Bacteria can multiply rapidly, potentially doubling every 20 minutes in ideal conditions but this exponential growth phase is preceded by a period known as lag phase, where no increase in cell number…

As you know, 74 people were killed this Wednesday when Egyptian soccer fans stampeded into a bottleneck after a 3-1 hometown upset win. While certainly tragic, it’s far from irrational: it turns out…

What is actually happening in the brain when one person looks at another?  For people with prosopagnosia, an inability to recognize faces, information processing - the stages that our…

A new study in Nature shows that Santorini may have reactivated roughly a century before the Minoan "super-eruption", a lot quicker than had previously been thought.  How is it possible to time…

The Wall Street Journal posted a letter from 16 scientists who are critical of climate science in general and anthropogenic warming in specific. There were numerous flaws in the letter (see Robert…

I can feel it in the air, so thick I can taste it. Can you? It's the we're-going-to-build-an-artificial-brain-at-any-moment feeling. It's exuded into the atmosphere from news media plumes ("IBM Aims…

A social psychologist who doesn't spend his days finding ways to rationalize being progressive? University of Virginia Prof. Jonathan Haidt certainly was a partisan liberal, he says, but researching…

I spend quite a lot of time here at Squid A Day blathering about one fishery or another, and I ought to remember that the word "fishery" isn't exactly common parlance. It's not jargon in the same way…

Who has more credibility to the NPR audience, a scientist or someone who runs an organic yogurt company?  It depends on the issue, of course.  When it comes to global warming, science is…

It may turn out that coffee is bad for you. The World Health Organization already lists it as a possible carcinogen, despite any evidence, but they do the same thing about cell phones, in contrast to…