryonic destruction,  dental and tissue engineering researchers at Tufts University School of…

When we were kids, you could do stupid things and, if you absolutely needed them to be left behind, you moved away and never spoke to your old friends again.   Now stupid things end up on…

Don't get Michael Schumacher or Jeff Gordon on the phone yet but we could one day be driving on tires made from trees. Wood science researchers at Oregon State University say they could cost less,…

Epidemiological studies have shown that some oral contraceptives are less effective at preventing pregnancy in obese women until an 'effective blood concentration' has been reached, meaning there is…

Netflix launched its million dollar contest—improve their movie rating prediction system by 10%—nearly three years ago, and like most computer science graduate students, I downloaded the data and got…

Disclaimer: As a Naturalist and Scientist these are my observations. This may be disturbing to some people as they may have to think of cause and effect. Somewhere in Asia they are laughing…

Yesterday I wrote how Anthony Wesley, who hails from Canberra, Australia, grabbed this shot of a new dark spot near the south pole of Jupiter. It's left to bigger minds (and bigger telescopes)…

Researchers writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences say they have discovered that the sea lamprey, which emerged from jawless fish first appearing 500 million years ago,…

Mayo Clinic investigators say a proof-of-concept study has demonstrated that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells can be used to treat heart disease.  iPS cells are stem cells converted from…

As silly as it may look, I am going to start this post by publishing for the third time in a row the same figure. That is because I want to keep the promise I made earlier that I would explain in…

We could have made a killing off the previous administration...  Credit: toothpaste for dinner.

Neanderthals were stoutly-built and human-like and lived at the same time and in the same areas as some modern humans.  But they went extinct. Anthropologists have tried to solve the mystery of…

Stars don't die without being noticed and sometimes the results are pretty spectacular.  At the end of its life cycle, a star begins to collapse and throws new material into space, which…

How evolution can bridge the gap between two discrete physiological states is a question that puzzles biologists and therefore delights critics. Most evolutionary changes happen in tiny increments;…