20th Nov 2008 : The Texas State Board of Education is holding hearings right now on their science standards, and by all reports it is an embarrassment to the state: on the one side, we have the educated teachers and scientists, and on the other, a coterie of ignorant ideologues.

19th Nov 2008 : The transplant of a human windpipe grown from stem cells is a surgical breakthrough of almost limitless potential

19th Nov 2008 : Scientists have found a wide-eyed primate -- a clawed fur ball that fits snugly in one hand -- in the first live sighting in more than 80 years of a creature that some thought was extinct.

18th Nov 2008 : Richard Dawkins considers another of the extraordinary creatures that helped inspire Darwin's theory of evolution.

18th Nov 2008 : The question I keep hearing is, “But what about acupuncture? It’s been proven to work, it’s supported by lots of good research, more and more doctors are using it, and insurance companies even pay for it.”

17th Nov 2008 : The 460,000-year-old skull of a woolly rhino, reconstructed from 53 fragments, is the oldest example of these mighty, ice age beasts ever found in Europe.

15th Nov 2008 : Medical professionals in Germany may have stumbled across a possible cure for AIDS after treating a man for cancer.

13th Nov 2008 : Estimated to be no more than three times Jupiter's mass, the planet, called Fomalhaut b, orbits the bright southern star Fomalhaut, located 25 light-years away in the constellation Piscis Austrinus (the Southern Fish).

13th Nov 2008 : A team of researchers was able to see three orbiting planetary companions to HR8799 using high-contrast, near-infrared adaptive optics observations.

12th Nov 2008 : Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.

12th Nov 2008 : A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

11th Nov 2008 : Just how smart are monkeys? Their innate curiosity leads them to try new things, but it’s their culture — the passing of information from one generation to the next — that teaches them much of what they know.

11th Nov 2008 : Octopus origins, shark migrations and giant bacteria to be unveiled

10th Nov 2008 : It featured a four-way roundtable format, with a participant from each quadrant of the atheist/theist and pro-ID/anti-ID axes.

9th Nov 2008 : Nearly a third of teachers, who responded to an email poll for Teachers TV, think creationism or intelligent design should be given the same status as evolution.

7th Nov 2008 : Two mockingbirds, which are said to have helped Charles Darwin develop his theory on evolution, are to go on public display for the first time.

7th Nov 2008 : Something may be out there. Way out there.

7th Nov 2008 : This was supposed to be the election when hidden racism would rear its head. There was much talk of a “Bradley effect,” in which white voters would say one thing to pollsters and do another in the privacy of the booth; of a backlash in which the working-class whites whom Senator Barack Obama had labeled “bitter” would take their bitterness out on him.

6th Nov 2008 : Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease.

6th Nov 2008 : This is an excellent short video about Cassini, the most ambitious inter-planetary space mission ever launched.

1st Nov 2008 : The Texas Board of Education has named the six people who will be on a committee to review science curriculum standards. Texas, you've got trouble.

1st Nov 2008 : If you think ordinary Americans believe the last eight years have been a nightmare, you should see how scientists feel.

31st Oct 2008 : Sarah Palin's criticism of the critters is just bad buzz. Research on them offers insights into learning, genes, diseases.

28th Oct 2008 : People are programmed to avoid inequality

28th Oct 2008 : Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, has been appointed to the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science

27th Oct 2008 : Richard Dawkins says he will spend his retirement writing a book for children.

26th Oct 2008 : The secret of worm grunting, a mysterious technique used by fishermen to tempt worms to the surface, has been unearthed.

25th Oct 2008 : Palin: "Where does a lot of that earmark money end up anyway? [snip] You've heard about some of these pet projects they really don't make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not."

22nd Oct 2008 : For our ancestors, misjudging the physical strength of a would-be opponent might have resulted in painful –– and potentially deadly –– defeat.

22nd Oct 2008 : Much of human DNA is the genetic equivalent of e-mail spam: short repeated sequences that have no obvious function other than making more of themselves.

22nd Oct 2008 : Targeted memory erasure is no longer limited to the realm of science fiction. A new study describes a method through which a selected set of memories can be rapidly and specifically erased from the mouse brain in a controlled and inducible manner. New and old memories have been selectively and safely removed from mice by scientists.

20th Oct 2008 : Everything you think you know about the soul is wrong.

20th Oct 2008 : Beyond Belief: Candles in the Dark is the third in an annual series of conversations: an ongoing project to foster and promote the use of reason in formulating social policy.

