Category: Blog

Is that bottle of wine really what the label says it is? Not always, apparently. Enter Patrice This, a grape geneticist at the University of Montpellier, France, has his way. He and his team are trying to perfect the extraction and purification of grape-skin DNA from bottles of wine.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Shannon Roe revisits some tips from the great Isaac Asimov on how to be a prolific writer. Note, that’s “prolific,” not “good.” As Asimov is quoted in the article: “I can’t tell you how to be a good writer because nobody ever says that I’m a good writer. It’s always ‘prolific …

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Here’s an interesting article about immigrants from warm countries who have moved to Fort McMurray, Alberta to work in the oil industry. I wouldn’t say you never get used to the cold. After 38 years here (this August), this transplanted Texas boy has pretty much acclimated. Well, almost.

An Antarctic iceberg the size of Luxembourg is once more adrift after being grounded for two months.

I doubt Hassenpfeffer will be on anyone’s research agenda, but: Researchers in the University at Buffalo’s School of Informatics have undertaken a long-term research project to study how information from blogs produced in specific American urban areas reflects the political agendas, opinions, attitudes and cultural idiosyncrasies of the general population of those places.

Look, I don’t make up these headlines. I just find them.

No, but scientists might have managed to create something very much like one in a particle collider. UPDATE: Here’s a photo (of the machinery and scientist, not the extremely short-lived and tiny putative black hole, natch).

I don’t quite know why this site exists, but…enter an author’s name and see it spelled out in that author’s book jackets. There are various other permutations of the idea, too.

Sad news. From the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Web site: Andre Norton, 93, the “Grand Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy,” author, poet, editor, whose published works span seven decades, died of congestive heart failure in her Murfreesboro, Tennessee home, early Thursday morning, March 17th. Andre Norton was one of the authors …

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Cassini has discovered that Saturn’s snow-white moon Enceladus has a thin water-vapor atmosphere. That water has to be coming from somewhere, and one possibility is erupting ice volcanoes or geysers–which could mean liquid water beneath the surface, which could mean a possible habitat for life.

Imagine having a machine in your house that could make anything from a cup to a clarinet to a digital camera (minus the computer chip and lens) for just a few dollars–and could also make a copy of itself, so you could have as many of these machines as you needed. Research by engineers at …

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Do we know everything there is to know about the universe? Not on your life.