Frankincense is a milky, fragrant resin used in incense and perfumes across the world and is also a key part of the Christmas story but trees are declining so dramatically that production could be…

How old is the water in your drinking glass? What about the ice cubes floating in it? Any answer is bound to make reference to the water cycle (evaporate, rain, repeat). Still, for most practical…

As I have a long train journey and not much to do, I can use it to write about this recent open access paper on Eyjafjallajökull written by a couple of my colleagues in the lab. As it is open access…

Every year since 1990, I have made a holiday card sending it to friends and family (a list of ~ 50). They have always been nerdy. I try and feature something about the physics I figured out in the…

I missed reporting it when it happened at the end of November, but a group of Indian fishermen caught a rather larger squid than they were expecting: This rare squid, caught by the fishermen of King…

In the previous blog post we familiarized ourselves with a most remarkable device. A device resulting from 20th century science: Albert's chest of drawers. This chest, although presented as a…

A number of midwives believe modern births rely too heavily on medication and technological intervention and they instead have created 'birthing rituals' to send the message that women's bodies know…

A gene mutation dating back to 11,600 B.C. is the second oldest human disease mutation discovered so far. The investigators described the mutation in people of Arabic, Turkish and Jewish…

Galaxies are theorized to have massive black holes at their centers but the one in the Milky Way is the only supermassive black hole  close enough for astronomers to study in detail. A recent…

"[...] practically nobody took very seriously the CDF claim (not even mostmembers of the collaboration, and I know several of them), while practically everybody isnow convinced that the Higgs boson…