Is there such a thing as a Facebook murder? Is it different than any other murder? Legally, it can be. From a common sense point of view, there is no 'hate crime' status that should make a…

In the 1980s, a press release writer for an environmental group pulled a metric for meat and fossil fuel usage out of the air. It made its way into a book written by an activist and ever since then…

Some people have great memories - almost like they are looking at a photograph. What is the secret? Will it be possible to change the amount of information the brain can store? Maybe. Researchers…

There may be disagreement about whether or not telling teenagers to not have sex works but that could be due to puberty. In younger kids, cookie abstinence works just fine. Even the Cookie Monster…

The Obama Administration's Clean Power Plan was released in June of 2014 and is seeking public comments until December 1st so if you want to yell about liberals or Big Oil, you are running out of…

When Ebola was the latest rage in mainstream media (that would be last month - poor people in Africa are so October of 2014) National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins was quick to…

Here's a diet tip that is certain to work: Eat nothing and drink nothing except water from 6 PM until you wake up the next day. With no dieting at all, you are certain to lose weight unless you go…

In America, it is no surprise to see obese people. They know they are obese, they just don't care. In Britain, you see just as many obese people, but they don't care because they don't think they are…

If you like coffee, here is a delightful taste of confirmation bias. If you usually make fun of epidemiology, put your skepticism back in the pot, because coffee reduces diabetes. As many as 380…

I am using my blog to advertise the opening of PhD positions in Padova University, to work at several research projects and obtain a PhD in Physics. These are offered to Chinese students through the…

Kakadu National Park, Australia. Rita Willaert/Flickr, CC BY-NC By Bob Pressey, James Cook University and Euan Ritchie, Deakin University While we can never know for sure, an extraordinary number of…

Most of the world that has access to the Internet knows two things about the Rosetta mission - it landed on a comet and a European engineer wore an ugly shirt that offended a lot of American women on…

The bobtail squid and bioluminscent bacteria are just one of hundreds of examples of mutualism. Klaus Stiefel/Flickr, CC BY-NC By Alex Jordan, University of Texas at Austin Reproduction for a female…

How has domestication humbled house cats? Moyan Brenn/Flickr, CC BY-ND By Bryonie Scott, The Conversation House cats are a great source of companionship for many people – 3 million cats are kept as…

We may talk about a battle of the sexes when it comes to our species, but in the rest of the primate world, it really is a battle. We have the luxury of cultural hand-wringing about the shirt a…

Low standards breed poor results. I have been waiting for the biological revolution for quite a while now, and it always seems to be just around the corner.  Synthetic biology, genomics, protein…

Wired magazine devotes a special issue each November to a "What's Next?" for the upcoming year - and that means it is time to think about what will happen in the world of science in 2015. Wired…

Frightening experiences stick with us but a new study finds that the bonding hormone oxytocin inhibits the fear center in the brain and allows fear stimuli to subside more easily.  Significant…

Whether playing video games has negative effects is something that has been debated for 30 years, in much the same way that rock and roll, television, and even the novel faced much the same…

Instead of dying out, Anti-Semitic myths have withstood the test of time. By Asa Simon Mittman, California State University, Chico 800 years ago, a monk named Thomas of Monmouth wrote a bogus account…