In the past couple years, I’ve written over a dozen articles examining facilitated communication as Biklen and Crossley define it, along with Soma’s clone, Rapid Prompting. On several occasions, I have collaborated with Dr.

A researcher at the Auburn University Museum of Natural History has reported the discovery 33 new trapdoor spider species from the American Southwest.

These newly described species all belong to the genus Aptostichus and the paper revises it to discuss all 40 species, which get attention for being named after celebrities – Aptostichus stephencolberti and Aptostichus angelinajolieae for Stephen Colbert and Angelina Jolie, 

British environmentalist Mark Lynas was an early advocate against GMOs and, as he tells it, that meant he was an early advocate for demonizing scientists.

While most actual scientists did not give much credence to an offhand claim by researcher Árpád Pusztai in the mid-1990s that a genetically-modified potato damaged the immune system of an animal, because the results were unpublished and unverified, UK media of the scare journalism kind and British activists took off with it and the "Frankenfood" movement was born.

Here is what Lynas writes about his early efforts (bold mine):

Our Earth observation capacity is growing. Not only are star satellite data providers such as NASA and ESA improving their high quality products, new economies such as China and Brazil invest parts of their new won wealth in remote sensing as well.

Experiments psychologists from the Polytechnic University of Valencia and the University of Oxford say that the color of the cup matters in the flavor of hot chocolate - it tastes better in an orange or cream colored plastic cup than in a white or red one. 

Our senses perceive food in a different way depending on the characteristics of the container from which we eat and drink, they say.  They conducted an experiment in which 57 participants had to evaluate samples of hot chocolate served in four different types of plastic cup. They were the same size but of different colors: white, cream, red and orange with white on the inside. 

Merck Serono, a division of Germany's Merck, announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Rebif(R) Rebidose(R) (interferon beta-1a), a single-use auto-injector for the self-administration of Rebif, a disease-modifying drug used to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS). 

I am glad to see that the Higgs signal we have discovered last July continues to raise the interest of well-learned laypersons around the world. The confirmation this time comes from the fact that three readers of this blog have decided to challenge my bet that the two signals found by ATLAS in the gamma-gamma and ZZ decay modes, which presently have a discrepant measured mass, are no hint of two distinct resonances, but rather a systematic effect.

A saying goes, "as long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools", but they meant that students would look for help wherever they could get it.  But a subset of people felt it also reflected a fairly uniform view about school prayer: though federal law does not endorse a national religion, schools are funded and controlled by school districts and religious Americans generally approved of it.

Not so much any more; over the last two generations sharp differences in school-prayer support between different generations and their religious denominations are evident, according to survey results. 

A new study, believed to the largest randomized trial to directly compare changes in body composition induced by comparable amounts of time, has found that aerobic training is better than resistance training for weight- and fat loss. 

They measured time spent doing aerobic and resistant training, or both in combination, among previously inactive overweight or obese non-diabetic adults.  

Methodology