The Economist has published a highly amusing (at least to me) and informative article about "the new robotics," inspired by the diversity of natural forms: UNTIL recently, most robots could be…

In the autism community, it can’t help but be noticed that a good portion of the parents of autistic kids deal with the same kinds of issues their children do. Indeed, researchers also noticed that…

“I am going Nuts” introduced a misunderstood gem, the Nutmeg, and mentioned the problem of the nuts being very diverse, as you can see in the picture below, and thus a little difficult to dose. One…

Twitter and Facebook have been studied extensively and have provided some insights into the formation and maintenance of human social networks. But could this approach be adapted to gain…

A comment thread on my last post has gotten me thinking about the summer of 2009. I lived in La Jolla for a couple of months, sorting baby squid out of old preserved plankton tows, and then…

Rice accounts for nearly half the daily calories for the world's population but crops are at risk from tsunamis and tidal surges and perhaps future unknown effects of climate change.   But…

An unusual number of destructive storm surges along the East Coast during the 2009-2010 El Niño winter could be a taste of things to come - with more destructive storm surges in future El Niño years…

New research on Jakobshavn Isbrae, a tongue of ice extending out to sea from Greenland's west coast, shows that large, marine-calving glaciers don't just shrink rapidly in response to global warming…

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow so forests are a completely natural way to offset climate change - but rather than let them passively sit there, the amount of carbon…

 Given the mass exclusions we already know from the Tevatron it is already more likely that the Higgs sector will be described by something outside the Standard Model.  With the exception…