2017-11-04 10:00
Most people would be able to say that it was an impact by an enormous meteor that did for the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. I have written previously about the less commonly known vulcanis… Read More
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2017-10-28 09:00
The arms of Tyrannosaurus rex have the become the stuff of legend. The butt of a million internet jokes about having short, useless arms the memes have become so prevalent that people are as… Read More
2017-10-14 09:00
Time for a bit of physics.
You are probably aware that we cannot currently account for about 95% of the matter in the universe. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are the place holder names we use… Read More
2017-10-07 13:16
As a follow up to last week’s post on CRISPR DNA editing, this week we have a story on the practical application of said technique.
Celiac disease is the disorder where an individual i… Read More
2017-09-30 09:00
It occurred to me that I’m a geneticist writing a science blog and I’ve never written about the phenomenon that is CRISPR/Cas9. Anyone vaguely interested in science, and I’… Read More
2017-09-23 09:00
On this day in 1869 in County Tyrone, Ireland, a baby girl by the name of Mary was born. Certainly, there’s nothing unusual in that. Very little is known of the formative years of youn… Read More
2017-09-17 13:26
A matter of some controversy this week. You may have seen in the news lately that an ancient viking burial with all the trappings of an experienced warrior was shown to be that of a female… Read More
2017-09-09 09:04
Saturn. Truly, one of the most beautiful objects known to man. We’re lucky to have something in our solar system that is both so wonderful to look at and so scientifically informative… Read More
2017-09-03 11:32
Hey Science Fans! I’m back from a week off and ready to write so let’s get to it.
You’ll no doubt remember the curious case of Tabby’s Star: a star about 1300 lightye… Read More
2017-08-19 10:00
This week, science fans, the small matter of life on Earth as we know it. You have probably heard of the Cambrian explosion, that point about 540 million years ago when multicellular life su… Read More
2017-08-12 10:00
I am really quite passionately against smoking, I really hate it. Asides from the obvious health impact it’s just gross. Which is unfortunate because all my girlfriends have been smoke… Read More
2017-08-05 09:00
Being a massive Star Trek nerd I am regularly exposed to time paradoxes. The writers seemed to throw in at least one or two time travel episodes per series and as sure as eggs is eggs, there… Read More
2017-07-29 09:00
Some interesting research was published last week that, to begin with, seemed a little counter intuitive to me but actually makes sense when you look at it a little more deeply.
It concerns… Read More
2017-07-22 09:00
You may remember last year when the USDA approved a field trial of genetically modified mosquitos in Florida. Although there were the usual ideologically opposed protests the trial is progre… Read More
2017-07-15 09:00
It has been some time coming but the enormous chunk of ice that has been slowly breaking away from the side of the Larsen C ice shelf has, now, broken free. The resultant iceberg is about 58… Read More
2017-07-08 09:00
More news from outer space this week where there is a race afoot in the world of astrophysics, a race to achieve what, just a decade or two ago, would have been assumed was simply not possib… Read More
2017-06-25 16:11
First of all, apologies for being a day late with this post. Secondly, just look at these amazing pictures!
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles
These im… Read More
2017-06-17 09:00
Few fields of human endeavour are moving quite as quickly as that of anthropology and human evolution. On an almost weekly basis there are new papers being published that, instead of adding… Read More
2017-06-10 09:00
I like Pepsi Max. It’s my favourite soft drink. Sadly, PepsiCo is not paying me to say that, it’s just a boring fact. Whilst I would never claim that it is a health drink (if the… Read More
2017-06-03 10:00
About 7 million years ago in the region of the Rift Valley in eastern Africa there is an ape. It is small, compared to us; maybe just a metre tall but it is hard to tell as it sits in the lo… Read More
2017-05-27 10:00
I heard a lovely, little story the other day of a serendipitous discovery that may well change the world. One day a couple of years ago, Federica Bertocchini was inspecting her beehives. She… Read More
2017-05-20 10:00
As I travel the underground to work each morning I must survive a barrage of advertising. Everywhere you look in a modern city there is some kind of attempt to get you to buy the latest dood… Read More
2017-05-13 10:00
Why do we help others? More specifically, why do we help others that are not related to us? What do we get out of it? Evolutionarily speaking it doesn’t make any sense. Every organism… Read More
2017-05-07 09:00
On the island of Flores, about a decade ago, in the Liang Bua cave there were discovered some bones. The bones were human like, but small, perhaps those of a child. Mercifully, this was not… Read More
2017-05-01 10:00
An extra post this week because I just can’t pass up the chance to point out the images coming in from Cassini right now. As you have probably heard in the news, as the Cassini mission… Read More
2017-04-29 08:08
The image above is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. You may well recognise it as the iconic cosmic microwave background data released by NASA in 2010. For the previous nine years… Read More
2017-04-22 10:00
I love a good curry. Obviously little old Indian grandmothers and Indian restaurants make the best ones but I am also capable of making a halfway decent curry from scratch. One of the severa… Read More
2017-04-15 10:00
I would say that at least once per month I hear that someone I know is going on a detox. This seems to mean different things to different people. For some it is laying off the booze after a… Read More
2017-04-08 10:00
When I was a kid I used to make little wooden models of dinosaurs. My favourites were my T.rex, triceratops and a pteranodon that hung from the ceiling amongst my Spitfires and Tornados. Eve… Read More
2017-04-02 10:00
I was listening to one of my favourite podcasts the other day (The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, check it out, it’s awesome) as they discussed some new papers about hominin skulls.
