The 2015 Antarctic ozone hole area was larger and formed later than in recent years, accorrding to a new paper. On Oct. 2, 2015, the ozone hole expanded to its peak of 10.9 million square miles, an…

I first wrote this after a recent particularly silly story about Nibiru, published in the Daily Telegraph: The end of the world now predicted for December say doomsday groups: "Terrifying stuff.…

Just how bad was the bite of Tyrannosaurus rex? Pretty bad, because the feeding style and dietary preferences of dinosaurs was closely linked to how wide they could open their jaws and T. rex could…

Substance abuse treatments that target drug and alcohol addiction are not frequently being used to also wean adolescents from tobacco, a study finds. There are even proposals to curb harm reduction…

The HIV epidemic among gay men in the Netherlands isn't going to decline as long as large, persistent, self-sustaining, and, in many cases, growing sub-epidemics shifting towards new generations of…

An analysis of nearly 500 anti-vaccination websites found that over two-thirds used what they represented as scientific evidence to support the idea that vaccines are dangerous and nearly one-third…

When you think of cheerleaders, and skimpy outfits, you probably do not consider them as being on the front lines of challenging stereotypes. But they are. No one is a professional cheerleader,…

Mood biases our judgments and perceptions, but this effect has usually been regarded as irrational or disadvantageous. New speculation in Trends in Cognitive Sciences argues that mood draws on…

10 commercially available insect repellents were evaluated for their effectiveness at repelling mosquitoes. Three of the products (Repel 100® Insect Repellent, OFF® Deep Woods Insect Repellent VIII,…

The lipid ceramide, long known to help keep skin smooth, also helps algae swim toward the light and appears to enable one type of brain cell to keep cerebrospinal fluid moving, researchers report in…

Chemsex, the unfortunately chosen term for sex under the influence of illegal drugs (unfortunate because it connotes chemistry with illegal, when love is clearly a chemistry event in the brain) -…

Because light travels far faster than sound, we see distant events before we hear them. Perhaps as a child you learned to count the seconds between a lightning flash and the sound of thunder to…

In a new study, infants remained calm twice as long when listening to a song as when listening to speech. The study involved thirty healthy infants aged between six and nine months. Humans like music…

In my last blog, I wrote in detail about zero, one, real numbers, complex numbers and quaternions (or as I now prefer to call them, space-time numbers although I use them interchangeably). For each…

In the film version of "The Martian", the main character is trapped on the red planet and is forced to figure out how to grow food. He declares he is going to "science the s--t out of" the issue…

Want to be an athlete but think it is too much work? Psychoactive drugs may be the answer. Let's face it, exercise is a lot of work. Our ancestors worked all of the time and they lived to be 35 so…

Products like milk have been fortified with Vitamin D for decades because of its importance in uptake of calcium in the bones, along with other cellular and immune processes. The body creates vitamin…

A new survey reveals that couples enjoyed more frequent and satisfying sex for both partners when men made a fair contribution to housework. The same paper also says there's no relationship between…

Using solar or wind power to produce carbon-based fuels is a self-defeating approach to making a greener world, but when governments decide to engage in advocacy rather than science, and throw money…

This week I am in Warsaw, where I attend the XI workshop on particle correlations and femtoscopy. I am actually here to give a seminar on statistical methods in particle physics next Thursday, but of…