A new find in Arctic Canada strongly suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty…

Show Me The Science Month Day 5 Speciation Genetics is, in a sense, an oxymoron. Genetics is the study of heritable characteristics, but the researchers who study speciation genetics are looking for…

The alumni magazines that come to my house rarely get much more than a quick glance, but this month the Rochester Review has an interesting interview with H. Allen Orr, one of the leading…

If you're a woman and need an excuse not to clean the carpet, it's your lucky day.   The bad news is, whatever you may already have done may have an impact on having kids.   Researchers at…

Looking for more evolution blogging? Check out the eighth edition of Carnival of Evolution at Biochemical Soul. There is great stuff on fossils, genes, parasites, antibiotics, and Darwin, so head on…

I had high hopes for "Gender Madness in American Psychiatry: Essays from the Struggle for Dignity", Kelley Winters. ( ISBN-10: 1-4392-2388-2, ISBN-13: 9781439223888 ) I write for Wikipedia on the…

Creationism, the rejection of the scientific basis of  evolutionary theory, is experiencing a resurgence among Europeans. The Department of Biology and Didactics of Biology at the TU Dortmund…

It would seem that in a bad economy, tax cuts make the most sense.    Letting people keep their money instead of letting the government spend money to collect taxes, spend money to…

Want to know if you have an honest dentist?   Tell him you want to try UV tooth bleaching.   A study in Photochemical&Photobiological Sciences writes the lack of any enhanced…

Show Me The Science Month Day 4 How did we become human? You can ask the same question in a slightly different way: how did we become different from chimps?  Although the common ancestor that we…

Nanotubes are often regarded as a precursor to nanocircuitry.  A group at UC San Diego has found that they work pretty well for transferring biological information, too.  Oh, et al. showed…

   Tycho Brahe was a sixteenth-century Danish, astronomer, astrologer and alchemist, most famous as the mentor of Johannes Kepler. In 1566 after a rousing night of drinking, Tycho lost a…

If you've ever been to a windy beach or a snow-blown landscape, you may have noticed a useless-looking fence with a pile of snow or sand on one side. The fence looks useless because it's full of…

Mold is icky. However, it has yielded one of the most important advances in medicine: antibiotics. There was a time when penicillin was the cure-all antibiotic, capable of quelling almost any one…

It's Friday and time for a coffee break. Looking for more Darwin reading? (If you're already sick of the Darwin Bicentennial, you're in for a loooong year.) Michael Shermer takes on common…

It's been nearly thirty years since the last application for construction of a nuclear power plant was filed in the United States. Despite the age of the reactors already operating, however, the…

On the bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birthday in February 2009, biology and medicine find themselves in crisis.  The promise of stem cell therapy has the potential to dramatically improve…

How many Cardinals can fit on the head of a pin?   Still unknown, but Stanford physicists can at least tell us how many letters formed by quantum electron waves can fit on the surface of a…

Show Me The Science Day 3 Reproduction involves some tricky trade-offs for all species, and anyone who has watched a David Attenborough film knows that you can find a wide range of reproductive…

The origin of species may be almost as random as a throw of the dice, says Iosif Pinelis, a professor of mathematical sciences at Michigan Technological University, who claims to have worked out a…