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Using connections he’d made living with the Mujahideen in the 1980s, Van Dyk set out to discover the relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but ambition and deadlines pushed […]

Last week, I wrote that Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) opponent, Sharron Angle, would have a hard time appealing to moderate voters.  Her views are so far out of the mainstream—at […]

While I was out of town last week I got a lot of reading done. One of the books I picked up was the paperback version of Palace Council by […]

Science used to be fascinating to the general public … where did we go wrong and how do we fix it?

Expect to hear a lot about this from the Obama campaign over the next few weeks. See the front page article at today’s Washington Post, detailing McCain’s reaction to the […]

Few people have felt the muzzle of an automatic machine gun in their gut, let alone survived a kidnapping on their birthday. In January 1998, then-federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was […]

Back in the fall, after hosting a class “blog” debate on the Internet and community, more than a few readers asked me whether I would post the reading list for […]

By studying the neural networks in the brain, scientists have constructed computer-based models that mirror the brain’s complex biological networks. 

Part 1 of the Q&A from Dr. Boris Behncke of the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Catania.

n It’s déjà vu all over again. Post #163 of this blog (d.d. Aug 5, 2007) dealt with a secretive plan by the European Union to carve up the United […]

As insolvable problems go, it’s right up there with attempts to square the circle. Try as you might, it is impossible to render a three-dimensional object (the Earth, say) on […]

Research suggests that promiscuity is not associated with increased happiness and, in fact, that the number of sexual partners needed to maximize happiness is exactly one.

In chemistry, a free radical is the name for an atom or group of atoms having at least one unpaired electron, thus making it unstable and highly reactive. From the […]

The exclave exists only because the Austrians wanted to spite the Swiss

Our stereotype of strip club workers is that they don’t have a lot on the ball. But a new study of UK lap dancers shows they are more educated than the typical Brit.

A few weeks ago I highlighted this relevant finding from the massive amount of data contained in Pew’s annual State of the Media report. And Chris highlighted the results of […]

A friend of mine, who works in the sustainable food industry, was alarmed by my recent post on overfishing. Not alarmed to learn about the demise of marine ecosystems (she […]

Learn a little bit more about the Volcano Hazards Program and where it is headed (we can thank Bobby Jindal for a lot of it).

Sady Doyle has a piece in the Atlantic about how the latest case of HIV in the porn industry has revived public concern about the lack of condoms in straight […]

Any art lover who has been to Paris knows what it’s like to try to see everything in a finite time frame. Cruel choices must be made, masterpieces must be […]

An April Fool’s prank that had lots of Guardian readers fooled – except those who knew their typography. 

In the wake of the Aug. 23 court decision that halted Federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, Democrats are gearing up to use stem cell research as a wedge […]

The fledgling state managed to elect a Miss Absaroka 1939 before disappearing into the dustbin of history

n n What is it with airlines and maps? Which part of ‘atlas’ don’t they understand? You’d think that, being the business of transportation, they’d get their distances and directions […]

I am back from an excellent science journalism conference in Denmark and will have more to say on the meeting which highlighted several issues that speak directly to challenges faced […]

Last week I noted that McCain is scoring political body blows with a compelling message on energy and that the Obama campaign has not responded to the massive shifts in […]

Summer is over. Now fall begins. When we think back on this season in this year will we remember the books, the songs, the finals of the U.S. Open (or […]

Dr. Norman Frost of the University of Wisconsin at Madison tells Big Think “drug-testing policies in professional sports are completely illogical.”

This morning I posted on a fascinating forthcoming study that concludes that generalized messages about science are more impactful on audiences than similarly framed messages that include details on scientific […]

As neuroimaging labs use scanners to reveal more and more details about how the brain works, their findings are increasingly affecting the legal system.