While I was napping, Jupiter became a 2nd sun. Although it was observed in January by STEREO, we forgot to tell people. Or perhaps we were hiding the truth. Also, it was so well covered on YouTube…

Jan Hendrik Schön, if you have heard the name, will either fascinate or enrage you.   His ability to progress from ridiculous fibs to world-class deception as a 31-year-old physicist working at…

Toddlers with autism appear more likely to have an enlarged amygdala, a brain area associated with numerous functions, including the processing of faces and emotion, according to a report in the May…

It's certainly the case that 'dark matter', like 'Smurf' or 'government regulation', has in recent times become a de facto explanation for the unexplained.   We aren't big believers in magic so…

If you want to learn a little something about 'characteristic curvature', you're in the right place.   Hydrophilic surfactants love water, but lipophilic surfactants love oils and dislike…

This has been a slow news day.  On such days, my mind tends to drift somewhat.  Combining the science of linguistics with the philosophical notion of multiple parallel universes leads to…

With hot, new technologies, biologists are taking higher-resolution snapshots of what's going on inside the cell, but the results are stirring up controversy. One of the most interesting recent…

BOSTON ––– In a new study of terminally ill cancer patients, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute found that those who draw on religion to cope with their illness are more likely to receive…

Preliminary research in healthy men suggests that the narcolepsy drug modafinil, increasingly being used to enhance cognitive abilities, affects the activity of dopamine in the brain in a way that…

DURHAM, N.C. -- Somewhere out there in the ocean, SpongeBob SquarePants has a teeny-tiny cousin and a humongous uncle. That's just what one would expect from a new analysis of body sizes across all…

When the Chinese invented gunpowder round about the 800s, they founded one half of the science of chemistry, namely bangs, the other half of course being stinks.  They quickly applied it to…

How many times have you wondered where did I leave my keys?  Activity in your hippocampus and medial temporal lobes encodes the answer.A new study using high resolution brain imaging has shown…

It's hard not to see the world through the lens of our own preconceptions and biases.  We tend to be more interested in other large mammals.  We're drawn to human-like qualities in pets.…

Okay, my last blog was a list of Spam haikus. I offer this post as self-flagellation before the scientific community at large. Traditionally, the crux of teleportation has been its seeming…

This morning I signed a contract with INFN, the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics, which grants me tenure in the role of research scientist. Start date: 05/04/2009. End of penalty: never. Am I…

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched June 2008, has certainly started its career with a (big) bang, discovering a new class of pulsars and watching flaring jets in galaxies billions of…

'Drought-proofing' Australia's urban regions by installing large domestic water tanks may enable the dengue mosquito Aedes aegypti to regain its foothold across the country and expand its range of…

An international team of scientists has determined the structure of the chlorophyll molecules in green bacteria that are responsible for harvesting light energy. The team's results one day could be…

Self-cleaning walls, counter tops, fabrics, even micro-robots that can walk on water -- all those things and more could be closer to reality because of research recently completed by scientists at…

Infants who receive the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine (PCV) following the combination vaccine for diphtheria, polio, tetanus, pertussis and Haemophilus influenzae type b (DPTaP-Hib vaccine) appear…