The world got lucky on February 12th, 1809 with the birth of Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. In the United States, Lincoln's 200th birthday will be celebrated in acknowledgement that he was…

It wasn't always the case that people believed in continental drift, German geologist and meteorologist Alfred Wegener's(1)  theory that parts of the Earth's crust slowly drift atop a liquid…

Genes that contain instructions for making proteins make up less than 2% of the human genome. Yet, for unknown reasons, most of our genome is transcribed into RNA.  Investigating all transcripts…

Dead zones are low-oxygen areas in the ocean where higher life forms such as fish, crabs and clams are not able to live.   In shallow coastal regions, for examples, dead zones can be caused by…

Psoriasis affects some 7.5 million people in the United States, causing sore, itchy patches of red, scaly skin. In many cases psoriasis is not only disfiguring; between 10 and 30 percent of patients…

This fascinating article at Scientific American, about human and animal consciousness, contains the following passage:"In humans, the short-term storage of symbolic information—as when you enter an…

In the latest Vanity Fair is a brilliant piece of journalism, Goodbye to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House by Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum. In a fun, easy-to-read format, it tells…

In a Times News Review interview, Marcus du Sautoy, our new Oxford University Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, says: I became a mathematician and not a scientist because science…

For those of you who still are not reading Evolution: Education and Outreach, here's another reason to check it out. Eugenie Scott and Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education have a…

When thinking of a child with ADD, most people will picture an easily-distracted hyperactive child... long on energy, and short on attention span.  And although that is sometimes the case, that…