Two days ago I showed how the measurements produced in the course of the last decade have allowed us to "zoom into" the parameter space of the Standard Model, pinpointing the W boson, top quark, and Higgs boson masses to a very narrow 3-D volume of phase space.

It didn't take long before the Netflix dramedy hit "Orange Is The New Black" made its way into Psychology of Women Quarterly, a publication devoted to peer-reviewing the feminist science.

With all that humor and girl kissing and talk of beatdowns, you know an editor was excited about the chance to link a paper to the show in a press release - things have been rather tame, culturally, for readers and contributors there since "The L Word" went off the air. The American Psychological Association is, as always, happy to ride a cultural wave.(1)

What do anti-science groups do that science never seems to do?

Trot out naked women.

PETA - constantly, Greenpeace - sure, using cheescake to raise money for their corporate agenda is nothing new for groups that have neither data nor reason nor ethics.

But Babes Against Biotech is not even hiding behind a pretense of caring about a naturalistic fallacy. It is so ridiculous and goofy I at first assumed that some evil corporation had created it to make anti-science hippies look sexist.

The sleeping patterns of baby birds are similar to that of baby mammals they even appear to change in the same way as it does in humans.

Studying barn owls in the wild, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the University of Lausanne discovered that this change in sleep is strongly correlated with the expression of a gene involved in producing dark, melanic feather spots, a trait known to covary with behavioral and physiological traits in adult owls. They speculate that sleep-related developmental processes in the brain contribute to the link between melanism and other traits observed in adult barn owls and other animals.

The K Computer has been used by researchers from the RIKEN HPCI Program for Computational Life Sciences, the Okinawa Institute of Technology (OIST) in Japan and Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany to carry out out the largest general neuronal network simulation to date:  1.73 billion nerve cells connected by 10.4 trillion synapses. 

The simulation was made possible by the development of advanced novel data structures for the open-source simulation software NEST.

In August 8th, the VERIS rocket is going to launch from the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.

VERIS is short for Very high Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and its 15-minute trip will carry an instrument that can measure properties of the structures in the sun's upper atmosphere down to 145 miles across, some eight times clearer than any similar telescope currently in space.

There are two ways to influence the public - basically carrots and sticks. A stick is, of course, taxes and fees and regulations and armed federal agents at your house should you choose not to obey the law.

A carrot is to create a Behavioral Insights project, similar to one that exists in the United Kingdom, tasked with using the awesome power of social science to create the behavior they want - it's like framing on steroids. 

In this Hubble Space Telescope composite image taken in April 2013, the sun-approaching Comet ISON floats against a seemingly infinite backdrop of numerous galaxies and a handful of foreground stars.

The icy visitor, with its long gossamer tail, appears to be swimming like a tadpole through a deep pond of celestial wonders.

In reality, the comet is much, much closer. The nearest star to the Sun is over 60,000 times farther away, and the nearest large galaxy to the Milky Way is over thirty billion times more distant.

These vast dimensions are lost in this deep space Hubble exposure that visually combines our view of the universe from the very nearby to the extraordinarily far away.

Since the United States lacks regulatory guidelines or a standardized risk assessment for herbal supplement use, it falls on pediatricians to try and recognize what natural pharmaceuticals could be impacting the health of mothers and children during breastfeeding.

Omega-3 fatty acids, contained in oily fish such as salmon and trout, selectively inhibit growth and induce cell death in early and late-stage oral and skin cancers, according to a new paper.