Taking Andy Warhol's quip, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for fifteen minutes," (which seems, like so many quotations, to have been stolen or mis-attributed) as a point of departure, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi hypothesized that perhaps the internet was the place where this prediction might be close to accurate.

In his 2010 book "Bursts," Barabasi looks at many phenomena related to dispersion, starting with Einstein's thought experiments and predictions for a power law to describe the "random" movement of dust particles in water.

Category theory is a branch of mathematics which attempts a formalization in terms of simple elements and associations between them. A rather abstract construction, indeed, and certainly one above my head (I am an experimentalist, for god's sake!).

Scientists have discovered that the high pressure in the eye that occurs with most common forms of glaucoma can trigger two genes that work together to cause vision loss, a finding that may help pave the way for new glaucoma drugs.

There is currently no way to prevent onset or worsening of glaucoma and it is usually treated by managing fluid pressure inside the eye.

The researchers looked at the genes involved in primary open-angle glaucoma, the most common form of the disease, which usually affects people over 50 and can cause blindness.

This story has recently hit the news. I think it is reasonably clear he was not putting forward a serious worked out future plan for Mars. But is there any potential in the idea?

When a jogger sets out on his evening run, the active movements of his arms and legs are accompanied by involuntary changes in the position of the head relative to the rest of the body. Yet the jogger does not experience feelings of dizziness like those induced in the passive riders of a rollercoaster, who have no control over the abrupt dips and swoops to which they are exposed.

The reason for the difference lies in the vestibular organ (VO) located in the inner ear, which controls balance and posture. The VO senses ongoing self-motion and ensures that, while running, the jogger unconsciously compensates for the accompanying changes in the orientation of the head.

With all of the recent controversy about claims that Monsanto funding a plant biologist skewed discussion by scientists in their favor, and claims that organic PR companies strategically used anti-science activists at Mother Jones and the New York Times to keep those readers against GMOs, a public relations study couldn't be more timely.

Americans lead the world in adult science literacy, just like America leads the world in science output, but there are substantial differences among Americans when it comes to knowledge and understanding of science topics.

The details beyond the averages are important and while numerous pundits will lament that everyone does not know everything, that is not realistic. What is important is that as many people as possible have access to knowledge.

Patients with spinal stenosis (SS) experienced good short term benefit, lasting from weeks to months, after receiving epidural steroid injections (ESI).

These findings, which appear in a letter in the journal Pain Medicine, contradict a previously published New England Journal Medicine (NEJM) study that found epidural steroid injections were not helpful in spinal stenosis cases.

New research has uncovered why a particular strain of Staphylococcus aureus -- known as HA-MRSA -- becomes more deadly than other variations. These new findings open up possible new pathways to vaccine development against this bacterium, which the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions says accounts for over 10,000 deaths annually, mostly among hospital patients.

In a series of experiments in mice and in human immune cells in the lab, a team found that the presence or absence of dueling toxins, or bacterial poisons, appears to explain the major difference between HA-MRSA, and its less virulent and more common, community based-based cousin, CA-MRSA, the two main types of MRSA infection.

As you all know, the ecosystem is like a giant human anti-lung - it breathes in the CO2 we exhale and helps produce oxygen.

It turns out that the Southern Ocean seasonally absorbs significantly more CO2 than they release, higher than previous estimates. Most importantly, these seas remove a large part of the CO2 that human activities emit into the atmosphere, thereby slowing down the growth of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which has been lessening the rate of climate change.