The so-called 'reality-based community' hates popular culture, unless they like it ironically. Sports most of all.

But, argues George Washington University Professor of Anthropology Jeffrey P. Blomster, the ballgame is associated with the rise of complex societies, so understanding its origins also illuminates the evolution of socio-politically complex societies.

The sexual maturation of female mice has been linked to longevity by researchers. 

They had previously established that mouse strains with lower circulating levels of the hormone IGF1 at age six months live longer than other strains. In new work, scientists report that females from strains with lower IGF1 levels also reach sexual maturity at a significantly later age. 

The researchers conclude that IGF1 may co-regulate female sexual maturation and longevity. They showed that mouse strains derived from wild populations carry specific gene variants that delay sexual maturation, and they identified a candidate gene, Nrip1, involved in regulating sexual maturation that may also affect longevity by controlling IGF1 levels.

Are modern Jews a ‘race’—the descendants of an ancient tribal people, as Biblical lore has it? Or do they trace their ancestry to Eurasia as Shlomo Sand, author of The Invention of the Jewish People, and Arthur Koestler in The Thirteenth Tribe, claim?

The latest DNA research offers extraordinary insights into the origins of the Jewish people and its impact on each of us. I addressed this controversy a few years ago in my book, Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People.

I've some background in space weather-- the influence of solar activity on Earth and near-Earth orbits.  My new job as a professor at Capitol College has brought me into contact with several bright students working on using picosatellites to test our orbital debris removal concepts.  Further, the number of other groups doing balloon and picosatellite work is increasing (yay!)  So it's time to update this column more frequently with not only my progress, but stories of other pico teams.

Over the past century, 70 percent of beaches on the islands of Kaua'i, O'ahu, and Maui have had long-term erosion, according to a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and University of Hawai'i (UH) report released today.

They studied more than 150 miles of island coastline (essentially every beach) and found the average rate of coastal change – taking into account beaches that are both eroding and accreting – was 0.4 feet of erosion per year from the early 1900s to 2000s. Of those beaches eroding, the most extreme case was nearly 6 feet per year near Kualoa Point, East O'ahu.

You're in luck. To the consternation of advertisers, we gather almost no information about you so if you are concerned about outsiders learning a lot about you from your visit to this article, fear not.  If we were that clever, this site would make a lot of money.

What Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” - like sharing music and book choices with the Internet - isn’t really frictionless – it forces on us the new frictions of worrying who knows what we’re reading and what our privacy settings are wherever and however we read electronically. It’s also not really sharing; real sharing is conscious sharing, a recommendation to read or not to read something rather than a data exhaust pipe of mental activity. 

Integrated circuit techniques can do just about anything - perhaps even help cure sepsis.

Margination is natural phenomenon where bacteria and leukocytes (white blood cells) move toward the sides of blood vessels. Now it's the inspiration for a novel method of treating sepsis, a systemic and often dangerous inflammatory response to microbial infection in the blood.

Anthropogenic climate change is so anthropomorphic.  While we think we have a mighty impact on the atmosphere, sauropod dinosaurs millions of years ago shouldn't be left out of the pollution hall of fame - they alone could have produced enough methane to warm the climate many millions of years ago, according to a numerical model.

Like CO2, methane is a greenhouse gas, but with 23X the warming impact of CO2. It's produced by dying plants and cow burps - and cows share one thing in common with hulking sauropods, distinctive for their enormous size and unusually long necks, that were widespread about 150 million years ago. As in cows, methane-producing microbes aided the sauropods' digestion by fermenting their plant food.

This week's graph comes from a recent publication by the CMS experiment, the one I am a proud member of together with about 3000 colleagues from all over the world.

I make the case for replacing business executives with robots.*† This is no smart-ass slur on the intellects of executives. A transformation of business soon will be upon us. In the transformed enterprises, robots will take on more and more business decisions. Humans will retain a smaller but still crucially important role.

The argument involves ‘real options’ and ‘agency theory.’ Explaining them is simple, though lengthy. So let’s get started, using an illustrative example:

An opportunity requires Rineu Corporation to invest $10,000 now, with an assured first-year cash flow of $6,000. The second-year cash flow is uncertain with a 50-50 chance of either a $15,000 gain or a $5,000 loss.