By Helen King, The Open University It wasn’t that long ago that it was believed that regular periods were essential for women's health and in their absence, a loss of blood through another orifice…

Should scientists handle retractions differently? Peer review cannot catch everything. In many papers, there is no peer review at all, it is editorial review that checks off a few boxes and relies on…

It's the home stretch of the professional baseball season and that means players are more likely to be tired or sustain an injury. New research suggests that a stronger core might help. In the study…

Why would anyone bake bread and then turn around and toast it? I lived in a Pennsylvania house heated by wood. The idea of using our manual labor, in the form of wood, to toast bread was silly - but…

Spend any time in American science media and you may find some of them are pretty far out of the political mainstream; so far out, they may not even be friends with anyone who has not always voted…

Research that found links between abortion and breast cancer also found men who had 'much opportunity to participate in parties' were more likely to have stomach cancer. Credit: burningmax/Flickr, CC…

Jack The Ripper is famous - everyone in the Western world has heard of the unsolved case of the Whitechapel serial killer who preyed on prostitutes for a few months in 1888. There were only five (or…

The pressure's on JJ Abrams and the new Star Wars films.Credit: wiredphotostream, CC BY-NC By Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, Manchester Metropolitan University Much of the excitement of fantastical and science…

We come in peace. redgum, CC BY-NC-SA By Seth Shostak, SETI Institute The Conversation organized a public question-and-answer session on Reddit in which Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI…

My Kickstarter project has closed having raised  $220 out of the needed $2500 to help me either publish some scientific papers or to buy a telescope for astronomy students to use. Instead of…