18th Oct 2008 : No computer has ever passed the Turing Test to see if, during text-based conversation, a machine can be indistinguishable from a person. But Elbot just came pretty close.

17th Oct 2008 : Who holds the world record for travelling furthest into the future? Where did scientists create materials that were once thought to defy the laws of optics? Why is King Kong's existence impossible? If you are surprised by the questions, Kaku's answers will surprise even more.

17th Oct 2008 : One of the most famous experiments of all time has just been found to have been even more successful than anyone realised. The Miller-Urey spark flask experiment could hold the key to the origin of life on Earth.

13th Oct 2008 : The new book is simple to summarize: just read the title. It's aimed at a lay audience and answers the question of why biologists are so darned confident about the theory of evolution by going through a strong subset of the evidence.

24th Sept 2008 :

24th Sept 2008 : CHONGZUO, China � Long ago, in the poverty-stricken hills of southern China, a village banished its children to the forest to feed on wild fruits and leaves. Years later, when food stores improved, the children's parents returned to the woods to reclaim their young.

18th Sept 2008 : The creationism row at the Royal Society has exposed the number of Britons who believe Darwin was wrong about man's origins - and the Bible right. James Macintyre investigates

16th Sept 2008 : An hour on the life and work of Charles Darwin with James Watson, chancellor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and E.O. Wilson, professor emeritus, Harvard University.

16th Sept 2008 : Richard Dawkins and Clive James discuss science, education, the big questions and more at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

15th Sept 2008 : We would urge that Professor Reiss step down, or be asked to step down, as soon as possible.

14th Sept 2008 : The Church of England is to apologise to Charles Darwin for its initial rejection of his theories, nearly 150 years after he published his most famous work.

13th Sept 2008 : There are two ways of reacting to the Royal Society's claim that its education director Michael Reiss was misrepresented in reports alleging he thought creationism should be taught in science classrooms. Either journalists got it wrong or Reiss - an ordained Church of England clergyman - did indeed suggest religious dogma be mixed with science teaching. I tend very much to the latter view.

13th Sept 2008 : Two Nobel prize winners - Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts - have demanded that the Royal Society sack its education director, Professor Michael Reiss. The call, backed by other senior Royal Society fellows, follows Reiss's controversial claim last week that creationism be taught in schools' science classes.

12th Sept 2008 : THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it's one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system.

11th Sept 2008 : My central argument of this article is that creationism is best seen by a science teacher not as a misconception but as a worldview. The implication of this is that the most a science teacher can normally aspire to is to ensure that students with creationist beliefs understand the scientific position.

24th Aug 2008 : Richard Dawkins was interviewed about 'The Genius of Charles Darwin' TV program on 'Talkback' August 5th, 2008. Part 1 is the interview, and part 2 consists of call-ins to the show, some being relevant and some discussing other topics.

20th Aug 2008 : As researchers recently reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the entire life span of the Furcifer labordi chameleon � from the moment of conception to development in the egg, hatching, maturation, breeding and right through to its last little lizardly thud to the ground � clocks in at barely a year.

20th Aug 2008 : Scientists have used embryonic stem cells to generate blood -- a feat that could eventually lead to endless supplies of type O-negative blood, a rare blood type prized by doctors for its versatility.

19th Aug 2008 : HOW many readers have gone to dinner parties and listened to otherwise intelligent people assert that alternative medicine can be just as effective as mainstream, scientific medicine? Generally, the argument is that alternative medicine, in all its many forms, is just another complementary and legitimate form of healing.

8th Aug 2008 : Professor Richard Dawkins on his television programme about Charles Darwin, evolution and atheism

8th Aug 2008 : Natural selection is a philosophy of beauty and imagination

5th Aug 2008 : Steven Pinker gives the 2008 Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture, sponsored by RDFRS.

1st Aug 2008 :

1st Aug 2008 : Richard Dawkins examines the legacy of Charles Darwin. The three part programme will be broadcast on Channel Four at 8 pm on Monday 4th, Monday 11th and Monday 18th August.

31st Jul 2008 : Popular but controversial science writer Richard Dawkins discusses his new 3-part television series The Genius of Charles Darwin, in which he retraces Darwin's journey and his confrontations with fundamentalists and theologians.

The Genius of Charles Darwin starts next Monday 4 August on Channel 4 at 8 pm

21st Jul 2008 : Why do we crave love so much, even to the point that we would die for it? To learn more about our very real, very physical need for romantic love, Helen Fisher and her research team took MRIs of people in love -- and people who had just been dumped.

