Here is a video explaining clearly how and why cancer spreads, using prostate cancer as an example. In the process the video also explains why it is that cancer is more likely to strike the older we get, the basis of the comment that cancer is the reward we get for getting old.

(Via Gawker.)

Reports are emerging from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN that provide some evidence of the detection of the Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV, or about 133 times the mass of a proton. [Read more…]

Take a look at this photograph published in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine. (You can see a larger photo by clicking on the link.) It show the asymmetric skin damage on the face of a 69-year old truck driver due to the many hours driving with just the left side of his face exposed to sunlight.

Those of us who grew up in the tropics avoided staying out in the sun if we possibly could. We sought the shade and I still find it strange when at the first sign of warm weather in the spring, people here in the US rush to lie out in the sun in skimpy clothing. [Read more…]

I find science amazing. But sometimes it is easy to forget the incredible things that engineers are able to do using basic science discoveries. Here engineer Bill Hammack explains how accelerometers work and how the miniature ones inside these devices are made.

Dr. George Murray Levick was a member of the ill-fated Scott expedition to the South Pole in 1910 where he observed penguin behavior, including necrophilia, that so shocked him that he recorded his observations in Greek so that others would not be able to read about them accidentally. [Read more…]

There has been quite a bit of publicity about watching the transit of Venus across the Sun. Apparently for a few hours earlier this week, you could see a small black dot move across the face of the Sun. [Read more…]

In my review of the futuristic novel Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart, I mentioned one element that the author envisaged which was an iPod-like device that people carried with them that would immediately calculate your attractiveness, informing everyone nearby both of your absolute score as well as your ranking in a room full of people. It sounded a little disconcerting, even creepy. [Read more…]

A lot of outrage has been expressed at the behavior of the school administrators and the school nurse who did not allow a student suffering an asthma attack the use of his inhaler. The question naturally arises as to how anyone could be so callous as to not respond to an immediate visible need. This was especially so with respect to the nurse whom one would think would put medical needs first and bureaucratic niceties second. [Read more…]