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Here's Where Your Backyard Was 300 Million Years Ago

We may use terms like "grounded" and terra firma to mean stability and consistency but geology...

Convergent Evolution Cheat Sheet Now 120 Million Years Old

One tenet of natural selection is a random walk of genes but nature may be more predictable than...

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Chronic pain is reported by over 20 percent of the global population but there is no scientific...

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Anti-science progressive alarmists have been on a rampage against Bisphenol A (BPA), a common component of plastic used in many consumer products, because of concern it can mimic natural estrogen in the body. A new study by Brown University toxicologists, however, finds that male mice whose mothers were exposed even to high doses of BPA while pregnant developed no signs of harm to their testes as adults.

In the study, a team led by Mary Hixon, assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Brown University and lead author Jessica LaRocca, a graduate student, exposed mice to BPA during days 10 through 16 of their pregnancy, the period of time when the sexual organs of their fetuses were developing.

The National Health Service (NHS), the United Kingdom's public health care systems, wasted $976 million during the years 2000-2009 on synthetic forms of insulin, when the recommended human alternatives, which are considerably cheaper, would have been just as effective, based on an analysis of publicly available data from the four UK prescription pricing agencies. Costs were adjusted for inflation and reported at 2010 prices.

Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne are hoping the Higgs boson is found at the LHC for a big reason - they think it can explain universal expansion and even reveal the possible existence of another closely related particle.

The Higgs boson would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess mass. but a group of EPFL physicists say it would also help us understand the evolution of the Universe from the moment of its birth - and it could be verified with data from the Planck satellite.

To religious fundamentalists, atheists in science are engaged in an insidious campaign to undercut morality and replace it with God-less relativism and moral equivalence.  To militant atheists, religious people are intellectually immature, anti-science busybodies telling people how to live.

Social projection, where we believe that others agree with us, helps us validate our beliefs. Psychologists say that we tend to believe people who are similar to us in an important way, religion or lifestyle, will act as we do and even vote as we do.

And we exaggerate differences between ourselves and those who are explicitly unlike us, another form of rationalization.

A new plant species is appropriately named Spigelia genuflexa because after fruits are formed, the fruiting branches 'bend down' and deposit  the capsules with seeds on the ground and sometimes burying them in the soft cover of moss, a phenomenon called geocarpy.

Geocarpy ensures that the seeds end up as close to the mother plant as possible, facilitating its propagation the following season. A famous example of geocarpy, a rare adaptation to growing in harsh or ephemeral environments, is the well-known peanut, which is from from the legume family and buries its fruits in the ground.