The current H1N1 influenza A swine flu strain has genetic roots in an illness that sickened pigs at the 1918 Cedar Rapids Swine Show in Iowa, report infectious disease experts at the University of…

Research from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Canada says that 4 percent of worldwide deaths are directly attributable to alcohol consumption and the rise is mainly due…

The Columbine school shooting in the US and Dawson College in Canada are examples of recent traumatic events that, due to their broad timeframe, allow researchers to examine their residual impact.…

Between the 1932 and 2008 Olympic Games, world record times in the men's 100 meter sprint improved by 0.6 seconds, mostly due to improved training techniques and technological advances. Scientists at…

University of Minnesota Medical School researcher Iris Borowsky, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues found that one in seven adolescents believe that it is highly likely that they will die before age 35, and…

Dolphins, whales and porpoises are perfectly adapted for maximum aquatic agility.  We know why that is - biologists expect that as a result of evolution - but to-date no one in physics had ever…

From Prof. Chad Orzel's Graduation Speech: Science isn't a body of facts, science is a process for figuring out how the world works: you see something interesting, come up with an idea of why that…

The president wants to transform healthcare with new laws and new technology, but once upon a time, a moral bond ruled between patient and physician. Recently, I experienced something so rare in…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #8 Quistic grammar is a predominantly semantic grammar based on the observation that any statement in human language can be re-phrased as one or more simple…

If you have followed this blog for long enough, dear readers, the words "multi-muons", "anomalous muons", or even "lepton jets" are not foreign to you. They all refer to a paper appeared on the ArXiv…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #7 Quistic grammar is a predominantly semantic grammar based on the observation that any statement in human language can be re-phrased as one or more simple…

What happens when the pet owners refuse to take the responsibility of the animals litter? They are either turned outdoors as strays or sold back to the pet dealers and puppy mills where they are…

Jeffery Dach, MD claims that this argument is persuasive: Since every man on the street knows that the computer code that runs a program requires  intelligence for its origin, it…

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced some of the basic concepts and steps associated with the development of cognition and how more and more sophisticated responses to problems may have emerged in…

An interesting phenomenon in growing random networks: The number of 3-node, 3-edge connected subgraphs in a random, scale-free network of N nodes scales as N0 (=1). No matter how big your network…

Having been inspired by a series of articles by Becky Jungbauer, I thought it might be useful to explore the basic concept of intelligence and its possible origins. Any creature which has sensory…

NASA watch seems to have been first in noticing the way-cool Star-Trek Style NASA poster, cheerfully shown here in all its glory.  Yes, this is not your parent's NASA... no, wait, it is. …

David Brooks takes on evolutionary psychology and gets it sort of right: The first problem is that far from being preprogrammed with a series of hardwired mental modules, as the E.P. types assert,…

    Part of the enjoyment of doing research is that ideas pop into your head all the time. Everyone has ideas, but the hard part is to choose which should be subjected to critical…

The first two articles of this series have covered a brief overview of evolutionary psychology and the difficulty in defining and measuring intelligence. In the first article, I covered that we can…