Like people who approach geopolitics with the attitude of "If people would just talk to each other, we would all along", there are a lot of naïve assumptions about just dumping gasoline.

We know it causes emissions, and emissions are bad, we know a lot of the money paid for oil goes to fund Middle Eastern terrorism, and that is bad - those things should cause both the left and the right in America to want gasoline gone. And yet it is not gone.  The reason is simple: gasoline is a lot more efficient than alternative energy proponents want to believe.

For as long as I can remember, academic scientists have said that applied research is great - for someone else.  But for themselves, they want to do basic research and be creative and not have to worry about any applied / societal benefit.(1)

But another election season is here and, despite $140 billion of taxpayer money being spent on research, no one in either party really gives a hoot about science topics and scientists are concerned neither candidate cares.(2)  

The hormone oxytocin is well-known as the “bliss hormone” because it is secreted upon stimulation by touch and is known to result in a feeling of calm and physical relaxation. But odder claims are that is is a “mindreading” hormone and recent research set out find if there is any truth in those claims.

Physicists doing economics has gotten a bad rap - a practically worldwide recession will do that - but it's no reason to give up, especially if you are of the world view that redistributing wealth is better than a free market.

Models designed to represent taxation and wealth redistribution could be adjusted to create a target level of wealth distribution, according to mathematical physicists from the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. 

Our immune systems are funny things. An American traveling to Taiwan, for example, might be warned to get a hepatitis vaccine - unless they grew up on a farm. Rabies is even scarier.  If you are bitten by an unknown animal, it requires a series of painful injections because if clinical disease sets in, it is usually fatal.

I am very happy to have been invited, by Matteo Polettini, to two events that will take place at Festivaletteratura (literature festival), an important cultural event that takes place in Mantova, a beautiful town in northern Italy, from the 5th to the 9th of September.

We can't complain that children don't know how to think and act like adults if we homogenize the way children behave...but criminologists wish you would.   If you don't, they could be drug addicts.

Defiant kids are correlated with drug dependence - they include cigarettes along with pot and cocaine, naturally - according to surveys analyzed by psychologists at Sainte-Justine University Hospital Center’s (UHC) Research Center and the University of Montreal, concluded following a 15-year population-based paper published in Molecular Psychiatry.

See? America did not need any stinking Kyoto agreement, we just needed for three areas to work in tandem to get greenhouse gas emissions back close to the magic number picked by the Germans and French a decade and a half ago.(1)

The Department of Energy released carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions of the energy sector  for Q1 of 2012 and they were the lowest since 1992. American energy is positively green again, just like people wanted. We can thank right-wing energy companies for that, because it has primarily happened due to natural gas.

… asks Peter C. Sundt, BSc. in the June 2010) of the journal Elevator World (page 114). Although the article is ‘subscribers only’, an earlier essay by the same author on broadly the same subject (with the same title) is available online here, via The Structural Engineer.

“Most agree that the Great Pyramid at Giza, the last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World, was an amazing job of construction. It’s a great pity, though, that the Egyptians left little or no records of how they did it.”

Most methane comes from natural gas - natural gas used to be loved but once it got popular it got lumped in with mean old fossil fuels so the search is on to find a new, green approach to methane, using microbes that can convert renewable electricity into carbon-neutral methane.

Researchers are raising colonies of microorganisms, called methanogens, which have the ability to turn electrical energy into pure methane, the key ingredient in natural gas. The scientists' goal is to create large microbial factories that will transform clean electricity from solar, wind or nuclear power into renewable methane fuel.