When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life 150 years ago next month, he avoided conjecture about the origin of life and "To my mind it accords better with what we know of the laws impressed on matter by the Creator" shows that he had limits on the cultural firestorm he wanted to create in the name of science.

Virtually every study in the last two years has blamed neighborhoods for obesity rather than the people who eat too much - but living near a variety of restaurants, convenience stores, supermarkets and even fast food outlets actually lowers your risk for obesity, according to a new study from the University of Utah.

Surprisingly, people who live more than a half mile away from any food outlets are the ones who tend to be fatter.   The study suggests that placing restrictions on fast food outlets may not be effective, but that initiatives to increase healthy neighborhood food options may reduce individuals' obesity risks, especially if focused on low-income neighborhoods.

On Memorial Day, May 26, 2008, the "Roadrunner" supercomputer exceeded a sustained speed of 1 petaflop/s, or 1 million billion calculations per second. "Petaflop/s" is computer jargon—peta signifying the number 1 followed by 15 zeros (sometimes called a quadrillion) and flop/s meaning "floating point operation per second." Shortly after that it was named the world's fastest supercomputer by the TOP500 organization at the June 2008 International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden Germany.

There has been much discussion lately on this blog and elsewhere about the relationships among skepticism, atheism, and politics.

Nepotism has a bad connotation in the workplace or French politics but being surrounded by relatives does lead to better group dynamics and more cooperation in some animals, and certainly spiders, according to a new study published in BMC Evolutionary Biology.

In a new study, the researchers found that Stegodyphus tentoriicola spiders are far more efficient at foraging for food and cooperate better when they’re related to each other and, as with humans and other animals, relatedness may favor the evolution of less selfish behavior, more collaboration and better group dynamics.