I am spending my vacations in the beautiful island of Leukada, in the Ionian sea. Consequently, my posting rate here has dropped significantly in the last few days. I will return in August; in the…

Drug addicts are outraged by recent changes to the formula of frequently abused prescription painkiller OxyContin which makes it harder to inhale. So they are taking their business to heroin. For…

Cuba is adored by communists - maybe they like 1950s decor.  No, they like the socialized medicine. Specifically, they like to claim that a lower infant mortality rate means Cuban health care is…

Today, scientists are extremely careful in making sure they cite others’ works, if not for ethical reasons because plagiarism destroys reputations and is potentially a career ender. However, in the…

The European Commission, which controls one of the world's largest science budgets, has backed calls for free public access to taxpayer-funded research. Reed Elsevier is not thrilled. "Taxpayers…

Have you noticed a huge increase in the price of pork chops or bacon or hot dogs? Neither have I, despite the fact that sow gestation stalls, or crates or whatever you may call them in your…

Brain activity is a complex cipher but researchers were recently able to 'decode' monkey thoughts and determine how the little primates were planning to approach the same task - before they…

The following text has been offered as a followup of the Higgs observation by the LHC experiments, which finds a signal at a mass compatible with the pre-discovery predictions made some time ago by…

A giant herd of cattle are not huddled together to get away from evil oil companies or other things that have overwhelmingly improved the ecosystem in Alaska, these Northwest caribou are avoiding…

Compared to most moons in our solar system, Titan is relatively smooth. It has few craters  but Titan is around four billion years old, about the same age as the rest of the solar system - so it…