Let me borrow a riff from co-blogger Allyson: Forgive me, readers, for I have slacked (from blogging, that is). It has been 50 phone calls, 200 emails, seven meetings, four gym workouts, three dinners, two "events", one screening, and a dental appointment since my last blog post. That's the downside...

Fans of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are familiar with the fictional Infinite Improbability Drive that powers the spaceship Heart of Gold . It allows for faster-than-light travel, per Adams, and is based on one of the central peculiarities of quantum physics: the notion that a sub...

When I was just a wee young thing, my grade school teacher assigned us all reports on a specific animal. I got the duckbilled platypus. Can I just say? I thought my teacher was having me on at first. I mean, come on: it had a bill like a duck, a body like a beaver, and it was venomous like a snake! ...

It's possible I have a streak of hypochondria. When I suffered the Amazing Five-Day Headache from Hell last December, there was, I admit, a brief period where I genuinely feared I might have a brain tumor... until I went online and every single authoritative site informed me -- with just a hint of e...

Back in March 2000, the U.S. Navy was conducting a military sonar testing trial in the Bahamas. The tests coincided with a mass stranding of beaked whales -- 17 in all, 7 of which were dead, as a result of hypothermia -- on the shoreline. Coincidentally, a marine biologist named Kenneth Balkan, who'...

One day in 1980, a man claiming to be called Clairvius Narcisse showed up in a rural Haitian village. This came as something of a surprise to the villagers, since Narcisse had supposedly died in 1962, and was subsequently buried. The new arrival claiming to be Narcisse said he'd been turned into a z...

The December 2007 issue of Physics Today is out, and among other interesting articles, it contains one by yours truly describing emerging medical applications for cold plasmas. I stumbled on the topic quite by accident while browsing abstracts for the APS-sponsored 2007 Gaseous Electronics Conferenc...