Category: Blog

You’ve got to like that headline, don’t you? Oh, sure, technically it’s just the theobromine in the chocolate that’s the active ingredient in suppressing coughs, and sure, Dame Helena Shovelton, chief executive of the British Lung Foundation, advises that “patients to speak to their family doctor before,,,treating their cough with chocolate,” but, still…it beats the …

Continue reading

India could send a man into space within seven years if the Indian government gives the space agency the go-ahead.

NASA has launched a spacecraft called Swift to look for the gamma-ray bursts that might mark the birth of black holes.

Ray Bradbury and Madeline L’Engle were among the recipients of the National Medal of Arts in Washington yesterday.

Humans have evolved to run, scientists say–if running weren’t so important to us, we’d look more like apes. Maybe. But given our druthers, most of us would rather sit on our buns (themselves a running adaptation, apparently).

Almost everyone has heard of the placebo effect–but it might surprise you to know that we’re still not sure how it works. A placebo (Latin for “I will please”) is a fake medical treatment–a pill made of sugar, for example, or an injection of saline solution. With no active ingredients, it shouldn’t have any effect …

Continue reading

Here’s something you’d have trouble convincing most Canadians of, I’ll wager. From Roger Ebert’s Movie Answerman column: Q. In your Ebert & Roeper review of Michael Wilson’s ‘Michael Moore Hates America,’ you blurted out an erroneous opinion, expressing your doubts about the film’s claim that the Canadian crime rate is double the U.S. rate. I …

Continue reading

Hey, I could have written this/1

Hey, I could have written a href=”http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/11/15/dungeons_and_dragons_we_love_you/”this/a/1

As the proud owner of a 2002 Volvo S60 2.4T, I’m very pleased to see that Volvo builds some of the safest auto seat-headrest assemblies in the world.

Oh, great, another health risk that appears to be targeting me, personally: according to a Japanese study, excessive computer use can lead to glaucoma in short-sighted people.

The best images ever photographed of Uranus through a telescope were created by a ground-based instrument, not Hubble! Technology marches on.