Is immortality really ideal? Is the confusion and befuddlement worth surviving the times and ages?  Much like Mary Shelley’s monster that arose from the dead, would we be wretched, dejected, and distraught by the prospects of a future that we can’t even hope to fathom? Frankenstein’s monster is composed of the separate body parts found at a morgue, the monster has lived in a previous era and was spawned in Frankenstein’s time. His creation had once died but was reborn in the future.

Very different complex networks, like global air traffic and neural networks, share very similar 'backbones', say a group of mathematicians, and by stripping each network down to their essential nodes and links, they found each network possesses a skeleton which shares common features, much like vertebrates do.

Mammals have evolved to look very different despite a common underlying structure and now it appears real-world complex networks have common descent in a similar way.

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012 at 3:03 PM PDT (California), Venus will do something we on Earth will have witnessed for only the eighth since the invention of the telescope - it will cross in front of the sun. This transit is among the rarest of planetary alignments and it has an interesting cycle. Two Venus transits always occur within eight years of each other and then there is a break of either 105 or 121 years before it happens again.

What evolutionary reason would tiny insects 100 million years ago have for collecting and transporting Gingko pollen?  They had highly specialized hairs with a ringed structure to increase their ability to collect pollen grains. Their ringed hairs cannot have grown due to an evolutionary selection benefiting the trees so ancient thysanopterans, so-called thrips (a group of minute insects of less than 2 mm in length) must have fed their larvae with pollen. This suggests that this species formed colonies with larvae living in the ovules of some kind of gingko for shelter and protection, and female insects transporting pollen from the male Gingko cones to the female ovules to feed the larvae and at the same time pollinate the trees.

"Chagas Disease: “The New HIV/AIDS of the Americas”" screams the headline of an editorial in the open access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, written primarily by two principal investigators of a vaccine against Chagas disease - and it has resounded with a thud among the actual people they think they are helping.

Almost exactly a year ago, I made a medium storm in the water glass by publishing my exchange with what I ironically called the "Future King of Physics". I then asked Perimeter Institute in Canada, Oxford University, and FQXi, to distance themselves from Joy Christian instead of any further supporting his pseudoscience.

Diagnostic tools are getting small, small enough to fit in a person's pocket, and one huge benefit for medical researchers would be a way to easily move and even mix small samples of a liquid. 

A newly patented surface moves drops along certain paths - all it takes is a shake.

Georgy Nikolaevich Flerov (1913-1990) is the father of the superheavy element production in the USSR (now Russia). Under his guidance scientists at the Flerov Nuclear Institute in Dubna were successful in synthesizing a significant number of heavy elements, non-existing in nature.

Space is an extremely hostile environment. You knew that, though no one wants to think about exploding instantly as their blood boils without an atmosphere (or it does not - like how airplanes fly, this seems to still be a debate). Most planets aren't all that much better.

Honduras is now a permanent shark sanctuary so any shark fins found are illegal - the International Union for Conservation of Nature says that 30 percent of all shark populations around the world are threatened or near threatened with extinction.