T… Read More
2017-03-25 10:00
For about a decade now we have had wave after wave of advertising and op ed pieces telling us that brain training games can improve your memory, your cognition and even stave off dementia. T… Read More
2017-03-18 10:00
It is fairly well established in humans that a good night’s sleep is important for long term memory formation. Deep sleep seems to be a part of the mechanism by which we process the da… Read More
2017-03-11 10:00
Last time out I wrote about the incredible scientific goals of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), due to launch towards the end of next year. The earliest light in the universe is its ma… Read More
2017-03-04 10:00
More astronomy today.
This week it occurred to me that we’re approaching one year to go until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The JWST is very big news for anyone… Read More
2017-02-28 10:00
What’s the harm? That’s the question I’m sometimes asked when I’ve explained why a particular pseudoscience or alternative medicine is nothing but BS. If someone want… Read More
2017-02-25 10:00
Two astronomical updates for you today; one good, one bad.
Let’s start with the bad news. Two faulty helium valves on the Juno spacecraft mean that it is unlikely that it will be able… Read More
2017-02-21 10:00
In a statement released last Thursday the British Antarctic Survey commented on data showing that sea ice in the Antarctic this summer reached a record new low. Satellite data shows that sea… Read More
2017-02-18 10:00
I grant you, the title of this post makes a bold claim but I’m confident I’m not misrepresenting the science. A couple of weeks ago an interesting, open access paper was publishe… Read More
2017-02-15 10:00
Today it is widely accepted that the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs was caused by the giant meteorite impact at Chicxulub, Mexico; this has not always been the received wisdom, howeve… Read More
2017-02-13 00:15
Happy Darwin Day everyone. Read More
2017-02-11 12:14
The first time I saw the image below I was quickly flicking through my Twitter feed without paying too much attention. I assumed it was an artists impression of some new exoplanet or some su… Read More
2017-02-08 10:00
We turn now to one of my favourite whipping boys of complimentary and alternative medicine (CAM): acupuncture.
More than 3000 research studies into acupuncture are yet to show any kind of ef… Read More
2017-02-05 10:00
By the middle of this century it is expected that there will be 9 billion humans alive on this planet. That’s really rather a large number of hungry mouths to feed and it is thought th… Read More
2017-02-02 10:00
I’m going to tell you two stories.
The first is a story about a group of researchers from Cambridge, UK; China and Germany. The team discovered very ancient fossils in the rocks of Sha… Read More
2017-01-31 10:00
When you’re writing a blog I always find it helps to have a compelling image or video to go along with it. Today I have managed to rustle up a video of a pig’s heart inside a rob… Read More
2017-01-28 18:21
Every day as I trawl through the science news I see something that makes me say, “Huh, cool.” But every now and then I see something that completely blows me away. The video belo… Read More
2017-01-26 22:27
Hey science fans!
The Skeptilogicon is back and full of more science than ever*. I humbly apologise for my recent hiatus, I can only blame the combination of having a job, a young family and… Read More
2016-09-18 12:01
I saw a paper in Science this week that was simultaneously very exciting and, frankly, terrifying. It involved the study of antibiotic resistance in Escherichia coli. Many studies have… Read More
2016-09-09 10:53
I’m afraid we’ve got to that point where I have to start properly working on my masters again which means I will have less time to write this blog. Similarly to last semester I w… Read More
2016-09-07 09:00
Last week the Juno spacecraft made its first close pass of Jupiter. Passing within just 2500 miles of the surface the craft was able to take unprecedented pictures of the gas giant.
In the i… Read More
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