Many people will write columns, fiction, games, et cetera for the joy of doing it.  But that leads me to an important distinction between writing versus publishing.  Writers-- good and bad-…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #5 This article is a continuation and expansion of the theory of mental models, introduced in part #4. Part #1 of this series outlines the need for an inclusive…

From bench to bedside - who is the catalyst? Academics? Pharma? Everybody? Nobody? From this recent spate of articles on progesterone and brain trauma, it's tough to say. I was waiting in the doctor…

If you live outside Italy, you read newspapers more often than Italians do. Thus, you probably are more informed about the recent scandal emerging on the private life of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy's…

Differences in growth factor (GF) signaling may cause the poor prognosis in some breast cancer cases. A new study, published in the open access journal BMC Medical Genomics, suggests that some…

Spanning 40 degrees of latitude, some 4,800 kilometres (2,980 mi), the Rocky Mountains run the length of North America from the Liard Plain in the north to the Rio Grande in New Mexico. The…

A new journal is out - Genome Biology and Evolution. To my surprise, it actually looks quite good, with high-quality pieces. I generally don't see many new journals I like, but this one fills a…

Research links smog to devastating effects not just on lungs but on hearts, brains and fetal development. By Greg CritserJune 23, 2009 Not long ago, Jesus Araujo, a cardiology researcher at UCLA,…

All men are liable to error; and most men are, in many points, by passion or interest, under temptation to it. - Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding Book IV, Ch. 20, sec. 17

Now there's a new reason for the weight-conscious to drink fat free milk at breakfast time, suggests a new study published in the July issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers…

The Earth's mantle, situated under the Earth's crust, is a key area for understanding geological processes but we only come into contact with Earth's circulating layers in the event of earthquakes…

We do lots of things without thinking about it, like driving to work while we talk on the phone.   We have a kind of 'autopilot' that kicks in for things we have practiced and it allows us to do…

Most conspiracy theories wouldn't gain much traction without unhinged academics: "The most destructive people linked to conspiracy theories and denialism are those with academic appointments - and…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #4 In Part #1of this series, I suggested that a grammar heavily based in syntax was not sufficiently scientific as a general theory of how language functions. Part…

Drosophila can't catch a break.  Even Nature, which never runs a press release about one of its studies without putting 'prestigious' in front of its name, fell prey to a glaring error regarding…

The Bookworm And The Encyclopedias - The Solution Last Monday I posed a simple math puzzle: A set of 10 encyclopedias is sitting on a bookshelf in left-to-right numerical order. Each single volume…

Scientists at VIB, the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology, have successfully introduced genes coding for a variant of the Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT) disease, into fruit flies. CMT is one of the…

DNA is like your phone line. As Northwestern University biophysicist Johnathan Widom put it in a talk recently, DNA simultaneously encodes multiple overlapping signals, just like your phone line that…

PrologueSome of you might remember the ripples caused in the blogosphere by the two-standard-deviation excess found by the CDF collaboration in their data in January 2007, while searching for a Higgs…