If you believe The Daily Mail, we’re all convinced that the world is going to end on 21st December 2012. Apparently people are stockpiling food and weapons, flocking to remote villages and heading for mystical peaks from whence ‘an extra-terrestrial mothership’ housed for centuries in an alien temple inside the mountain ‘will pluck believers to [...]

Planetary scientists have come together to prioritize the most compelling, cutting-edge questions across our entire field. Some of these questions are best addressed by ambitious, sophisticated, large-scale missions. Others are best addressed by smaller, more focused missions. Some require continued operations of existing plantary orbiters or rovers. All require a commitment to maintaining the existing [...]

Enzo, Haley and Emma are ordinary kids working on an extraordinary mission. They are joining up with a team of Special Forces medics and elite, global surgeons to deliver medical aid to the Rama Indians of Nicaragua in the spring of 2013. In partnership with HumaniTV, the journey will be beamed to tens of thousands [...]

#StorySaturday is a Guest Blog weekend experiment in which we invite people to write about science in a different, unusual format – fiction, science fiction, lablit, personal story, fable, fairy tale, poetry, or comic strip. We hope you like it. ========================= This installment of my blog was supposed to be part two of my series [...]

For the past couple years, I’ve been working as a science communicator on two fronts, as a freelance science writer and a community college Earth science instructor. I’ve seen, from many angles, the difficulty people have understanding and assessing scientific issues. With topics that are publicly contentious, those difficulties rarely arise from a simple lack [...]

One day I would like to have a long tube snaking in and out of the rooms of my house carrying a faintly glowing algal broth. I know it sounds strange, but these tiny creatures are bioluminescent, so eco-enthusiasts think they could make great, environmentally friendly lamps. They use energy from the sun, which makes [...]

A critical element in the dissemination of scientific discovery is the preparation of a paper for publication.  Strong rules and traditions govern the writing of science for a journal.  The tone should be sober and restrained as if emotions and literary flourish do not exist.  With “I” or “we” resisted if not banned, passive voice [...]

What if I told you there were populations of chimpanzees that made spears to hunt, lived in caves, and loved playing in water?  These are behaviors usually associated with ancient humans, not chimpanzees.  However, recent research has revealed that there are populations of western chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes verus) that engage in all of these behaviours, [...]

Millions of people around the world come home to four legs and a wagging tail, and many spend some of their time together playing. While dog-dog play has been studied extensively, dog-person play, which takes on a different form and appears to have different rules, has not attracted nearly as much scholarly attention. At the [...]

When I was a sophomore in college, my mother unfortunately lost her very short battle with pancreatic cancer, an experience that changed my life forever. During that time I witnessed firsthand the devastating effects caused by the administration of toxic, non-specific treatments which ultimately failed to stop the spread of the cancer, and instead only [...]