14th Jul 2008 : We're making a video about each element on the periodic table. Subscribe here to see them, or visit our website at http://www.periodicvideos.com/

13th Jul 2008 : Starting with the simple tale of an ant, philosopher Dan Dennett unleashes a devastating salvo of ideas, making a powerful case for the existence of memes -- concepts that are literally alive.

7th Jul 2008 : In 2006, I was one of tens of thousands of academic scientists all around the world who received, unsolicited and completely free, a huge and lavishly illustrated book called Atlas of Creation by the Turkish Muslim apologist Harun Yahya. The thesis of the book, which was published in eleven languages, is that evolution is false. The main 'evidence' consists of page after page of beautiful photographs of fossil animals, each one accompanied by a modern counterpart that is said to have changed not at all since the time of the fossil. It is a large-format book, a thick coffee-table book with more than 700 high-gloss colour pages. The cost of production of such a book must have been extremely high, and one is bound to wonder where the money came from to produce it and then distribute it gratis in so many copies and so many languages.

1st Jul 2008 : It was on 1 July 1858, 150 years ago today, that the idea of natural selection was first presented to the public in a joint reading of Darwin's and Wallace's papers at the Linnean Society of London (an event which they did not recognize as important at the time), which makes today analogous to the Fourth of July for the biology revolution. Celebrate! If you've got a some fireworks you were saving for the holiday in a few days time, set off a few early.

25th Jun 2008 : Scientists unearthed a skull of the most primitive four-legged creature in Earth's history, which should help them better understand the evolution of fish to advanced animals that walk on land.

22nd Jun 2008 : After a decade of shouting, "Follow the water!" in its exploration of Mars, NASA can finally say that one of its spacecraft has reached out, touched water ice and scooped it up.

20th Jun 2008 : British atheist and staunch Darwin defender Richard Dawkins' official website is urging Americans to oppose the Louisiana Science Education Act. Newsflash for Richard, we're not a British colony anymore.

18th Jun 2008 : In a week or so, the trumpets will sound, heralding the start of 18 months of non-stop festivities in honor of Charles Darwin. July 1, 2008, is the 150th anniversary of the first announcement of his discovery of natural selection, the main driving force of evolution.

14th Jun 2008 : Behe's Empty Box

Some years ago, John Catalano, of New York, was a kind of predecessor of Josh who ran a website which was a kind of predecessor of this one. One of the many good things John did was to maintain a section called "Behe's Empty Box". You might be surprised that it is necessary to pay attention to Behe. Unfortunately, it is. I frequently get letters from people who have read Darwin's Black Box and seem persuaded by it,

13th Jun 2008 : A recently completed youtube series on Science and the history of the Universe.

12th Jun 2008 : This is an older article, but well worth the read.

11th Jun 2008 : SB 733, the "LA Science Education Act," is a stealth creationism bill. Introduced by Louisiana Sen. Ben Nevers on behalf of the LA Family Forum (LFF�the LA affiliate of Focus on the Family), it is the direct descendant of SB 561, the "LA Academic Freedom Act." SB 561's twin in the LA House of Representatives was HB 1168. SB 733 was passed in the LA Senate on April 17, 2008, and in the House Education Committee on May 21 as a compromise bill. SB 733 is being promoted by the Discovery Institute (the Seattle headquarters of the intelligent design (ID) creationism movement) and the LFF as part of the Discovery Institute's coordination of the introduction of academic freedom bills in six states: Florida, Alabama, Missouri, Michigan, South Carolina, and Louisiana.

11th Jun 2008 : Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern University, and Gene Mills from the Louisiana Forum on Family, debate the pros and cons of teaching creationism in schools.

10th Jun 2008 : Excellent new book by Gary Marcus.

7th Jun 2008 : In 1928, as America heads towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin reveals his master plan - nature is to be conquered by science, Russia to be made brutally, glitteringly modern and the world transformed by communist endeavour.

Into the heart of this vision stepped Trofim Lysenko, a self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden.

31th May 2008 : 'The Voyage of the Beagle' shows us a young man intoxicated with the tropics and careless of the risks

31th May 2008 : To mark a double anniversary celebrating Charles Darwin, the father of evolution, his supporters are taking the fight to their opponents

29th May 2008 : The contentious debate about why insects evolved to put the interests of the colony over the individual has been reignited by new research from the University of Leeds, showing that they do so to increase the chances that their genes will be passed on.

25th May 2008 : The first-ever landing of a probe near Mars' north pole happened smoothly on Sunday, NASA confirmed.

