Yours truly has been watching telly again!  (I hope no-one will get the idea that the couch potato might be a significant source of starch.) 

This time, on our local BBC news service, we hear how researchers at the University of Portsmouth Institute of Biomedical and Biomolecular Science are cooperating with their Institute of Marine Sciences to harness the Gribble.  

In doing some research for my next book (on the differences between science and pseudoscience), I re-read this rather stunning piece of writing: “Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist's field and methods of study are as good as every other scientist's, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it comes to recommending each other for government grants.”

The dying light of the George W. Bush presidency was marked by, among other things, a legislative move to derail recent gains in the federal government's opening of science. In particular, the innocuous sounding “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” (HR 6845) introduced into the House by John Conyers, Jr. (DEM-MI), on 9 September 2008 [1] was poised to shut down the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy [2], as well as forestall the spread of this open-access spirit to other areas of federally sponsored research and scholarship. Hearings were held, but the bill did not make it through the House.

End of story? Not quite.

Cryptography isn't just for spies anymore - it's absolutely everywhere around us. Every time we use an ATM or buy something online we are sending data that we hope isn't intercepted on its way, because that would mean our finances were at risk. Additionally, corporations and the government have an interest in securing communications within their organizations and with other companies or governments so that information doesn't fall into the wrong hands.

How do these large organizations keep malicious people (commonly called "adversaries" in cryptology circles) from intercepting and reading their messages?

Plants' ability to sprout upward using their own woody tissues has long been considered one of the characteristics separating the land kind from aquatic plants, which rely on water to support them.

A newly developed mathematical model that figures out the best strategy to win the popular board game CLUE© could some day help robot mine sweepers navigate strange surroundings to find hidden explosives.

At the simplest level, both activities are governed by the same principles, according to the Duke University scientists who developed the new algorithm. A player, or robot, must move through an unknown space searching for clues. In the case of CLUE©, players move a pawn around the board and enter rooms seeking information about the killer and murder weapon before moving on to the next room seeking more information.

Toxic nuclear waste is stored at sites around the U.S.  and debate surrounds the construction of a large-scale geological storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which critics maintain is costly and dangerous. The storage capacity of Yucca Mountain, which is would open by 2020, is set at 77,000 tons. The amount of nuclear waste generated by the U.S. is expected to exceed this amount by 2010.

A new invention could drastically decrease the need for any additional or expanded geological repositories, say physicists at The University of Texas at Austin who have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants.

If you have a 401K, you've seen what happens when confidence abandons the stock market.   If people didn't trust financial leaders and institutions before, they certainly do not now.   Paola Sapienza (Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University) and Luigi Zingales (Un iversity of Chicago Booth School of Business) have created the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index and they have published the first set of results today.   They say their research shows just how deep America's declining trust runs and how strongly it contributes to the country's financial problems.

The results do not speak well for confidence that more government programs are the solution.

A new analysis confirms what we already knew - the evolutionary relationships among animals are not simple and the traditional idea that animal evolution has followed a trajectory from simple to complex—from sponge to chordate—had met a dramatic exception in the metazoan tree of life.

But the new study suggests that the so-called "lower" metazoans (including Placozoa, corals, and jellyfish) evolved in parallel to "higher" animals (all other metazoans, from flatworms to chordates).  They say that means Placozoans—large amoeba-shaped, multi-cellular animals—have passed over sponges and other organisms as an animal that most closely mirrors the root of this tree of life.

Stem cells are today’s panacea. They are greater than penicillin and vaccines combined, or so we hear. Research scientists have been touting the benefits and limitless medical possibilities of stem cells, and we have yet to see the real applications. After what seems like decades of waiting, embryonic stem cell research is finally ready for human testing.