The Draconids (also called Giacobinids) are a meteor shower associated to comet Giacobini-Zinner (see below for a 100-year-old picture of the comet). While most years this shower passes unnoticed to…

The news cycle spins quickly, and spinning it does, the news that is. Neutrinos forgotten faster than light speed. What neutrinos? Foxy Knoxy got away without spilling the beans – well done. Stupid…

Today's post in honor of the 2011 Cephalopod Awareness Days. October 8th is Octopus Day. There are some weird octopuses out there, I'll grant you. The tiny-but-deadly blue-ringed octopus. The…

A few weeks back I flew to Los Angeles to have some meetings about technology and media outside the Science 2.0 world - well, sort of.  A surprising number of people outside science know of…

This weekend is the first episode in a three-part "Brain Games" series on the National Geographic channel.  Since National Geographic does not have a show on the 'science' of ghost hunting, and…

Two items of tremendous note today, to wit: The 2011 International Cephalopod Awareness Days begin tomorrow! It's no accident that this date also marks TONMOCON, the fourth biannual gathering of…

A new review has found evidence that a specific gene is linked to suicidal behavior, which may be one of the many complex causes of suicide.  In the past, studies have implicated the gene for…

It took years of mismanagement, printing Monopoly money by the federal government, and runaway unemployment to get groups claiming to represent 99% of Americans protesting progressive fiscal policy…

To say that a system implements a given computation is to say that something about that system - some aspect of its behavior - is described by the computation. It is thus a way of characterizing the…

This TED video of Christoph Adami is about life, and how to look for it. He begins by talking about the apparent difficulty in defining life (click here for a post about inorganic life) (funny that…