For decades, physicists have used a theory known as the Standard Model to explain the interactions of subatomic particles, and the theory works beautifully. It's guided our way through the world of nuclear power, television, microwave ovens and lasers. One problem: The theory needed something extra to explain why some particles have mass and some don't. Back in the 1960s, physicist Peter Higgs and his colleagues proposed the existence of a mysterious energy field that interacts with some particles more than others. That field is known as the Higgs field, associated with a particle called the Higgs boson.

America is the only civilized country that allows late-term abortion on demand yet America is regarded as more hung up on abortion than European countries.  What gives?  Outside the recurring re-election campaigns of people like Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer, who insist if they do not get 80% of the votes in Democrat bastion San Francisco women will be 'having abortions in back alleys', abortion is not really an issue.

In Last Gasp For The UNFCCC And Climate Change Negotiations? I worried that the departure of sane people from the UN body tasked with...doing something about climate control...would mean only the full-on kooks would be left in attendance, so our chances of a science-based, non-scientization-of-politics solution would dwindle.

At some point we need to either ban cigarettes or call off the fundamentalist ranting about smokers.  Yes, smoking is bad for you, everyone knows that by now, but having the state of California increase taxes on cigarette smokers - making the state government even more reliant on them - while they use some of that money for anti-smoking campaigns, which means the government now wants to kill the revenue source it is making itself more reliant on, is the kind of thing only...well... progressive government would do.

Teenagers 16 years old and younger would have been able to get the 'Morning-After' Pill, called Plan B One-Step, under new FDA guidelines. Currently, they can get it, it just requires a prescription and teenagers 17 years and older can get it freely.

Eye evolution is always interesting stuff, as I last discussed regarding Dr. Ivan Schwab's "Evolution's Witness".  A new finding suggests that the compound eyes evolved right at the origin of this branch of the evolutionary tree, long before the sorts of hard exoskeletons we now consider typical of arthropods.

At the AGU meeting in San Francisco, journalist Simon Winchester apologized to attendees for his March 2011 article that claimed the Tohoku Earthquake in Japan could trigger a daisy chain of temblors in North America.

When rational people give up, all that is left are zealots - that means the conduct of some nations at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) could be a sign reasonable discussion of controlling emissions are out the window.It has been hoped for years that a meaningful successor to the Kyoto agreement could be in reach soon but it's a little silly to have the world's top CO2 emitter exempt from CO2 emissions cutbacks - not to mention India, Brazil and Mexico, who are also exempt and don't want that to change, since they are much poorer than China and China remains exempt.

Most neutral parties regard the Kyoto Treaty as more of a political/economic effort than a science-based climate one. Regardless of how much blame you place on CO2 for current climate change, the fact that Germany and France rammed through a date that made it easier for them (for Germany, a date right after re-unification, so they simply closed World War II-era Soviet factories in E. Germany and France brought on more nuclear plants at that time) to achieve their CO2 goals is suspect by anyone not on the partisan fringe.

Let's hope bizarre stories regarding Sweden's nationalized health care system are the exception - worried Americans have enough on their minds without wondering if a government life/death panel will suddenly decide not having legs is not good enough reason to have a wheelchair.A man from Nyköping in eastern Sweden has been denied a power wheelchair despite having had both of his legs amputated after a long struggle with diabetes. The health authority remained "uncertain if the impairment was permanent".