Our more militant brethren in the science and science media community paint all religious people as intellectually immature but AAAS surveys show nearly 40 percent of AAAS members are religious and a new University of Nebraska-Lincoln study challenges the common belief that more intelligent people are less religious.

Instead, the article in Review of Religious Research contends, education has a positive effect on Americans' churchgoing habits and their emphasis on religion in daily life.

Almost 50% of female scientists and 25% of male scientists at the nation's top research universities say career kept them from having as many children as they wanted, something they might do over given the chance.

As the saying goes, no one on their death bed ever says they wish they had spent more time at the office.

Sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice and Anne Lincoln of SMU  spent three years asking what junior and senior scientists in physics, astronomy and biology think about discrimination, family life and the state of their careers. They found that both men and women say having a science career means they will have fewer children than they wanted.

Anisogamy (see figure 1), or sexual reproduction in which two different gametes fuse to produce a new individual, leads to an inequality between female and male organisms. After all, females produce a limited supply of costly egg cells, while males produce a virtually endless supply of cheap sperm cells (this is the case in the vast majority of animals, and is known as oogamy (see figure 1), in which a large, non-motile egg cell is fertilized by a small, motile sperm cell (see figure 2)) . So, females best carefully choose the male they mate with, while males best copulate as much as possible, with as many females as possible. Females are choosy, males are promiscuous. Of course, there are exceptions, but still, this holds true in many cases.

   

The Many Worlds Wiener Sausage is a very simple model that shows how apparent non-locality in the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox can arise. It can be understood by advanced high school students. But we saw that although it is a many-worlds model, it is not a quantum world! Today we will make the model look like the great spaghetti monster. There are two aspects about this that I find amazing:

1) It can still be understood by high school students but is nevertheless correct quantum mechanics.

Creating sperm or egg cells in the laboratory has been tried several times in the past few years. The reasons for this range from a better understanding of the fundamentals of the reproductive process, to helping infertile couples with their child-wish. The attempts, using embryonic stem cells, however, did not yield viable germ cells.

Until now.

A research team at Kyoto University has succeeded in turning mouse embryonic stem cells into viable sperm precursor cells. The resulting sperm cells was subsequently used to give birth to healthy, normal cute little mice (see figure 1).

   

An athlete’s level of greatness is often measured by the opinions of his or her peers while they’re playing and especially when they retire.  Being recognized as one of the best by those who understand what it takes is rare.  This week, one of the world’s greatest soccer players of the last 30 years retired, yet he could walk down most streets in America without being recognized.  After 17 seasons, Paul Scholes of Manchester United played in his final tribute game last week and will become a coach at the club he’s been part of since his teens.

While not a household name in the U.S. like Messi or Ronaldo or Beckham, he has earned the respect of the greatest players of his time.

Sometimes the precautionary principle can run amok.   Anti-science people who don't accept climate science use it to prevent meaningful policy actions related to the environment while anti-science people who don't accept biology block efforts to improve food sources so crops can grow in areas where the world's poorest live, or improve yields to feed more people, and use silly labels like "Frankenfood."

Imagine going through customs with everything in order. Passport’s okay, and all seems fine. But when your fingerprints are scanned, the customs agents are looking surprised. Apparently, you have no fingerprints. Sounds weird, right? And yet, it is exactly what happened to a Swiss woman in 2007 when she tried to enter the United States.

As it turned out, the woman had a very rare condition known as adermatoglyphia, leading to a lack of fingerprints (see figure 1), and a lower production of hand sweat than the average person. Very little is known about the condition, and so far, only four families carrying the mutation have ever been documented.

   

This afternoon we had the first formal meeting for product planning of the Science 2.0 television pilot.  

As you can imagine, there was talk of technical details, how the creative guys will set up the shot lists and storyboard the segments, what segments we will use, and then some of the philosophical stuff.

Like, what will make Science 2.0 a science show for the next century?

I told the agency and the producer what a fond recollection U.S. scientists of today have for shows like "Nova" and Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" - but noted that at the time, those were not regarded as stodgy, traditional ways of doing science on television, they were cutting edge.