On Sunday at 7pm EST PBS Nova is airing a special on the science of mega-storm Sandy. For readers who work and teach at universities, I encourage you to watch the […]
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Upon seeing in person Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, American novelist Henry James pithily dubbed it “the saddest work of art in the world.” War, weather, da Vinci’s own […]
Savita Halappanavar is dead, and she shouldn’t be. That has to be the beginning and end of anything anyone writes about this. Savita was 31 years old, married, four months […]
The guile of Girl Talk, to paraphrase a Times article, is its appeal to the ironically inclined. Crunk rap or heavy metal are too lowbrow for the hipster. Not so […]
One of the sadder but less noted aspects of this lurid Petraeus business is that not only did he cheapen his public service legacy and career with this affair, Paula […]
Stanford University researchers say they still have a ways to go, but the ability to create a cell using one of the most abundant elements on Earth suggests real promise for the solar energy industry.
Robot home care may be coming eventually, but right now, scientists are working on a more affordable way to use technology to help keep elders independent.
I encourage Waq al-waq’s readers to tune in to Rock Center with Brian Williams this evening at 10 pm EST for a segment on Ibrahim Asiri – who I wrote […]
Engineers and scientists have struggled for years to figure out how to turn waste products into significant quantities of fuel. Two companies say they’re closer than ever before to solving this problem.
Big Think would like to congratulate Peter Salovey, who was named the 23rd President of Yale University last week. Since Salovey succeeds Richard C. Levin, whose tenure at Yale lasted […]
Scientists from MIT and Rice have created a self-assembling material comprised of ultra-thin layers, as well as a groundbreaking test that allowed them to observe up close how the layers worked to prevent projectiles from penetrating.
Just before leaving office in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a farewell message in which he warned of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the […]
Two cancer patients are said to be doing better after their livers were “bathed” with drugs in an attempt to reach the tumors more directly and avoid common side effects.
It turns out that Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” gaffe in October wasn’t a gaffe at all: it was, as some observed at the time, a reflection of how the Republican […]
This past weekend, I was in Springfield, Missouri for Skepticon V (“the fifth most annual Skepticon yet”). I had such a fantastic time at Skepticon IV in 2011, it was […]
A Princeton scientist suggests that the index most commonly used to predict droughts may not be reliable, raising questions about whether the world might get wetter as it gets warmer. Some scientists agree with him.
Residue of second-generation blood thinner-type poisons are increasingly being found in the livers of dead birds and other predator animals.
As more details about the Petraeus Affair leak out, it’s becoming increasingly clear that marriage infidelity is no longer what it used to be. The digital trail of a cheating […]
All 364 subjects under the age of seven exceeded cancer benchmarks for arsenic and DDE, among others. Ninety-five percent of preschool-age children exceeded non-cancer benchmarks for acrylamide.
What do Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century prison reforms have to do with David Petraeus and Google’s biannual “Transparency Report”?
A new paper says the “rogue planet” is drifting in space about 100 light-years away from Earth, raising speculations as to how many others are out there.
Brazilian scientists have been working on gathering the necessary materials to clone endangered species, but conservationists fear it distracts from existing habitat protection.
After all the votes were cast and counted and even Florida reached a conclusion, the election postmortem flew fast and furious and will continue to whirl until the 2016 presidential […]
The travel site has released Neighborhoods, a search feature that gives tourists details on specific areas in the cities they’re visiting.
There are 17 days left to submit an entry to the White House’s Health Design Challenge, in which designers are invited to change the current unwieldy, text-heavy electronic medical record format.
E la Carte has made its Presto tablet better able to withstand heavy usage, and included nifty features like an LED light that changes color according to table status.
As lawyers say, exceptional cases make bad law. The director of the CIA having an affair in which, at best, he lacked the wherewithal to keep the secret secret (isn’t […]
Looking at the electoral college map, it’s easy to imagine that the U.S. is a sharply divided country. The northeastern and western coastal states are all blue, while a broad […]