A recent study by University of Alberta researchers Elena Nicoladis and Cassandra Foursha-Stevenson in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology wanted to see whether speaking French (being bilingual) influenced how children assigned gender to objects. It yielded some interesting observations, like that in the unilingual crowd, more cows are boys and cats are girls.

Americans of a particular cultural and political persuasion like to regard Europeans as 'more' scientific because surveys reveal that they say 'yes' to the appropriate buzzwords.  Not so, even to European scientists. Europeans are instead far more distrustful and dismissive of science than most Americans; they are precautionary principle-obsessed.

Scottish microbiologist Anne Glover would like to change that.  She just took office in Brussels as the first European chief scientific adviser and her first goal is to get people information in the hopes that they will stop listening to advocacy groups and accept science overall the same way they do politically charged topics like climate change. 

A train is heading toward five people who can't escape its path and only you are close enough to do anything.  You can reroute the train onto different tracks with only one person along that route.

Would you do it?

A team of Michigan State University researchers recently put participants in a 3-D setting and gave them the power to kill one person (in this case, a realistic digital character) to save five. The results of the moral dilemma?  About what you would expect. 90 percent of the participants pulled a switch to reroute the boxcar, affirming that people are  okay to take a direct hand in killing someone if it saves a lot more, even if they are against killing people.

Last week I wrote a somewhat half-baked post describing simple numbers that parents can use to pick an elementary school (the first and second were solid!). This week, I called around to get experts’ take on the topic. Here’s what they said.

Often when reading about cutting edge physics and the amazing feats of the Large Hadron Collider, we are treated to crazy scenarios involving “virtual particles”, also variously referred to as “ghost particles” or worse. These labels clearly distinguish the involved concepts from "real particles" like atoms. Not being bound by restrictions of reality, virtual particles “borrow” energy from nothing, go faster than light, travel back in time, do an infinite amount of loops creating an infinity of other virtual particles during every single infinitesimal moment.

What's the one thing that could make anti-science progressives dislike genetic modifications and medicine even more than they do now?  Putting them both together.

It's Valentine's Day and the wonders of nature are getting in on the act.  Luckily, ESA was there to capture the memories.

Here, for your enjoyment, are the numerous ways the cosmos and the Earth hearts you.   If you want to see their slideshow with music, go here.   If you want all of the science of Valentine's Day, go here

In August of 2011, Hurricane Irene hit the Caribbean and and then traveled up parts of the eastern United States, bringing widespread wreckage in some places and, thanks to threatening midtown Manhattan, even more media coverage. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Some hurricane analysts suggested that Irene was a “100-year event”: a storm that only comes around once in a century.