If I could do it all over again, I would forget genomics and specialize in the chemistry of Scotch. You may scoff, dear reader, but there are employment opportunities out there (not to mention…

In case you haven't heard, there's a debate about health care reform going on - today we find out that a campaign promise, no fines if you choose not to use government health care, is off the table…

One of the biggest concerns about president Obama's government health insurance plan is that both quality and waiting lists will suffer in return for broader access.    It turns out…

There is little doubt that, in modern times, scientific knowledge is at a peak from any other period in human history.   However, there are also other factors that need to be considered. …

I ran into an interesting linguistic stumbling block.  I'll call it the "It's science, so it must be hard" frame of mind.  I wrote to some friends and family about this project, saying: I'm…

The 2009 movie District 9 is a metaphor for what might be an evolved version of the world federalist government we have today.  Some time before the 1990s, conflicts were mainly fought between…

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in citizen science was certainly not on the minds of 6-year-old Alyson Yates and her mom, Kate, when they stepped out into their back yard one day to scout for…

Apparently, for a week in 2006 the UK newspaper The Guardian gave away wallcharts (=posters) as a promotional gambit to drum up readership. It seems the charts were all nature-themed, with a strong…

One of the favorite themes in transhumanist discussions is considering the melding of human intellect with "machine intelligence" to arrive at superhuman abilities.   Right from the beginning we…

Some people believe in fate, others don’t. I do and I don’t. I may seem at times as if invisible fingers move us about like puppets on strings. But for sure, we are not born to be dragged along. We…