more than 65 years, and it is finally on the verge of creating a true electronic brain. Big Blue is announcing today that it, along with four universities and the Defense Advanced Research Projects…

Just what computer scientists want - dumb jocks getting all of the credit for artificial intelligence. Or maybe computer scientists are simply letting football players think they matter, and they are…

National Geographic, which nows runs Scienceblogs.com, has put the hammer down on anonymous blogs. Really, that whole thing was always a little sketchy.  Supposedly the rationale was that these…

What constitutes racism?   If you have a pool of applicants for a research grant and applications with good scores were likely to be funded, regardless of race or ethnicity, can there be racism…

Our solar system, with planets over a range of sizes and moving in near-circular paths, seems to be unusual, according to a model in t Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society which finds…

Researchers  have developed an inexpensive way to grade the ethanol potential of perennial grasses at the biorefinery's loading dock - the first use of near-infrared sensing (NIRS) to measure 20…

On one of my recent safari’s through the internet jungle, I came across a remarkable little creature. It’s a small (maximum diameter about 4.5 millimeters) bell-shaped jellyfish, with a number of…

Look, we all know smoking is bad for you by now.  We don't need to spend billions of dollars telling people that but an entire industry has been built around getting people to stop, and it is…

For this instance of my "Guess the plot" series I wish to go back to the basics. So I picked a graph which allows me to illustrate a general concept, something about particle physics (but we could…

As health care costs continue to rise and more people want more services for less money, it will be important that doctors engage in evidence-based medicine.  The Centers for Disease Control and…