I am presently in Athens for a few days, to give a seminar and meet the local group of CMS physicists. So I took the chance to visit yesterday evening the Astrophysics department of the University of…

When a feather or a plastic bag or almost anything light is placed in water, these items will generally float.  This is easy to understand if you think of water being more dense than the other…

Scientists may get frustrated at Dr. Oz and The Food Babe and other people who are against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) while munching happily on organic strains created by mutagenesis, but…

What does it mean when a supermassive black hole exists in a place where it isn't supposed to exist? It's another puzzle of the early universe. Henize 2-10 is a small irregular galaxy that is not too…

A recent randomized trial looked at the feasibility of 2013 guidelines issued by the American College of Surgeons Trauma Quality Improvement Project for trauma resuscitation and found that delivering…

Much of what we know about cancer and many modern medicines that treat it grow from experiments on cancer cells but it is difficult to maintain the integrity of cell lines due to contamination or…

It’s all very well choosing not to eat genetically modified (GM) food, or even banning it entirely, but what if you then rear your cows on GM soya? Can you really maintain a consistent moral…

There is a great deal of evidence that meditation, in particular mindfulness meditation, improves the brain, and the research is teaching us a lot about how and why that happens. Let’s look at some…

The Calbuco volcano, a 2,000 meter peak in southern Chile, sent a column of ash about 15 kilometers skywards twice on the night of April 22 and early the following morning.  As the risk of…

Researchers have solved a genetic mystery that has afflicted three unrelated families, and possibly others, for generations: The genetic basis for a variety of congenital eye malformations, including…