One of the more exciting aspects of going 4-wheeling in the wilderness is the potential for getting stuck in the mud or hung up on a rock. It’s not so exciting if the 4-wheeler is a robot on Mars (actually, a 6-wheeler). There are websites that tell you how to free your vehicle on Earth (such as http://4wheeldrive.about.com/cs/offroadingtips/a/aa020401a_5.htm). For the Mars rover Spirit, her drivers have to test out options in a simulated Martian landscape.

The science is in and men are easy.

Men are far more interested in casual sex than women, according to Dr. Achim Schützwohl, from the Department of Psychology at Brunel University in the UK, and a team who published their results in Human Nature.  Their research showed that men are more likely than women to report having had casual sex and they express a greater desire for it than do women.

But men need to be exceptionally attractive to tempt women to consider casual sex, they say.

What do you do if you're stuck between a banana and a hard place?

The slippery slope of paying extortionists tripped up Chiquita in the late 1990s and early 2000s, much like Donald below...


But two years after the company agreed to pay a $25 million fine for paying violent paramilitaries in Colombia to protect its employees there, Chiquita is still dealing with the fallout. If you were the CEO of Chiquita, what would you have done?

A Boatload of Baddies

Tonight you have a chance to contribute to science -namely, the knowledge of our solar system- and have a lot of fun at the same time. Do you want to know how ? Then please read on.

Comet Swift-Tuttle (left, courtesy NASA) may be far away by now, but the debris that gets thrown out in space during each of its passages in the proximity of our Sun traces the full elliptical orbit of the comet, like droplets of sweat of an athlete running the 10,000 meters in a stadium. And tonight, the Earth is going to plunge in the core of the filament of debris following the comet's orbit.

Folsom, CA – August 11, 2009 – On Monday, August 17th at 1:30PM in Hensill Hall 113, attendees of the 90th Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the AAAS in San Francisco will get to learn about the latest efforts in science communication from some of the brightest minds in the field.

The symposium is called “Good Science is Only Part of the Job: Communicating Science to the Public.” (Online link: http://www.sou.edu/aaaspd/2009SANFRANCISCO/Symposia09.html#15).

I finally got around to reading Carl Sagan’s The Variety of Scientific Experience, a volume edited by his wife, Ann Druyan, and based on a series of Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology that Carl delivered in 1985 at the University of Glasgow.

I recently read an article regarding a specific therapist's idea for a movement to treat World of Warcraft players with video game addiction.  These types of articles are not uncommon, World of Warcraft (WoW) currently has millions of subscribers worldwide so there is an interest in anything

Biology has just gotten a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information, biology's equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics.

Researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and their colleagues say this visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that models are accurate, efficient and readily understandable. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), is published today in Nature Biotechnology.

100 years ago you had to be rich to be fat.  Now apparently you have to be rich to stay thin.  And women add more pounds being poor than anyone.

A nationwide study that followed participants for 14 years correlates the U.S. Food Stamp Program to obesity among its users.

Researchers found that the average user of food stamps had a Body Mass Index (BMI) 1.15 points higher than non-users. The link between food stamps and higher weight was almost entirely based on women users, who averaged 1.24 points higher BMI than those not in the program, the study found. For an average American woman, this would mean an increase in weight of 5.8 pounds.

Magnetotactic bacteria are the smallest organisms to use a biological compass but exactly how these bacteria create their cellular magnets is a mystery. In a study published online in Genome Research, scientists have used genome sequencing to unlock new secrets about these magnetic microbes that could accelerate biotechnology and nanotechnology research.