'Priming' studies, which suggest that decisions can be influenced by apparently irrelevant actions or events that took place just before the cusp of choice, have been a boom area in psychology over…

If you want your daughter to do better in science, get her exercising, says a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. All teens benefit, girls more. The improvements were sustained over the…

Fake volcanoes, giant space mirrors, oceans of iron filings - one of these ideas might save our planet from the worst effects of global warming – or destroy it. Memphis Barker reports on the rise of…

Active camouflage update. In a Harvard School of Engineering laboratory test, a team of applied physicists placed a device  with a new coating that intrinsically conceals its own temperature to…

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) is a common human virus, you get a cold sore near the mouth, but a study of the full genetic code of HSV-1 shows a dramatic confirmation of the "out-of-Africa"…

There's a reason why organic food sickens far more people than conventional produce; a lack of science in agricultural practices. Researchers have identified some agricultural management practices in…

Few people love evolutionary biology outreach as much as the University of Chicago's Professor Jerry Coyne. His book, "Why Evolution Is True", is one of three that gets a personal endorsement on my…

Greenpeace was founded on a pretense of humanitarian action - between 1969 and 1971, they gathered together because they wanted to put an end to hydrogen bomb testing. Later they lost their way and…

'A peculiar Scottish disorder' is described in the Scottish Medical Journal (SMJ), August 2011 vol. 56 no. 3, pp. 164-166 (by Doctor I. B. McIntosh.)  “A highly contagious behavioural affliction…

It was the late astronomer and author Carl Sagan who popularized the phrase “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and originated the closely related concept of scientific skepticism…