The discovery of the first gene causing familial scoliosis was announced by an international France-Canada research team today. "Mystery surrounds the cause of scoliosis, which is a three dimensional…

James D. Bjorken, also known as "BJ" by colleagues and physicists around the world, has been awarded the prestigious 2015 Wolf prize in Physics together with cosmologist Robert Kirshner. Bjorken…

Today I collected in my mailbox the hefty "Review of Particle Physics", the publication of the Particle Data Group which contains a summary of everything we know about subatomic particles. For the…

In this post, I will provide the ultra orthodox fringe view (translation: just my view) on the problems that face physics when doing classical problems with gravity.  The difference between…

One saved the U.S. space program, another invented a better treatment for leprosy and a third spawned an industry in the American Midwest - but you have probably never heard of these female "legends…

Mars One, a private effort to do what governments seem incapable of achieving, has believers excited about colonizing another planet, but the long-term consequences of living in low or no-gravity…

Public participation will have to be at the heart of big data projects in health care and biomedical research and a new report calls for greater transparency about how people's data are used. The…

A new study has linked a previously unexplored biological process to the failure of embryos to attach to the uterine wall during in vitro fertilization (IVF). IVF only has around a 25% success rate,…

There’s no scientific definition of picky eating, but parents know it when they see it.  Sharon Donovan, a University of Illinois professor of nutrition, says that picky eaters do exhibit…

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a relatively rare congenital disease which causes muscle degeneration and eventual death in teenagers.   Around 1 in 3500 newborns is affected and by approximately…