23rd May 2008 : Many people see the years of the Tinbergen group at Oxford as a golden age of Ethology, beginning when Niko arrived from the Netherlands in 1950, and culminating in his Nobel Prize of 1973.

16th May 2008 : Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal and human.

15th May 2008 : UC Berkeley is going to court this week over their Understanding Evolution web site (that's an excellent resource, by the way, especially if you're just trying to get up to speed on the science). At issue is the fact that the site dares to point out that some religions contradict the evidence, and other religions try to avoid conflict with science; that is interpreted to be a sectarian endorsement of certain religions over others. This is where separation of church and state becomes insane: when you are not allowed to point out obvious idiocies because they are protected religious beliefs. Here's the offending section: I think it's pretty namby-pamby and bends over backwards to give deference to superstitious nonsense, but some people are apparently irate over a simple, accurate truth statement: "some religious beliefs explicitly contradict science". They do, but a university isn't allowed to say so?

14th May 2008 : In a major article in the newly released anthology, Secularism & Science in the 21st Century (published by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, at Trinity College), I look critically at their writings. I find little evidence for their claim, and put forward my own hypothesis, which I dub The Dawkins Effect.

11th May 2008 :

11th May 2008 : Richard Dawkins pointed out that nature is Darwinian and dominated by the short-term greediness that is required within competitive ecosystems to pass on one's genes. Humans are no different and are dominated by those instincts, but with our complex brain-power we have the ability to rise above these destructive tendencies and be a good steward to the planet and ourselves.

9th May 2008 : Monotreme's genome shares features with mammals, birds and reptiles.

8th May 2008 : AMERICAN science is in trouble, and if you wonder why, just go to the movies. Popular culture is gradually turning against science, and Ben Stein's new movie, "Expelled," is helping to push it along.

6th May 2008 : Eyes are one of evolution's most useful and prevalent inventions, equipping approximately 95 percent of living species. They exist in many different forms across nature, having evolved convergently across different species. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. In the pre-Cambrian era, insects, in particular the dragonfly, would take the compound eye to new heights. Find out how dinosaurs adapted their eyes to become such successful hunters of prey. And while dinosaurs remained at the top of the food chain for 150 million years, tiny early mammals developed night vision to populate the night as a survival technique. Finally, learn how primates underwent several adaptations to their eyes to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.

5th May 2008 : Switches within DNA that govern when and where genes are turned on enable genomes to generate the great diversity of animal forms from very similar sets of genes

5th May 2008 : If there is life on Mars, it might soon be coaxed out of hiding by a new instrument designed to detect the subtle chemical traces of biological activity.

5th May 2008 : Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated an ultrafast laser that offers a record combination of high speed, short pulses and high average power. The same NIST group also has shown that this type of laser, when used as a frequency comb�an ultraprecise technique for measuring different colors of light�could boost the sensitivity of astronomical tools searching for other Earthlike planets as much as 100 fold.

5th May 2008 : ScienceDaily (May 5, 2008) � Parents of children with autism were roughly twice as likely to have been hospitalized for a mental disorder, such as schizophrenia, than parents of other children, according to an analysis of Swedish birth and hospital records by a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill researcher and colleagues in the U.S. and Europe.

5th May 2008 : "Rock star physicist" Brian Cox talks about his work on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Discussing the biggest of big science in an engaging, accessible way, Cox brings us along on a tour of the massive complex and describes his part in it -- and the vital role it's going to play in understanding our universe.

5th May 2008 : Experimental results are beginning to shed light on the psychological foundations of our moral beliefs

5th May 2008 : PARIS (AFP) - A new, simplified family tree of humanity has dealt a blow to those who contend that the enigmatic hominids known as Neanderthals intermingled with our forebears.

4th May 2008 : We are preparing to run another fMRI study of belief and disbelief, and we need volunteers to help us refine our experimental stimuli. This promises to be the first study of religious faith at the level of the brain. By responding to the four surveys I have posted online, you can make an enormous contribution to this work.

3rd May 2008 : They have spent years working school boards, with only minimal success. Now critics of evolution are turning to a higher authority: state legislators.

3rd May 2008 : 16 Apr 08: Neanderthal expert Dr Chris Stringer discusses new ideas of how neanderthals and early man co-existed with Telegraph Science Editor Dr Roger Highfield.

29th Apr 2008 :

25th Apr 2008 : Harvard Scientists Say T-Rex Was A Close Cousin Of Barnyard Fowl

17th Apr 2008 :