The Milky Way's total mass is about 100 billion solar masses - enormous to us but average among galaxies. It spirals around a black hole that is about three million solar masses, say cosmologists.…

Egon has just posted about Nature Precedings, which looks like a no-brainer as an additional publication outlet for UsefulChem. I've requested an account and we'll see how it works. In my view,…

Much cooler than a flaming Optimus Prime, more practical than Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot - they're rescue robots, and they're here to help. NIST engineers are organizing the fourth in a series…

This week's issue of Science has a book review (subscription required unfortunately) of Michael's Behe's latest effort to defend Intelligent Design Creationism. Michael Behe's latest book, The Edge…

The peculiar pose of many fossilized dinosaurs, with wide-open mouth, head thrown back and recurved tail, likely results from the agonized death throes typical of brain damage and asphyxiation,…

In the internet age, when 120,000,000 smart people on Digg can see an article about your technology, it takes some real courage to use the term "unbreakable", but the guys at NIST are doing just that…

Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage – so experts believe. But what preceded these pre-life steps? A pair…

Key milk nutrients, calcium and vitamin D, may do more than just help keep your bones strong. Increasing intake of calcium and vitamin D could reduce the risk for cancer in women by at least 60…

A new novel about Sherlock Holmes or, my favorite, The Saint? No, this really happened in an operating room in St Paul’s Hospital, British Columbia. Dr. Alana Flexman, Dr. Stephan Schwarz and Dr.…

  Recent events and news stories have had a familiar feel to me.  It is because many of them had been part of my predictions for 2007 that I published here in January.  When something…