A widely publicized report that cosmic microwave background, the glow left over from the explosive start of the universe believed to have occurred 13.7 billion years ago, contains echoes of previous…

I had a beautiful dream on Thursday night. Having recently graduated, I was cleaning up and moving out of my lab, and in particular, I was deciding what to do with the animals in the aquarium room. I…

What's on people's mind? Who or what is impacting us most? That is easy to decide: go to Google, put in the search field the n-gram (the sequence of n words) that describes the item you want to check…

An excellent interview-style article created by one of my Facebook colleagues, Sniff Code.A hybridized product of Science and Philosophy. Introduction: Dr. Shapiro believes that it might be time for…

In all of the excitement about 'renewable' energy that can replace fossil fuels, we look to the future - algae, seaweed, switchgrass, we have articles on practically every new idea - but forget to…

In the month of December (and October, November, and January), PA systems in malls around the country play holiday music. And when we hear the telltale pa-rum-pum-pum-pum we want to strangle the…

The American chestnut tree (Castanea dentata) was once among the most culturally and economically important trees in the eastern United States but in the last century more than four billion trees…

Google is claiming that it has scanned 10% of the books ever published. Google Ngram Viewer is a tool to see how often the phrases have occurred in the world's books over the years.  Users can…

In the 'government employees become so entrenched in their bureaucracy they lose common sense' department, a group of people who rescued a deer from an icy river were given tickets by a "natural…

On his Reference Frame site, contrarian physicist Luboš Motl uses Google to determine the 'reading level' of some science blogs, with, he says, "Basic" being 1 star, "intermediate" 3 stars and "…