When you can't afford onions 27 Aug 2013 | 03:34 pm

People can put up with quite a bit, and while annoying, if some non-necessity or luxury item is beyond your means, well, you wait or change your mind and generally endure.  But when you cannot afford ...

On the Road with the Shambulance 27 Aug 2013 | 03:14 pm

Hello from the land of boxes! I'm about to move across the country, so there will be a brief hiatus from new stories here. But in the meantime, please enjoy some travel-themed reruns. The Shambulanc...

Fairness or intimidation: How do you handle difficult commenters? 27 Aug 2013 | 02:10 am

Last week I wrote a post on my Scientific American blog criticizing a guest post about nuclear power on Andrew Revkin's NYT blog "Dot Earth" by John Miller, a social psychologist and journalist who ha...

Everything as usual 26 Aug 2013 | 10:11 pm

Let's see.  TPP is too much of a mother hen; TPP doesn't give enough instructions.  One week into a two week lesson, and two out of 24 people have uploaded material.  A mother hen warning was delivere...

Not the birthday present I would have preferred 26 Aug 2013 | 06:12 pm

I seem to have now thoroughly disproved one of my favourite hypotheses, that cytoplasmic genes in the competence regulon act to help cells survive depletion of pools of deoxyribonucleotides (dNTPs). ...

Alternative medicine quacks show their greedy side 26 Aug 2013 | 05:00 pm

Congress is on holiday this month, but the lobbyists are baiting their hooks, planning their strategies for how to get more money for themselves. A growing lobby is Complementary and Alternative Medi...

Children don't always learn what you want 26 Aug 2013 | 04:42 pm

Someone has not been watching his/her speech around this little girl. It's clear she has some sense as to what the phrase means, but clearly she's got the words wrong. But she is treating this phrase...

Paradrillia 26 Aug 2013 | 12:37 pm

Paradrillia patruelis, from Joop Trausel and Frans Slieker. Paradrillia is a genus of conoid gastropods found in the Indo-Pacific region, with a fossil record going back to the Miocene (Powell 1966; ...

Crazy space 25 Aug 2013 | 12:44 am

The Destruction of Pompeii - Still a Mystery of History 24 Aug 2013 | 05:25 pm

It's probably the most famous volcanic eruption of all times - the 79 A.D. eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. So may it surprise that the exact date of th...