I’m not sure I understand this, which says light as we know it may be a direct result of small violations of relativity, but it sure sounds cool.

Remember those invasions of giant ants triggered by nuclear testing in the 1950s, chronicled in classic documentaries like Them? Now global warming threatens invasions of…smaller-than normal ants. But what they lack in size, they’ll make up for in quantity.

NASA is using high-tech sensors to develop human-shaped robot astronauts called Robonauts.

Have you heard of Ward Churchill? Count yourself lucky if you haven’t. For some reason, he was invited to speak in North Battleford on Saturday. (Yes, yes, I know, second anniversary of the beginning of Iraq War–what I mean is, I don’t understand the reason for inviting someone whose views are the intellectual equivalent of, …

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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.