The two most common swimming strokes used by athletes training for the Olympic Games either pull the swimmer through the water like a boat paddle or whirl to the side like a propeller.

Which arm motion works best is a big argument among elite swimmers and their coaches but a university research study has picked a winner - which will be no comfort at at all to actual athletes and their coaches.

Plato and a platypus walked into a bar. The bartender gave the philosopher a quizzical look, and Plato said, “What can I say?

'Grey' literature, which led to the "Glaciergate" scandal of 2010 when it was revealed that the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are losing ice (gone by 2035!) was stated as fact even though it was not based on evidence, will no longer be a problem for  the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Because they have declared that grey literature will no longer be grey - any information they choose to use will be considered peer reviewed just by being posted on the Internet by the IPCC.  

Henry I. Miller, M.D., physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and was at the NIH and FDA from 1977 to 1994.

He is, basically, a longtime knowledgeable insider into How Things Work. And he isn't a fan of how things work at the National Science Foundation.

GBI Research, a business intelligence provider, has released its latest research, 'Bone Metabolism Therapeutics Market to 2018 - Hyperparathyroidism Sector to Decline in the Absence of New Product Launches and Increased Generic Erosion for Zemplar, Hectorol and Sensipar', which provides insights into bone metabolic disease therapeutics until 2018.  

Hundreds of millions of people in the world suffer from allergies, and it is estimated that 300 million have asthma. In some countries, one in three children has asthma, and 80% of them also have other allergies. There are many guidelines and consensus documents about how to treat this disease but the dissemination and implementation of these are still major challenges. 

Recent data from BaBar, a high energy physics experiment at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (originally Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) may suggest possible flaws in the Standard Model of particle physics, the reigning description of how the universe works on sub-atomic scales.

BaBar, a detector built to measure the decay of B mesons and their anti-particles, B-bar mesons and named after those particles, weighed 1,200 tons, and was 6 meters long and 6 meters in diameter.

Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have shown that ramping up the overall metabolism of algae by feeding in more carbon increases oil production as the organisms continue to grow - and that may point to new ways to turn photosynthetic green algae into tiny "green factories" for producing raw materials for alternative fuels.

A new study says a portion of the groundwater in the upper Patapsco aquifer underlying Maryland is truly ancient- over a million years old. 

Last week I wrote about the anti-science campaign being waged by opponents of the use of genetically modified organisms in agriculture. In that post, I promised to address a series of questions/fears about GMOs that seem to underly peoples’ objections to the technology. I’m not going to try to make this a comprehensive reference site about GMOs and the literature on their use and safety (I’m compiling some good general resources here.)