Synthetic biology seeks to apply the principles of engineering to biological systems and processes. Scientists believe that it may lead to new applications, such as new energy production systems,…

Segregation or choice? That's always the concern when one gender is over-represented in one occupation, like psychology and education, and under-represented in others, like physics. But one other…

Seeing images inside the body is nothing new, either with an endoscope or even a camera the size of a candy. In the case of a camera, the inside of the intestine can be seen as it makes its way…

Curtis E. Hinkle of Organisation Internationale des Intersexués (Oii) has written “Zucker: Manipulation of Young Feminine Boys ” . To me this reads like just another attack on the very concept of the…

Paleontologists working in Antarctica have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods - land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages – dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million…

A chronic issue with fuel cells is that, in order to deliver a high enough power output, a lot of them have to be connected in series. Traditionally that has meant stacking the fuel cells – creating…

Technology-development studies at Cornell University and Jefferson Laboratory are showing how to use the brightest X-ray light ever generated for the scientific examination of everything from human…

The ruya, an inspirational night dream, is a fundamental part of the militant jihadist movement among Muslims, according to a study by Dr. Iain Edgar, a social anthropologist at Durham University.…

A new study in Neuroscience Letters says that short-wavelength light, including natural light from a blue sky, is highly effective at stimulating the circadian system while exposure to other…

A few days ago I had the opportunity of moderating a conversation with philosopher Daniel Dennett, hosted by the New York Society for Ethical Culture as part of their presentation of two of…

Was Judgment Day at hand? At noon, it was black as night, there was lunch by candle light, the night birds came out to sing while flowers folded their petals and the animals behaved strangely. They…

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute have taken a page from sports physiology and developed a low-cost optical sensor to measure the force with which tiny, migrating somatic cells push themselves…

Jonathan Eisen, who blogs at The Tree of Life, has coined the phrase "Genomics by Press Release", and has even given out two ignominious awards for particularly egregious examples. The most recent…

Biology remains a wide-open field because it has accomplished a lot but still has a long way to go. The dominant view in cellular behavior, for example, has been that it is largely chemistry-driven…

Researchers from Iowa State University have identified a factor that promotes the development of antibiotic resistance in a bacterial pathogen. The study explains that Mfd, a protein involved in DNA…

TreePeople, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit corporation that does not seem to be one of the groups filing lawsuits every time anyone recommended responsible forest management that would have prevented…

I hopped over to Hudson River Park in NY to check out the Science Barge, first project of the NY Sun Works for sustainable engineering. Photo: The Science Barge Sarah Hanna, Educational Coordinator…

Scientists have been trying to understand how and when we gain or lose fat cells, and now a paper in this week's issue of Nature reports that nuclear bombs are the key to solving this problem. To…

I've written this post to address some of the issues raised in the comments to my first post on the evolution versus creationism debate.   (1) A major reason that Biblical creationism…

Mathematicians and astrophysicists recently discovered that work on the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra and gravitational lensing had a common answer. The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra (FTA),…