Science & Society

Pirates, like gangsters and other pop culture outlaws, have always carried a certain romantic appeal and, thanks to "Pirates of the Caribbean", they are the most appealing  outlaws at this…

Nature had her own ideas about testing the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) near Geneva last Friday. A thunderstorm knocked out some transformers that are part of the helium cooling system, which cools the…

A current news piece announces the end of scientific secrecy. Scientists can "forgo the long wait to publish in a print journal and instead to blog about early findings and even post their data and…

In the inaugural Big Ten Battleground Poll taken as the nation's financial crisis worsened this week, John McCain and Barack Obama were in a statistical dead heat in seven of the eight Midwest states…

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers: As the dominoes of the financial sector continue to fall at an alarming rate and the Federal Reserve attempts to forestall a systemic…

In sports, the old saying goes that you can fire a coach but you can't fire the whole team. This doesn't mean the coach has all the blame but you still do what you can do. Sometimes a coach with…

The inventor of a revolutionary new forensic fingerprinting technique claims criminals who eat processed foods are more likely to be discovered by police through their fingerprint sweat corroding…

The only thing I get tired of more than crazy people invoking Galileo as their defense against criticism of whatever bizarre science 'theory' they are foisting on the world are people on the other…

David Foster Wallace committed suicide last Friday. The NY Times has an appraisal here. No more novels with inimitable passages like this: Hydrolysis is the metabolic process by which organic cocaine…

Dialysis patients diagnosed with depression are nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized or die within a year than those who are not depressed, a UT Southwestern Medical Center researcher has found.…