DURHAM, N.C. -- Somewhere out there in the ocean, SpongeBob SquarePants has a teeny-tiny cousin and a humongous uncle.

That's just what one would expect from a new analysis of body sizes across all orders of animal life that was conducted by researchers at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), in Durham, N.C. and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Researchers Craig McClain and Alison Boyer created a giant database on body sizes across all orders of animal life and found that phyla -- families of animals grouped together by a similar body plan -- with the greatest diversity of species were also those with the largest range of body sizes.

When the Chinese invented gunpowder round about the 800s, they founded one half of the science of chemistry, namely bangs, the other half of course being stinks. 

They quickly applied it to warfare, both as an explosive in bombs, and as a propellant in rockets.  It remained the explosive for about a millennium, but in the 19th century demands both from the military and from industry created a demand for new explosive.unpowder was a low explosive which burns swiftly rather than detonates.  

It's hard not to see the world through the lens of our own preconceptions and biases.  We tend to be more interested in other large mammals.  We're drawn to human-like qualities in pets.  But even the most benign insect is disturbingly alien when seen up close.  We also tend to use the familiar as a metaphor for understanding the unfamiliar.  Sometimes this gives us additional insight.  Other times, it leads us down the wrong path.

Okay, my last blog was a list of Spam haikus. I offer this post as self-flagellation before the scientific community at large.

Traditionally, the crux of teleportation has been its seeming contradiction of the Uncertainty Principle, which states that you can never measure and thus know all the information contained within an atom (the more you measure, the more you disturb, until the thing no longer looks like what you started with). Without knowing the make-up of the original object, how could you replicate it across space?

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched June 2008, has certainly started its career with a (big) bang, discovering a new class of pulsars and watching flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away.

Now it's going after another cosmic mystery; high-energy particles in cosmic rays.

The description of compounds and interactions between atoms is one of the basic objectives of chemistry. Admittedly, chemical bonding models, which describe these properties very well, already exist. However, any deviation from the normal factors may lead to improving the models further. Chemists with Professor Thomas M. Klapötke at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München have now analyzed a molecule, which has an extremely short bond length.

Increased social stress in childhood and young adulthood has a direct link to later increased dating violence, and that young social stress is impacted by things like unemployment and economic worries, according to Murray Straus, professor of sociology and co-director of the University of New Hampshire Family Research Laboratory.  The research, based on a 32-nation study,  was presented at the conference on “War, Terrorism, and Social Stress: Impacts on Crime and the Criminal Justice System” at the Institute of Criminology, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Monday, May 4, 2009.

He studied 14,252 university students from 68 universities in 32 nations in an International Dating Violence Study.

'Drought-proofing' Australia's urban regions by installing large domestic water tanks may enable the dengue mosquito Aedes aegypti to regain its foothold across the country and expand its range of possible infections, according to a new study published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. 

Dr Nigel Beebe and colleagues from the University of Queensland, CSIRO Entomology, the Australian Army Malaria Institute, and the Communicable Diseases Branch of Queensland Health, Brisbane, challenge the common assumption that climate change will drive the spread of this mosquito. 

An international team of scientists has determined the structure of the chlorophyll molecules in green bacteria that are responsible for harvesting light energy. The team's results one day could be used to build artificial photosynthetic systems, such as those that convert solar energy to electrical energy.