The nuggets of information necessary for science to progress are often hard to find, submerged deep within the Web, or within databases that can’t be easily accessed or integrated. As a result, many scientists today work in relative isolation, follow blind alleys and unnecessarily duplicate existi...

Just skip the messy chemical stuff. The device created by University of Miami Physicist Stewart E. Barnes, of the College of Arts and Sciences and his collaborators can store energy in magnets rather than through chemical reactions. Like a winding up toy car, the spin battery is "wound up" by applyi...

Remember the wind-powered rotating skyscrapers of Dubai? Well, the building boom in the Emirates is over, thanks to the financial crisis. Most of the huge and expensive construction projects have been cancelled or are on hold. Not only that, foreign laborers are being laid off at an astounding rate ...

To predict the outcome of a game, you should know the players. A handicapper who fixes the odds on flats or trotters in horse racing has to know the race track, the conditions, the horses, the jockeys, the length of the race and their post positions in order to have an informed idea of how the race ...

Filipino blogger and writer Charles Tan has been a quiet but persistent force in the online world, producing quality interviews with some of the western world’s top science fiction and fantasy authors while working to promote speculative fiction in his own country. Tell me a little bit about yours...

Yesterday John McCormack pointed out excellent stem-cell pieces by Yuval Levin and Robert George & Eric Cohen. Will Saletan's piece in Slate also deserves to be read. Saletan is a measured proponent of embryonic stem-cell research and his piece is a caution to his confederates about not delving too ...

The second day of the “Neutrino Conference XIII” in Venice was dedicated to, well, neutrino telescopes. I have written down in stenographical fashion some of the things I heard, and I offer them to those of you who are really interested in the topic, without much editing. Besides, making...

Via the the always great Bishop Thomas Olmsted. Our president's rationale is that science should trump ideology. In other words, that ideology should not have the upper hand in making decisions about who pays for research; science should. We Americans, he says, should trust scientists more than we t...

For what? For total control of oil and other natural resources on someone else's land. For global hegemony. For lies and deceit sold to Americans and the rest of the world.   It matters not if citizens in other countries protest that they do not want US military bases on their land. Last month,...

Today, AT&T made a major announcement: that it will invest more than a half-billion dollars over the next decade to purchase more than 15,000 alternative-fueled vehicles — 8,000 vans powered by compressed natural gas, and another 7,100 hybrid passenger cars. The telecommunications giant estima...