Thermal infrared (IR) energy is emitted from all things which have a temperature greater than absolute zero - so, basically all things worth looking at.

Though mechanical detection of IR radiation has been possible since Samuel Pierpont Langley invented the bolometer in 1880, human eyes are primarily sensitive to shorter wavelength visible light and are unable to detect or differentiate between the longer-wavelength thermal IR "signatures" given off both by living beings and inanimate objects.

If you read mainstream media in 2013, you will learn that wheat and sugar are trying to kill you.

It's better not to take them too seriously. While science tends to be rather rigorous in its claims - peer review is an inherently prudent idea that conservative Russell Kirk was likely proud of - health advice is instead based on flitting from one fad to the next, and leading the charge today are the Four Horsemen of the Alternative, Drs. Chopra, Oz, Weil and Gupta, with foot soldiers like Mark Bittman and William Davis gathering up stragglers.

29% of large clinical trials remain unpublished five years after completion and, of those, 78% have no results publicly available, according to a paper published yesterday.

This means that an estimated 250,000 people have been exposed to the risks of trial participation without the societal benefits that accompany the dissemination of their results, worry the authors. Of course, the participants all volunteered for the trials and had informed consent and many were even paid so claiming they were 'exposed to the risks' is emotional verbage designed to guide the public into one conclusion: all trial results should be published.

Women can tell when someone's eyes aren't on her face and are instead looking at her body - because it happens all of the time. Men do it ... and so do other women. At least when they are in college.

The oft-rumored "objectifying gaze" is not just anecdotal evidence, say psychologists who set out to document the nature of roving eyes when it came to women's bodies. A new study employed eyetracking technology to map the visual behavior of college aged men and women as they viewed images of different females with different body types. 

Humpback dolphin swimming in the waters off northern Australia are a new species   previously unknown to science, according to a team of researchers 

To determine the number of distinct species in the family of humpback dolphins (animals named for a peculiar hump just below the dorsal fin), the research team examined the evolutionary history of this family of marine mammals using both physical features and genetic data.  While the Atlantic humpback dolphin is a recognized species, this work provides the best evidence to date to split the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin into three species, one of which is completely new to science.

In 1855, a specimen of the brain of mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was taken and preserved. But the over 150-year-old slice of his brain, which scientists had long been examining in the belief that it was Gauss's brain, turns out to not be his brain at all.

Instead, the preserved specimens of the brains of Gauss and Göttingen physician Conrad Heinrich Fuchs, a medical scholar and founder of the University of Göttingen's anatomical pathology collection, were switched, probably soon after the death of both men in 1855, says  Renate Schweizer, a neuroscientist at Biomedizinische NMR Forschungs GmbH at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry.

One argument for putting a halt to government spending billions of dollars doing Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) 'outreach' is that, like all government programs, they become self-serving and never, ever stop.

After oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose about 600 million years ago, earth got the first proliferation of animal life. Between then and now, numerous short lived biotic events took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically.

Do you remember the dijet bump at 140 GeV that CDF published in March 2011 ? This was a surprising excess in the mass distribution of pairs of jets found in events containing a leptonic W boson decay.

I recently attended a talk by Daniel Garber (Princeton University) on the topic of “God, Laws and the Order of Nature in the Scientific Revolution.” While Garber’s talk was mostly historical in nature, it raised some interesting points about why and how we talk about laws of nature at all.