In a previous article here I considered from a statistical standpoint the signal of Omega_b candidate decays extracted by the DZERO collaboration in a large dataset of proton-antiproton collisions…
Mummy's Little Grammatical genius
How babies learn to use language.
A special note of caution to students. My description of how a baby probably acquires language is speculative and is not a…
A recent study of adult neural stem cells suggests a new route for research and development of treatments for neurodegenerative disease in elderly patients.
Within the last 20 years…
Before the days of mandatory underseat pet carriers, my airline colleagues received a call from a woman who needed to bring her therapy pet, a pig, on a flight. The airline didn’t see a problem,…
Astronauts blazed through their third of five spacewalks Saturday as they continued servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, installing the new Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and repairing the main…
For the next installment in my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”, we have two for one. Actually, not really: I’m going to skip…
I remember distinctly lugging a backpack of textbooks across the frozen tundra of Michigan State University in January. On many occasions, the weight of the backpack was enough to send me skidding…
A team of atmospheric chemists say they have moved closer to what is considered the "holy grail" of climate change science; the first-ever direct detections of biological particles within ice…
Some pregnant women do not wear seat belts due to fear that the belt itself could injure the baby in a car crash. Urban myth or legitimate concern?
It is well established that seat belts save…
Exposure to particulate matter has been recognized as a contributing factor to lung cancer development for some time, but a new study indicates inhalation of certain particulates can actually cause…
Could sleep be a critical component to maintaining a healthy body weight? Studies on subjects like this tend to have correlation arrows that point in all kinds of directions but new…
A clinical study, led by researchers from University College Dublin, Ireland, and Stanford University, California, USA, with international collaborators, demonstrates that mortality rates of HIV…
A new study using advanced cardiac imaging technology indicates that cardiac abnormalities experienced by some marathon runners following competition are temporary, and do not result in damage to the…
Our genome is a patchwork of neighborhoods that couldn't be more different: Some areas are hustling and bustling with gene activity, while others are sparsely populated and in perpetual lock-down.…
Last week we found out that Merck paid Elsevier to publish a fake peer-reviewed journal. This week we found out that Elsevier produced five other pay-for-publication journals. The …
On to part 4 in my series of comments on the New Scientist magazine series “Eight things you didn’t know about the internet”: “Is there only one internet?”, by Ben Crystall.
As with all the questions…
Tired of reading about science ? In need of a boost to your ego ? You think you are smarter than me ? Can you play chess at a reasonable level ? Or, do you have a chess program and you don't mind…
In today's connected world, networking know-how can be a key resource in finding jobs and business opportunities, but a series of new studies by Dr. Yuval Kalish of the Leon Recanati Graduate School…
When bees collect nectar, how do they hold onto the flower? Cambridge University scientists have shown that it is down to small cone-shaped cells on the petals that act like 'velcro' on the bees'…