Nuclear power is not an environmental issue. There is just no way to spin that it is.  What started off with activists being anti-nuclear weapon has morphed into irrational, anti-science stances…

Dopamine, the neurotransmitter celebrity chemical du jour in brain stories, gets invoked a lot because it can make a lot of correlations possible - and that means fun for journalists who either want…

A promising anti-cancer therapy - suppression of the protein mammalian target Of Rapamycin  (mTOR) - has failed to achieve hoped-for success in killing tumor cells. mTOR plays an important role…

Interacting with a therapeutic robot companion made people with mid- to late-stage dementia less anxious and also had a positive influence on their quality of life, according to a pilot study PARO, a…

How lifeless materials became organic molecules that are the bricks of animals and plants is a science question for the ages. The secret of a reaction that has to do with the synthesis of complex…

The world's first known odd couple: 250 million years ago, a mammal forerunner and an amphibian shared a burrow in South Africa. Scientists scanning a 250 million-year-old fossilized burrow from the…

As expected, a coalition of subscription-based journal publishers has responded to the White House’s mandate that federal agencies develop systems to make the research they fund available to public…

I have been doing public outreach for science since I originally moved to Tennessee in 1996. It has been a fun ride, and I’m sure it will continue to be that way for many years to come. But two of…

A 'Super Moon' - a new or full moon at 90% of its closest perigee - hasn't happened since...well, last year. But it's still cause for concern, according to people who need things to be concerned…

Jolts from Volts I have almost finished my translation of Volta's original article on his pile and his crown of cups. Most of the article is a straightforward description of his experiments, but I…