Mitochondrial dysfunction, which leads to rare genetic disorders in children, some forms of heart disease, and most likely some cases of Parkinson’s disease, is bewildering in the variety and…

Yes of course it is damn scary when once again, at a time as supposedly new Hitlers are arising, it is the media again who come into focus as a social problem. Or is it that the Hitlers arise as a…

Today I have a decision problem for you. Alice offers Bob participation in a simple coin toss game. It's called triple or bust. Alice start the game by writing an IOU to Bob for an amount of $ 1…

Today I have a decision problem for you. Alice offers Bob participation in a simple coin toss game. It's called triple or bust. Alice start the game by writing an IOU to Bob for an amount of $ 1…

They say two people can’t see the same mirage. I wonder who the hell started saying that?  Last fall, in the article, Polls Are Not Rigged, But They Also Aren't 'Scientific', prolific science…

Last December I took on a new challenge.  I was asked to speak to a large Canadian audience of agricultural producers about climate change.  ‘Bout time I stepped into a controversial area.…

Today is the first day of the Chinese Year of the Rooster, 2017. I am addressing this in particular to North American friends, since yesterday evening on TV we saw Michael Portillo on one of his…

Today I took delivery of my copy of Tony Zee’s third contribution to the Princeton University Press In a Nutshell series: “Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists”. With this book Tony…

A lot has been said about the so-called "hiatus" in Global Warming starting in 1998, a major El Niño year. Perhaps the best illustration of the problem with the talking point is an animation titled…

Technology development and use is one of the distinguishing human characteristics. Throughout history, technological developments have led to new opportunities and problems as civilizations…

After being only theorized for 80 years, Harvard scientists claim they have succeeded in creating the rarest - and potentially one of the most valuable - materials on the planet. That material is…

The number of theoretically possible fatty acids with the same chain length but different structures can be determined with the aid of the famous Fibonacci sequence. The ability to calculate the…

I have written this for young children and others scared the world is about to blow up. If you read the news announcements today, you can understand why they seem to say this. Take them literally and…

A new analysis finds that youths who hold off on trying marijuana until age 17 do better on cognitive tests and drop out of school at a lower rate than those who start by age 14. Obviously negative…

In computer science, the classic Turing test evaluates a machine's ability to mimic human behavior, and therefore is a measure of determining how close a machine can come to artificial intelligence.…

Lots of people have asked me for my views on Erik Verlinde’s latest paper “Emergent Gravity and the Dark Universe“. This fifty-one pages long preprint has attracted a fair bit of media attention.…

America is a car culture. The saying goes, in Europe 100 miles is a long distance whereas in America 100 years is a long time. With a heritage of continental exploration and frontier expansion, it is…

Expectant and new parents are under a great deal of pressure; every action is scrutinized by those around them, and food marketers and activist groups exploit their fear by telling them one food…

A chronic inflammatory process that may trigger cardiovascular problems could be solved by what's in a cup of coffee, according to a recent paper. Using survey data, medical and family histories and…

In a few days, students from five high schools in Venice will be lectured on particle physics, the Higgs boson, the giant detectors of today's colliders, and will be treated with pictures and graphs…