In the 1980s, scientists captured the precise mechanics of a protein machine. It looked strange, to researchers its tall thin structure with stubby legs invoked the enchanted broomstick that stole…

[As a meta-text, this blog column contains a large number of posts written over the years, that describe new results from physics analyses, among other articles commenting on news in science and…

A new paper has correlated birth control pills to binge eating. In 100 percent of controlled clinical studies, more energy consumed than burned causes weight increase, which means birth control pills…

Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries. Modern historians have generally assumed they were…

After decades of public safety campaigns focused on drinking and driving, it may be time to focus on the seventh leading cause of injury-related death, according to Bureau of Occupational Health and…

If you had a way to save the world and the NIH refused to fund it, could it ever happen? What if both Science and Nature, which claim to be the most prominent journals in the world, refused to…

Simonetta Vespucci is probably one of the most painted women of the Italian Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli is widely believed to have used her as his model for Venus, and she appears, transformed and…

We're bombarded with information at all times, so much that if we had to try and process it all times, we'd be paralyzed. Our cerebellum does information damage control by filtering out what changes.…

If you see multiple graves in medieval graves, it is reasonable to assume children and adults were related, but a new study finds that was not the case. They were separated by sex, males in one…

It wouldn’t make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out…

More men than women develop Parkinson’s disease and new work presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies says that it is do to sex differences in how brain cells change. Parkinson…

HFO-1234yf, a climate-friendly alternative refrigerant for car air conditioning systems touted by environmental activists, may instead be a greater problem than the products they insisted was causing…

I once was an active chessplayer, but work duties have long taken tournaments off my plate - I simply do not have the time to sit through long hours of chess battles. So I play blitz online on chess…

As a forewarning to the reader, I am a physicist, not an economist. What I wrote below may very well be naive. In fact, I hope to stand corrected by readers in the comments thread - that has been an…

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, commmonly called PFAS, are about 12,000 chemicals, nearly all found in nature, and since the 1940s, a handful have been synthesized for use in various products.…

Skip the glossary. Yes, it's the kind of thing editors love because of the famous communication guidance 'assume a lack of vocabulary but not a lack of intelligence' but that is when you're writing…

The ocean has quietly protected us from the full force of climate change. Since the industrial revolution, it has absorbed a vast amount of the carbon dioxide released by human activity. That has…

I want that table, I'll say that right out of the gate.You won't see the table on the cover, there is a gaming die and four cars even though only one of them ever drives to the place where all of the…

Last week I traveled to Singapore to give an invited talk at the AI4X conference, an exciting new venue gathering computer scientists, physicists and engineers to discuss how AI will accelerate…

Football fans everywhere are gearing up to celebrate the sport’s most skilled athletes as they prepare for the start of another Fifa World Cup. But few get to see how the next generation of Messis…